the groundhog day project

Twelve Monkeys starts with some lame text-exposition-- "...5 BILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM A DEADLY VIRUS IN 1997... THE SURVIVORS WILL ABANDON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET... ONCE AGAIN THE ANIMALS WILL RULE THE WORLD..." --but then makes it awesome by tagging it as "Excerpts from interview with clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, April 12, 1990 - Baltimore County Hospital." Great counter to get us going. The movie doesn't really leave much room for James Cole (Bruce Willis) to actually be insane--far too much detail (as one might expect in a Terry Gilliam film) in the future opening and later future scenes. But, as long as we can understand that Cole might question his reality later, the drama works fine in that regard. Meanwhile, we get what is probably the best time travel movie ever, or high on the list certainly. Like Timecrimes , Twelve Monkeys never contradicts its time travel. It doesn't play with time and the ability to alter the past. I...

I never got to the point I wanted to make yesterday . It's difficult, really, to demonstrate how Into the Wild doesn't (quite) romanticize Chris McCandless' adventure just by looking at how he leaves his parents and his sister behind. His parents are not portrayed as good people that we might care about when they hurt. We can objectively understand that they are in pain, but we just might not care (even if the film does make the effort of framing the film with the parents in pain, Billie in the opening scene, Walt just before the ending. And, Carine--she tells us that she understands her brother's choice to leave. In reality, she explicitly knew that he was going to separate himself from their parents, though she didn't know what he was going to do. In her book, she shares a letter he sent her, which included this: "I'm going to completely knock them out of my life... I'm going to divorce them as my parents." What I think really serves to de-ro...