the groundhog day project

(Officially, today we're going back to the 80s to go back to the 20s and 30s with The Untouchables . But, as I'm trying to get over being sick for a week, I wasn't doing much but sitting around the house anyway, and for me that means movies. Notably, Cinderella , Youth , The Hunting Ground and Racing Extinction . If you don't pay as much attention to the Oscars as I do, each of those films has one nomination. I now have just one Foreign Language Film nominee to watch and I will for only the second time ever, have managed to watch all the nominees before the awards. And, that film-- Embrace of the Serpent --is in a theater in Santa Monica. Bit of a distance, bit of a cost, without my own car, but maybe I'll borrow one next weekend, get it done just in time for next Sunday's awards.) The Untouchables was nominated for four Oscars and won one. One of its losers was Ennio Morricone, nominated for Best Score. He's nominated this year for The Hateful Eight . H...

Elijah Wood, especially as a kid, has a tone to his voice that limits his vocal range that doesn't mean he has to be as ridiculous and melodramatic as he was a few too many times in North . Today: The War . Same year as North , but a much better showing from Wood. The film doesn't have too many notes to hit, and it hits them in such obvious ways most of the time, but I have loved it since I first saw it at a free screening at USC just before it was in theatres proper. (Full disclosure: I also used parts of this film in two different interp speeches my first two years competing in speech and debate, so I'm a little attached.) It's got this nice combination of childish innocence and a keen adult sense of how horrible life can be. Something I loved about some of Stephen King's early novels, a tone I put into the a few of my own. I guess it's easier to explore some of the darkest of the see through eyes that don't understand it, because we all love to imagi...

There are too many scenes set at night in Wyatt Earp . And, I say this not even 20 minutes into the film. There's a strange back and forth between very bright daytime scenes and too dark nighttime scenes... I know this movie is long so I'm trying to just sit with it for a bit rather than start typing away and have yet another blog entry so long that no one reads it all the way through. Also, while I want to continue the discussion from yesterday about the good man with a gun , about how we automatically side with the authority, how we decide on impulse who's right and who's wrong, damn the details, I'm inclined to also get into a redefinition (again) about what the Western is because Wyatt Earp is structurally a biopic, not a Western. Not that we have movie rental stores anymore, but Westerns often had their own section, but did we separate other settings? The middle ages from the dark ages, the industrial from the enlightenment? The Western is a strange "g...