the groundhog day project

On Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast from Wired , 21 March 2020, science fiction author Tom Gerencer says, regarding Willow (on the occasion of a reported Willow -related television series for Disney+ ): It wasn't quite up to Star Wars standards... I wasn't 100 percent in love with it, but I didn't think it was completely awful either. The podcast's host, David Barr agreed, adding: Star Wars draws on Flash Gordon, samurai movies, Westerns, and a bunch of other stuff... I feel like Willow pretty much just draws on Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barabarian . I feel like George Lucas wasn't as knowledgeable about--or maybe as passionate about--fantasy. I read that yesterday before turning the movie on and figured I had no use for it. But, given some points I am about to make, I should say, I think Barr is wrong. 1) Star Wars is very much fantasy. It's got wizards. It's got magic. It's got sword fights. It's got monsters. That Lucas base...

Where to begin? With a measure of madness, perhaps. How do we define madness ? Why is the line between insanity and an awakened mind--especially in the face of amateur psychologists all over the Internet--such a thin one? With my final--probably final, anyway--critique of Jim & Andy , my final critique of presenting this content (not to mention various clips I've found myself watching on YouTube this week) as, sometimes without any debate, either an awakening or signs of insanity? For example, this comment from "Bill A" regarding a clip of Jim at New York Fashion Week (NYFW) 2017: "...things happening, and there ware clusters of tetrahedrons..." [says Jim.] well folks thats [sic] some kind of psychadelics [sic] talking right there like acid, DMT, or mescaline. We shouldn't be judging the guy anyway, let him go on his psychadelic [sic] journey and enjoy it. Some context: Jim's former girlfriend Cathriona White died September 2015 (2 years befor...

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I was a dreamer. I wanted to write. I wanted to make movies. Along the way between then and today, I wanted to sing, I wanted to act, I wanted to direct. I still have some very incomplete stories that I wrote as early as 4th grade (that's about 1984, when I'm 8 years old, for those of you in other countries where it isn't called the 4th grade. It was 1984 that Andy Kaufman died, too. And, it's 1984 that I've gotten to in this blog's deconstruction of my childhood experience with films on repeat. I didn't have the will then, at 8-years-old, to finish my stories. My imagination was bigger than my attention span or my capacity for sitting down and writing. As this is Day 1348 of this blog, and the entries average well over 1000 words each, I think it should be clear that that capacity has increased. Still, my imagination often surpasses me. Not my attention span, necessarily, but my time, my availability. I wish my Hyd...

The last few weeks haven't been the best for me but I just reinvent myself each day as someone doing better. I go through the motions of work. I put up with the worst of my students, enjoy the best of them. I watch television, I watch movies--and write about them here--and I play D&D when I can. I was already in a bad mood Saturday when I got to watching I don't feel at home in this world anymore . Hours later I watched Jim & Andy ... Full title for that last one: Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond: Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton because the premise of the film is far bigger than just Jim & Andy , just Jim and Andy, Just Jim and Andy and Tony. The premise of the documentary is Jim Carrey getting so much into character as Andy Kaufman and as Tony Clifton while filming Man on the Moon that he sort of lost himself... Or found himself, I guess is the point. And, after a tough time lately in terms of my mental health, it was an...

                                                                                                   

After talking about names , we need to move on to something more about identity in Annihilation . HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. Annihilation , which structurally echoes films like Event Horizon or The Arrival , or an under appreciated tv show from a few years ago called The River , or most any explorer adventure story. It harkens back even to Conrad's Heart of Darkness , except Kurtz and Marlow are on the same trip into the jungle. Or there have been many Kurtzes, including Kane (Oscar Isaac). This is a trip into the unknown taken by characters who are all dealing with loss, with grief, with the universe turned against them. And, in response, they explore because what else is there? They could wait to figure out who they are, or they could act, and hope that in action, the become someone recognizable in the mirror. The film relies on an understanding of the psychological underpinnings of depression but doesn't make much effort to explore them explicitly. Emily Yoshida at Vulture c...

