the groundhog day project

Gotta love a movie that has people walking out before the end. Oh, jump forward a few decades. Forget the childhood deconstruction for the moment. I'm talking The Killing of a Sacred Deer , the latest film from director Yorgos Lanthimos. That's the guy behind the fairly bizarre Dogtooth , a nominee for Foreign Language Film at the Oscars several years ago, and for last year's The Lobster , bizarre but (maybe) a little more straightforward. He doesn't make films for a wide audience. He puts characters who don't quite speak like real people into situations that are strange, but that feel a little familiar. Dogtooth was all about how parents can manipulate the shape of their children by the way they raise them, the way they restrict them, the way they protect them. The Lobster was all about the need for companionship, for love, and when things don't go the way you want, the world might as well fall apart, you might as well not be a part of it anymore... It'...

Once upon a time there was a guy named Joe Who had a very lousy job... I worked office jobs in my 20s. The opening scene of Joe Versus the Volcano is amazing in its satire (and it's awesome that both Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack (who played it relatively straight in Airplane! are in this), workers all dressed in black, trudged through a muddy parking lot, turnstile doors, a zig zag walkway, all to enter a factory that makes medical devices and leaks exhaust into the air. The lighting inside makes everyone look sickly, the hat rack doesn't even work right. It's no wonder that Joe Banks (Tom Hanks) feels like he's always sick. Effectively, he is . His job drains away his life. Or as he tells DeDe (Meg Ryan) (regarding his shoe), "I'm losing my sole."           Strictly speaking, Joe Versus the Volcano is not a bad movie. But, I'm going to end this month of bad movies with it because 1) it was one of the first movies recommended when I asked...