the groundhog day project

I remember thinking, at least the first time that I saw The Elephant Man , that Bytes' narrative about Merrick's origin (and that surreal bit at the opening of the film) was an accurate reason for Merrick's condition. But, we had a book about Merrick in our home and, while I never read it cover to cover, I browsed the text and looked over the photos. But, other than that initial confusion, I don't think I thought much of those Lynchian moments; they were distractions. I also didn't think much on the idea of exploitation ; Bytes was awful, Treves was nice--that's all I thought about that. What really mattered when I saw this film as a kid--and what absolutely shines through now--is Hurt's portrayal of Merrick. (And, primarily, he's got his eyes and his voice, and little else; the malformed head prosthetic doesn't move.) Humanizing the monster, so to speak. Something close to that we've seen in multiple movies in this childhood deconstruction so ...

I really wish that the opening line from Roger Ebert's memoir Life Itself were said out loud in the film Life Itself instead of just being text on the screen because I really want to use it as the title for this entry but tradition puts only lines of dialogue (or lyrics) as the title here at the Groundhog Day Project . (And, there should have probably been a comma in that sentence somewhere.) I was born inside the movie of my life. That's the line. I would figure that my life is a movie except, well, my life is not very exciting. If my life is a movie, it's some weirdly slow indie film. I'm trying to remember Julie & Julia . I saw the movie once when it was new, and I've read Julie's book (and a whole lot of Lawrence Dai's blog entries about the film), but I'm barely remembering how Julie's story works as a visual narrative. I remember some shots of Amy Adams failing at cooking, something with lobsters, but it's the Julia Child sequen...

Got Life Itself playing again right now. Also watched 45 Years today--not a film for people who don't like it slow, but I loved it until it didn't seem to really end, it was just... not on anymore. #NoClosure Sorry for the hashtag, but I just spent a couple hours watching and livetweeting # JurassicWorld on the Groundhog Day Project 's Twitter (after livetweeting (though I didn't actually tweet much for this one) the State of the Union with my personal Twitter ) and hashtags were getting thrown around a lot. I considered just copying and pasting the tweets here as today's blog entry, but I realized I have not gotten to something I really wanted to get to when I watched Life Itself the first time . I used Roger's line about movies being a machine that generates empathy as my title and never really got to the empathy thing. Plus, the tweets are probably best enjoyed in the format in which they were posted. Click the link above and check them out. Blasco an...

In class tonight, we were talking about finding a story. Like, you're producing a news story and you're in a situation and you need to know the main elements of the scene, but the story... the story has to be found. And, I got sidetracked in my head. I thought about one of my unpublished novels, possibly the best one of the bunch. It's called Clubhouse Blues . It began as my third attempt at a new storytelling format--a serialized story put online one chapter at a time. It was set in the same small California town as two of my previous novels-- Seeing Her Naked  and Twice Into the Same River . Each of these was built around children and/or teens trying to, you know, figure out life. Seeing Her Naked had run for ten chapters, building an audience as I emailed out chapters as I wrote them. Each chapter was written in one sitting, about one a week. The night I wrote the last chapter was, up until that point, about the most painful night of my life. I was writing on a comput...

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The title for today's entry is how Roger Ebert describes film in Life Itself , the documentary about his life. (It's also the title of his memoir. The quotation that starts this entry, on the other hand, is the closing line of The Great Gatsby , a line mentioned in Life Itself .) I had considered a couple other titles for today's entry. I started my day watching People, Places, Things , a nice indie film starring Jemaine Clement that touched on some old wounds for me; it's about a couple breaking up and than having some conflicts over their kids, their lives, etc., but really it's about Jemaine Clement's character trying to get on with his life. And, the first title I wrote down today was a line of his: Happiness is not really a sustainable condition. Thoughts of a rant about depression--or Depression; I've made that distinction before--here in this blog. But--a...