In the opening scene of Annihilation , which I saw for the second time today, Lomax (Benedict Wong) asks Lena (Natalie Portman) "What do you know?" She has no real answer for him. The film cuts back to him questioning her a few times throughout, and the more she tries to explain things, the less he probably understands. The lack of conclusive answers throughout the film, though, is fundamental to appreciating it. As Elizabeth Bruenig writes in the Washington Post , the story's central drama concerns the protagonists' efforts to come to terms with something they can't, as mere humans, understand. It certainly leaves a confusing impression: It was only a few days after seeing "Annihilation" that its curious moral logic began to creep, fungus-like, across my conscience. I've begun to think that the particular character of that formless, nameless danger--its eerie, morbid bounty--makes it an excellent villain for our moment. Additionally, like many a...

Today is Day 1279, which means that 1278 days ago... No, that's that not true. Day 1000 , I stopped this blog. I had completed (except for a few edits required by faculty later) my master's thesis about blogging and about the presentation of identity on the Internet, and I decided a few days earlier that 1000 was a nice round number and I would finish up this thing and do something else. I tried my hand at YouTube movie reviews for a bit, tried to build a review blog , and eventually made my way back here. So, really, it was 1644 days ago that I sat down to watch Groundhog Day and write about it. Every day. For a year. And, I altered the course of my life. Now, arguably, every little decision does that. One of the points you could take from Groundhog Day . Each little decision has repercussions. I wish the shows around them were better (so I could recommend them), because Joan of Arcadia had a science fair scene and John from Cincinnati had a parking lot barbecue scene th...

So, it comes down to this: what did I get from Grease 2 at six years old? And from all those many times watching it again over the next decade or more. I've already noted that 1982 may have been when I started to love musicals--three of them in my list of eight films for that year in this deconstruction of my childhood experience with movies. But, what else was there? For that matter, how do all these movies start to formulate together an explicit version of who I might be in the future? I'm looking at the list so far and wondering just how many of these movies suggest the very thing I've suggested is wrong with the Grease films--that you need to change who you are to get with the people you want. From Arthur to The Fox and the Hound , from Meatballs to Blackbeard's Ghost , so many of these movies involve people either having to change who they are to be accepted, that the world demands you to be one way, and you better be that way or you will be shunned, you will ...

I was going to start today's entry with a note I neglected yesterday: the first Grease does have one beat that the sequel doesn't--while Sandy changes for Danny and Michael changes for Stephanie, Stephanie doesn't change at all for Michael, but Danny does at least try to change for Sandy. He tries out for varsity sports, tries to clean up his image. It doesn't really take but Sandy's change covers the distance between them enough to make up for it. Stephanie, on the other hand, gets away with not even trying, yet Grease 2 almost feels like it wants us to see her as a feminist icon of a sort for the 60s setting, whereas Sandy was a good girl from the 50s until her makeover. I was going to argue, counter to the obvious point I made yesterday--that the message of both films is a bad one--that taking as singular instances, they're not so bad. If Sandy wants to change for Danny, that's on her. If Michael wants to change for Stephanie, that's on him. But, ...

It's actually strange watching Grease 2 again after many years because it is wide screen. I think our copy was recorded off cable, back when they just cropped the edges rather than having black bars at the top and bottom. And, kids, back in my day, the television screen wasn't wide enough to show the whole movie without doing one of those things. Immediate observation: the opening scenes of this movie move a little too quickly. It's the first day of school, it's a week later, it's bowling night, then it's time to work on the talent contest. Michael (Maxwell Caulfield) and Stephanie (Michelle Pfeiffer) have a two-part meet cute , with him enamored by her when she' spitting on the skirt over her capris, and then her kissing him to piss off Nogerelli (Adrian Zmed) at the bowling alley. It's both too simple and weirdly complicated. More than half an hour before "Cool Rider" gives Michael a goal and him writing essays for the T-Birds for money give...

Once Escape from New York 's plot actually gets moving, there isn't that much that actually happens. Snake (Kurt Russell) meets Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), Cabbie takes Snake to Brain (Harry Dean Stanton). Duke (Isaac Hayes) shows up. Snake, Cabbie, Brain, and Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau) flee, get to Duke's and find the president (Donald Pleasance) but Snake is captured and forced to fight Slag (Ox Baker). They all make a run for Snake's glider on top of the World Trade Center, then head for the Queensboro Bridge to get off the island. People die, Snake and the president get away. The end. Basically. There isn't much to say about the plot as it is. There's room for strange interpretations of meaning, but with John Carpenter behind the film, it feels like it would be me inventing meaning where he put none. As far as implicit meaning, Escape from New York feels like a response to gang violence in New York in the 1970s, an outlandish extension of the reality, people ...