the groundhog day project

...or was it the way of movies. The way of westerns. The way of American action stories. How the briefest of training montages can set you up to defeat a despot and save a president. Also, as long as you're the good guy, kill whoever looks like one of the bad guys. Five-year-old me certainly didn't care that Amy Stryker gets forgotten in the third act of the movie. He didn't care that Tonto forgets how to speak for that same act. He just saw western action, explosions, and a nobody turning into a superhero... Mostly. He also didn't notice the really bad framing and editing on the stagecoach ride early on--which I only just noticed. (They make a point of the seat on the left side of the screen being the one facing forward, but for several cuts in a row, the stagecoach is traveling to the left when seen from outside, which doesn't match the interior... A few shots later, when the sunglasses guy gets to talking, the interior is reversed making the seat on the right ...

Klinton Spilsbury is not actually that bad; the adult version of his character barely has to emote for the story as presented to work. And, the dubbing over of his voice was done quite well; even knowing it was dubbed, I could only really tell in a few spots. Michael Horse is fine, though his characters role is both expanding upon older versions and reducing it, so it is hard to gauge just how much he matters to the plot, if not the legend. Christopher Lloyd is good as Cavendish. Jason Robards is fantastic as Grant (though I'll get back to Grant below). Everyone else is so minimally affective to the story that their performances don't matter much as measure of the film. The structure is fine as long as you don't have expectations of Lone Ranger action. An origin story, if it is going to be an origin story, should take some time, set up its pieces. The stuntwork is awesome, especially for 1981. As is the pyrotechnics. Merle Haggard's "balladeer" narration i...

Got an old VHS playing tonight. The Legend of the Lone Ranger . Cheap opening, but not an uncommon thing. Assume the audience will care about a family getting slaughtered, a kid crying. Then, off to the Comanche village. And the spoken-word song narration gets going over a montage. Seems far too early for a montage. As a kid, of course, I did not care one bit whether there should be a montage already. Natives throwing spears... Ugh, then, big brother Dan shows up and the lead is crying again. I don't think we even know his name yet. And we get lots of quick cuts but it's not really another montage, exactly. I see the name of the star and I swear that's not anyone's real name. Klinton Spilsbury. And, apparently, all of his lines were dubbed over by James Keach. So, I guess he wasn't very good. CUT TO: I guess this is our lead as an adult--that whole opening could have been skipped or showed up as a flashback later--on a stagecoach ride. The spoken-word theme...

"What a wondrous vision "Excalibur is! And what a mess." So begins Roger Ebert's review of Excalibur , and as usual, Roger says it pretty well. "This wildly ambitious retellings of the legend of King Arthur is a haunting and violent version of the Dark Ages and the heroic figures who (we dream) populated them," he continues. "But it's rough going for anyone determined to be sure what is happening from scene to scene." The problem with Excalibur , though, is not that it's particularly confusing. It is just so damn full of, well, pieces of every story about King Arthur that any of its audience are likely to know. There's a reason that The Sword in the Stone offers up next to nothing (though, admittedly, I might be remembering the better part of the film if not the larger part of it) about Arthur as an adult and spent time with that training. There's a reason that the recent King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was born out of a plan ...

Structure matters, of course. Plot matters. Story matters. And, when we're stuck on origin stories--as with Big Hero 6 or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword , or 2004's King Arthur , which I've got playing now--you're going to get a lot of the same beats. Historical... Or pseudo-historical stuff like this, and you've got a cold open (with Lancelot as a child) that barely matters, you've got hordes of Roman soldiers and... I forget who they're fighting. Don't have time to get to know any just yet. Just a good battle to get the adrenalin pumping. After some opening text to place the story into some supposed historical context. The far more fantastical King Arthur: Legend of the Sword goes for that same kind of text. We're in the "dark ages" when the landscape of Britain is covered in smoke and/or fog pretty much always, and nothing is ever particularly well lit. Where Legend of the Sword has no real connection to the actual history of Ro...

Because I wrote yesterday ‘s entry before watching The Blair Witch Project last night, by the campfire, in the dark, in the woods, I didn’t get to write about the experience, watching the movie like that. It was as you might expect—though not as scary for me as it might be for a lot of people; I’ve seen the movie numerous times before and seen more horror films than I can even remember. There was one particular moment, though—when Heather and Josh and Mike hear children’s voices outside their tent and then whatever’s outside the tent—clever rednecks, the witch, those children—starts beating on the sides of the tent... it occurred to me, sitting maybe 10 yards from the tent in which I had slept the night before and would be sleeping in again soon thereafter, and you know, regardless of supernatural stuff, a bunch of voices outside the tent would be pretty freaky. Someone attacks the outside of my tent when I’m sleeping (or trying to sleep) inside... I’m not sure what I’d do in respon...