the groundhog day project

I don't know why The Great Outdoors starts with "Yakety Yak", but it does. And it reminds me of my recent watching of Stand By Me . A far better film, but they are so different that it's hardly worth comparing. But, comparisons are inevitable when movies come and movies go time and time again. Like, John Candy was was in--what?--two of these childhood fixture movies of mine: Vacation and Splash . He was also in Planes, Trains & Automobiles , which I spent a week on in this blog back in November 2014, except that movies was not a fixture with my family. I'm not even sure we saw it on the big screen. If any Thanksgiving movie made the list, it would be Dutch , which came out in '91 so might be early enough to qualify, or Home for the Holidays , but that didn't come out until '95, far too late for the list, thought we did watch it probably every year for a while there. ( Dutch and Home for the Holidays also each got a week in that November of T...

I don't know if, as a kid, I realized that Ed (Eugene Levy) was deliberately fucking with Clark (Chevy Chase) in the opening of Vacation --forcing the sale on the Wagon Queen Family Truckster. Eventually, I got it, but the first time, in the theater, I think I just thought it was an honest mistake.           And, I laughed at a line I don't think I ever found funny before. Clark tells the kids about the St. Louis Arch, "the Gateway to the West. It's over 600 feet tall and there's an elevator all the way to the top." Rusty asks, "Dad, can we go up in it?" Clark replies simply, "No." Like so many vacation details, road trips past all the interesting places because you don't have the time to stop everywhere. For example, they show the sign for Gatorworld on a postcard during the opening credits. When our speech team was in Florida my last year as coach, we drove past Gatorworld, but we weren't even there for a vacation; we were t...

So, right away, a complaint: the introduction of the woobie is lazy. Kenny has presumably had the woobie for, like, his whole life. Alex knows not to mess with it, and probably messes with it all the time. But, Caroline warns him not to touch it, as if it's something new... And, this is John Hughes writing, so I'm a little disappointed. Of course, later moments, like the entire Rocky conversation, or the recipe sharing (though something about the scorching butter line feels off to me), or the poker game, make up for that. And, there are little bits all over this movie that are great examples of writing. The "disability" gag with Larry (Christopher Lloyd). (Side note: I feel sorry for Tom Leopold, who plays Stan. He's in scenes with Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, and Jeffrey Tambor, and I'm like, Who's this other guy? .) Jack's growing interest in The Young and the Restless . The 220, 221 exchange. "I'm going to sleep on the fat cou...

Backtrack a few years. Give us the setup--sixteenth birthday, parents forgot about it--then a montage of high school scenes under the opening titles. Pretty basic. Samantha (Molly Ringwald) talking to herself is a bit too "voiceover" without being a voiceover. I'm not sure I approve.                   And then there were few words. But, I just gotta say, the chemistry between Ringwald and Michael Anthony Hall in the half car is awesome. And, Samantha is my kind of character... that is, a character like me. Obsesses about a crush that shouldn't amount to anything, practices what she's going to say to him ahead of time, then fails to say anything. Been there. The Geek (Hall), on the other hand, has a bizarre level of confidence for being a geek. Much more than Hall's character in The Breakfast Club . Much more than I ever had at that age. Hell, more than I've usually got to this day. But, getting back to performances, the scene wi...

Howard Deutch starts his commentary track for Pretty in Pink by talking about his director of photography Tak Fujimoto. Then he talks about the importance of the father/daughter relationship in the film and he talks about the film being like his "first girlfriend." Meaning: he remembers specific details about the making of that he doesn't about other movies he would make later. Like the fact that the intro shot of Duckie walking down the hall was left out of the first edit and he had to tell the editor to put it in there. Deutch thought James Spader was an obnoxious creep, but didn't immediately realize that would make him perfect for the part of Steff. John Hughes got him to cast Spader. Improv note: Annie Potts as Iona, saying "It's so... modern." Deutch says, "Jon Cryer, in this part, transcends acting." He's "channeling" this person. (Except, not quite because Deutch and he had a system called a "boner meter" for...

A streetsweeper, a not-so-great neighborhood, the tracks that I'm guessing we're on the wrong side of. Establishing shots to set us up for... Hm, montage of closeups as Andie Walsh (Molly Ringwald) gets dressed. Outfit seems much fancier than the house or the neighborhood, but the it is the 1980s and consumerism is rampant. Even working class folks need to look good. Of course, Andie claims that she spent $15 on the shoes and made the rest. (No mention of what all those different cloths or patterns might cost. Then, Duckie (Jon Cryer). He dresses like the male version of Andie but he's got an awkwardness to him that seems to turn her off even though they seem to be friends.         Oh, it's Pretty in Pink today. And, I'm not in the mood to write. Bad night. i can totally relate to Duckie, though, pathetic guy who likes an unavailable girl a little too much. And, doesn't fit in with much of anyone. Andie's admiration of the rich people's houses...

It has been a good long while since I have connected a film to impromptu quotations... For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, the usual setup for the impromptu speaking event at our speech tournaments--I'm a coach, and we just had two tournaments in two days this weekend--is you get a quotation, and you use that as a prompt for a 5(-ish) minute speech after 2(-ish) minutes of prep. During phase one of this blog, when I was watching Groundhog Day every day, several times after a tournament weekend, I would take a sheet of the quotations we had and link them to the film because when I was a competitor and participated in that event I used Groundhog Day as an example in nearly every round. Anyway... I judged the final round of impromptu today and instead of quotations, per se, competitors were given a choice of three meme-ish images. So, I'm looking over them and on speaker two's sheet, I see this one: Now, it really is not that great a line. But, it...

