the groundhog day project

I have to check old reviews of movies I'm watching from years ago because, having grown up with these things, it is impossible to be entirely objective. Like, I know Staying Alive is awful but I love it anyway. Krull , on the other hand, has gained a cult following even if it was initially a box office failure. Siskel and Ebert gave the film two thumbs down and purportedly [the YouTube clip of their show is gone] called it "one of the most boring, nonsensical, illogical fantasies in a long time." I like Lawrence Watt-Evans' description from Starlog --because it sounds like a defense I might make, arguing for the good regarding a detail that is obviously bad: Krull is not a real place. Although we're told that the Slayers have been burning villages, we never see a village, burned or otherwise. We never see a farm; the White Castle is surrounded by scenic, empty landscape, not by the crowd of peasants who clustered around any real castle. Nobody ever appears o...

It's that time of the blog, that time of the year, that time of life. As Krull begins, continuing this deconstruction of my childhood with film, I'm imagining doing something else other than this blog. I imagine, perhaps a podcast or a different version of the YouTube stuff I was doing. For example, today I saw Thoroughbreds after work and I can imagine an interesting conversation to be had about that movie that might head off on multiple tangents: 1) talk of Anton Yelchin and how it's unfortunate that someone like him will never be as famous as James Dean because there are so many more films and so many more film stars today than there were when Dean died. 2) Anya Taylor-Joy uses her expressionless performance yet again but she also has actual scenes of emoting. (Though, Olivia Cooke's ability to be expressionless is exactly why she was cast in her part, and that's unfortunate.) 3) A discussion/debate about violence in film, whether or not a film that includes ...