the groundhog day project

I was going to watch Hackers again but apparently my rental was only 24 hours, not 48 as most Amazon rentals have been. Anyway, I'm inclined to write in response to Everybody Wants Some!! instead, anyway, except for this: You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert. This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of the service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... And you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge, and you call us criminals. We exist without skin colour, without nationality, without...

Taxi guy gets sees a woman hit by a car, takes the time to set down his stuff before he casually checks on her. Jogging Lady says they should call the police but makes no effort to do so. Taxi guy casually steals hit-and-run victim's purse and walks away. New guy drives up and, when it seems like he isn't needed, hits on Jogging Lady as the camera drifts down the street, eventually happening upon the driver who just hit that woman, his mother, as he arrives home and goes inside to light some candles at an altar of some sort and then (possibly even more evil than running down his own mother with a car or performing satanic rituals) cuts photos out of a book. He arbitrarily sets a filmstrip to running as the police arrive and we're left wondering, what are we watching? And, is that filmstrip of his mother pushing him in his toy car? Is this poetry? Is that image supposed to rhyme with him hitting her with his car? But then we wander off with a passerby, whose on his way to d...

Right away, in Slacker , the theme and structure is laid out by none other than director Linklater himself, talking to a taxi driver. Alternate realities, each choice you make fracturing reality so that every direction exists. This movie is about to drift off on tangents from each scene-- (I wrote in this blog before--I don't remember when but I think it was fairly recently--about having a story idea that follows one character for a while then switches to another, then later to another, then another and another, etcetera. For the record, I have never seen Slacker until tonight. But, Slacker seems to be doing just that sort of thing.) --with no overarching plot to tie them together, just a lot of fringe-of-society type characters going about their business. (I imagine you could operate a story like this on different levels of reality as well, like Mr. Show with Bob and David used to link its sketches or how Cloud Atlas ties its stories together. One character watches a TV sh...

I find I can't--or don't want to--write about the third act of Before Midnight . But, who needs to get that far into everything anyway? Instead, I could talk about punctum, or a series of puncta. If you're new, or you've forgotten, a punctum, by way of Barthes, is the piercing, wounding moment that pulls you in, that forces you to identify with a character perhaps, that puts you fully into the story, the small detail that makes it all real for you in the moment. I can avoid the greater wound by dealing with the lesser. (As Jesse is left behind, Hank gone, music starts up and it feels intrusive. I'm sure there was background music in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset but I really don't remember it. If it was there, it wasn't intrusive. Here, and a few instances later in this film, the music is a bit too noticeable, making this film feel more like a movie than whatever the previous two films were.) The first punctum, I suppose, is in the car. The girls are...

Before Sunrise ends with a montage of shots--locations where Jesse and Celine have been, but now they are not there. It's an empty echo of their story. Before Sunset begins with such an echo, a montage of locations where Jesse and Celine will be. (Just in case you have never seen Before Sunrise , there's also a montage of scenes with Jesse and Celine as he answers questions at his book signing. (His book, This Time is basically the first film. Jesse tells his readers about an idea for a new book, one that will take place within the span of a pop song. He talks about two moments happening simultaneously, and we get one more shot of Celine from the previous film--that moment when Jesse takes her "picture." And, in the present, there is Celine at his book signing. Jesse is supposed to catch a plane in about an hour, but he goes off with Celine anyway. More walking and talking, but this more in real time than the first film. Within minutes, Celine asks if he showed ...

Before Sunrise begins on June 16. Some might know that day as Bloomsday, a celebration of James Joyce's Ulysses , which takes place on that day. I, however, am one of those people who tried reading Ulysses and never got very far. But, I can read about Joyce and have done so. Did so again today. The following is--because, as Luke McKernan puts it in his film blog , 19 July 2014, "Richard Linklater's Before trilogy is more subtly and rewardingly Joycean than any literal transcription of his work to the screen"--me mapping Before Sunrise onto the structure of Ulysses (which itself is mapped onto the structure of The Odyssey ). (Admittedly, some of these will be stretches.) Ulysses is told in eighteen episodes. As I understand it, the labels for those episodes were not included by Joyce but he used them in his letters and offered them to his friend Stuart Gilbert, who later published the schema. Episode One: Telemachus , named for Odysseus' son, in my mapp...

Who needs a plot anyway ? Who needs plans, our for things to end up how you want them to end up? (Or for a blog month's theme to outlast its novelty... twice.) Changing gears a little today with Before Sunrise . Jesse's (Ethan Hawke) 24-hour reality show idea has, of course, been surpassed by YouTube and Twitter and Tumblr and Snapchat and Vine and Facebook and whatever else everybody's using... It amazes me that with the setup of a thing like Boyhood anybody hoped for a plot. Linklater is kind of the anti-plot director. I mean, this Before trilogy, Dazed and Confused , Waking Life , SubUrbia ; even Bernie which is based on a true story kinda meanders. Before Sunrise (and its two (so far) sequels) is quite deliberately plotless. It's just two characters wandering around Vienna, talking about anything and everything. Good mid-90s fun. The epitome of such films actually got the title Walking and Talking . Unlike a lot of these films, Jesse and Celine (Julie Delpy) ...

Interesting thing. I'm watching Chaplin the other night and I'm too sick to really get into some preachy, self-help-style rant about being creative, being yourself, and all that jazz. Tonight, I'm watching Dazed and Confused and it occurs to me I could pull the same sort of message out of this film. I mean, that is the point to, say, Pink's (Jason London) throughline, yeah? That's what the freshmen are doing heading out to party with the older kids. That's even what Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) is doing hanging out with everyone younger than he is. They're all trying to just hold onto some ideal form of self, to enjoy a life full of possibilities and... ("I wanna dance," indeed.) See, it could turn cheesy, easy. And then I get distracted, because cheesy rhymes with easy and I thought maybe I should replace it with corny and then I got to wondering what was the difference between cheesy and corny . And, I'm feeling like Slater (Rory...

Watching Boyhood this morning, and a few times there were things I expected might happen that didn’t. The movie—if you don’t know it—was filmed over 12 years and evokes a sense of real life more than the Hollywood-constructed life. A boy doesn’t turn into a man in a single summer that lends itself easily to film—at least not all the time. It takes years. But, anyway, those moments. For example, Mason camps out with some other teenager boys at a house under (mostly done) construction and they’re drinking beers and breaking bits of wood, kicking them while another boy holds them. And, they also throw a saw blade into a spare bit of what looks like sheetrock. So, the end of the scene, oldest boy is going to punch a board held by the one kid who doesn’t want to drink, he’s holding it right in front of his face, and that saw blade is in the wall behind him. In a scripted film—especially a Final Destination film—this is a setup for a horrible injury and a lesson learned about going out ...