We open on Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson) playing the drums, then a little montage, Keith (Eric Stolz) walking along the tracks, past a factory, past Amanda Jones (Lea Thompson) making out with Hardy (Craig Scheffer). Establish our characters, establish the setting--got some class issues coming, but they probably will remain mostly subtext as usual. For example, Keith's father (John Ashton), who didn't go to college, wants Keith to go to college because, you know, that means he can have opportunities he (the father) didn't have. By the way, it's Some Kind of Wonderful . Amanda Jones is not the same sort of character as Cindy Mancini in Can't Buy Me Love or Maggie in Lucas ... Actually, I'm not so sure those two are even that much alike. Cindy's mother has money, but I think they are still far from upper class. Maggie seems a bit more working class, though obviously above whatever Lucas is. Amanda Jones, here, is like a rich girl, but that's "guilt...

Let's work backward. Start with another 30th anniversary screening tonight--made it to the sold out 7:30 show this time and it was nice watching this movie with a crowd. Run back through the past week of viewings, seven times in seven days, keep going back three decades, a viewing now and then, not as many times as I've seen some movies but more than others. Back to 1985, February 15--the day The Breakfast Club was released into theaters. Keep on going to March 24, 1984, the Saturday on which Andrew Clark, Claire Standish, John Bender, Allison Reynolds and Brian Johnson sat down as strangers in Shermer High School's library and left as friends... perhaps to become strangers all over again come Monday. Go back further to... Actually, the screenplay draft I found has no date on it. It's not the shooting script. It still has Robin Robertson in it-- (March 25, 2015, Karen Leigh Hopkins tells The Hollywood Reporter about how she was cast as a gym teacher (character, ...

7:30 show of The Breakfast Club was sold out, which kind of made me wish even more I'd been there. But, we--my son and I--made it to the second show. I had gone with the high school movies this month because I knew this film would be in theaters, so I'm glad we didn't miss it. 10:30 show wasn't as crowded, but at least it wasn't empty. The "event" began with some slide beforehand with trivia (facts, not questions) about the movie and its stars. Some examples: Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall dated for a while after filming The Breakfast Club . Not that exciting, that one. Judd Nelson was a philosophy major at Haverford College. On the one hand, definitely more interesting. And, it gets even more interesting when you consider the phrasing. It doesn't say that he got a degree, just that he was a "philosophy major." He could have taken like one philosophy class, for all we know. Hughes' business partner's son attended ...

Weird trivia found on IMDb : there were only two Christmas-themed movies released in theaters in 1989, this one and Prancer (and Johnny Galecki was in both); and there were three movies with animated openers that year— Honey, I Shrunk the Kids , Troop Beverly Hills and this one. The animated opening is odd. On the one hand, it gets us in the mood for a little irreverent and cartoonish humor. But, on the other hand, it, in my opinion, distances the film from Santa by injuring him and sending him flying away in a hurry. But, maybe that’s a) accidental (or at least incidental) or b) entirely on purpose to give National Lampoon some breathing room. After all, Santa doesn’t really appear in this movie except a little plastic version that Clark kicks in the face. This movie leaves Santa to the side—except for Clark’s conversation with Ruby Sue and the flight of Santa and his reindeer at the end of the movie—for something... else. Strangely, this movie does not deal as much in family dis...

Immediately I must wonder if Kevin is as bad as Doyle from Dutch . Or he will be, as he is already prone to violence. Despite his badness, though, the movie does a good job of setting everyone else against him. It’s his fault, but you can almost forgive him because he is a kid. As for the movie, Home Alone is not a movie I would normally equate with having much depth... Then again, neither was Planes, Trains & Automobiles or Dutch or just about any of the slasher films I watched in October. But, I suppose the point to this blog, quite often, is that every film has depth. Even the most shallow-seeming, simplistic piece of entertainment tells us something about us for watching it, if nothing else. I am not suggesting that Home Alone is the most shallow-seeming film. There are plenty of films shallower. This film does a great job of setting up later scenes early on. The old guy with the shovel is introduced right away, as is one of the wet bandits, posing as a cop. When Kevin ...

I find it interesting that Dutch Dooley and Del Griffith are both men used to being on the road. Neal Page and Doyle Standish, on the other hand—they aren’t used to it. For them, the road is a foreign place, somewhere beneath them. Neal’s house isn’t quite as big as the Standish home, but both are definitely a class or two above the likes of Dutch Dooley or Del Griffith. Speaking of class, the classist overtones in Dutch are quite deliberate. Consider the opening sequence at the fancy party. Not only is it strange that Natalie was invited after she has been divorced out of the club for a while now, but it is strange that she would show up when they did invite her. Really, there is no reason for her to be there in-story; rather, she is there simply so we can get some awkward information dumping out of the way quickly. Natalie is not really high-class, she got knocked up into it. So, there’s hope for Doyle—who Tim at the Antagony & Ecstasy blog says John Hughes “absolutely detest...

Ed O’Neill’s Dutch Dooley is a strange character. He used to drive a cement truck—Reed refers to him as a “truck driver”—but now he owns a construction company. That is not the strange part. He can cook a pretty good meal—I don’t know what it is he’s making early in the film, but it seems to be deliberately complicated and fancy just to let us know that he can cook, he’s better than the working-class schmo he seems to be. Later he’ll take Doyle to a greasy diner and even later proudly announce, “nothing burps better than bacon.” See, beyond the fancy cooking and the cigar smoking—which in ‘91 was more of a rich guy thing, right?—he is also prone to vulgarity and violence. He’s not above introducing a kid to pornography and he’s not above abandoning a kid on the side of the road in the snow. He’s also quick to offer a job to a guy in need. He’s kind when it fits the plot and rude when it fits, too. Stephen Hunter, in his Baltimore Sun review, says it well: But almost nothing is worked...