the groundhog day project

Taken out of the greater context to come--the slasher film as a thing-- Halloween is almost deceptively simple. Michael is given no motivation but for that Loomis puts upon him. I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding... even the most rudimentary sense, of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child with his blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes. The devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil. And... I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at the wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall, looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. And, of course, after Laurie calls Michael the boog...

First of all, they were doing this useless prologue bullshit in '68?! I mean, of course they were. Hollywood has rarely trusted its audience to figure out the story as it happens. Gotta dumb it down into an opening crawl, or a voiceover that just opens and closes the movie but adds nothing along the way. Anyway, Blackbeard's Ghost begins with this: In the early years of the eighteenth century lived the pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard. From the Spanish Main to the Carolinas, he wrought a bloody tale of destruction, unparalleled for its ferocity and terror. Blackbeard was killed in sea battle off the American shore. This was followed by widespread joy when it became known the dread pirate had gone at last. Or had he? Second, I realize this may take a while. This being the deconstruction and reconstruction of my childhood in film. Or some such thing. The plan began as a notion of watching all the movies I saw far too many times when I was young. I started with a li...

Less important than making my survey is the reasoning behind it. I've said before that I could write a memoir using movies to tell time, a la Fever Pitch . And, the "thesis" if you will for this whole blog (per Day 579 ) is: Our lives can be measured in movies and movies can be measured in our lives and profound and profane depths can be found in the intersection thereof. That is to say, if I can know your favorite movies, know what it is you look for in a movie, then I can know you. I tweeted (and then retweeted with my personal account over to Facebook) a few posts about what people's favorite movies are--their top five. But, it's more than that. For example, there's a huge difference between how I choose my favorite movies and how I might decide what are the best movies. Hell, I don't really even bother with the latter because movies are so subjective, the experience of watching a movie is subjective, and that version of a movie that is left in each ...

I remember when I was in Woodstock, Illinois two years ago--that's the filming location for most of Groundhog Day , if you must know, this blog's namesake and the film I watched for 365 days in a row and still come back to at least once a month--and I imagined being stuck in that location for a repeating day, and there was a "homeless" guy--really, he was just out of work and had made his way to Woodstock from a nearby town because he knew the crowd would mean he might be able to get more handouts from sympathetic passersby--that is, more people overall, more sympathy just by playing the percentages not that he was as cynical about it as I think I just sounded in describing it--and he was a nice enough guy, but unfortunately, I couldn't give him any cash because I saw him on my third day in Woodstock and I had run out of cash--I did offer to buy him Starbucks, I think, because I had just emerged from Starbucks, which is right by where Phil Connors hugged Ned Ryers...

So there I am, watching the trailer for Falling Down and I'm wondering a few things: 1) did every trailer in 1993 have really annoying voiceover? 2) sure, the film has moments that make it a very, very, very, very were people seeing it in the theater expecting an outright comedy about "urban reality"? 3) was this the perfect companion piece for / counterpart to Groundhog Day ? and 4) is this film--or rather the main character of D-FENS (Michael Douglas) just a metaphor for America... 5) I don't mean in an obvious, Americans are angry and fed up with all the bullshit problems in the modern world... 6) hell, I don't even mean that he's a stand-in for Ameri cans at all, but rather 7) he is America itself, and Falling Down can be mapped onto a sort of moral history of America. And, I'm not that impressed with America's morals lately, so this might turn into a rant. (Mal, you can check out now, because the word "patriarchy" might show up.) My...

After two new movies today-- The Gift and Southpaw --my IMDb seen it list has 4144 titles in it. And, I'm convinced there are still a whole lot of obscure movies I've seen over the years that I've neglected to add to that list. Walking home from the movie theater today, I wondered at what point I will have seen enough movies. Like there's a hole in me that I keep filling with them and at some point it will runneth over. I suppose my "edition" of each of these films (and, to be fair, a few TV series have found their way onto that list, I'm pretty sure) doesn't really take up much space. Not physical space anyway. Backtrack a moment to that "edition" line and flashback to, for example, Day 173 - who dreams of you at night , for a bit from Benesh (2011)--if you are new to this blog, Benesh wrote her doctoral dissertation on Groundhog Day and, over the course of a whole lot of days worth of blog entries, I systematically deconstructed, deba...

That ^ is a line Phil Connors could appreciate. It’s a line that invokes both timelessness and the temporality of life. You are born. You live. You die. The rest is details. I made the mistake of a google search just now. I was on my phone just to check if anyone had a screencap of the IV drip from the end of The Grey —no one seemed to. If I remember, I will get the image after the movie is over by sticking the DVD in the computer... Voila! (If there’s just a big white box or a blank space with a red X or whatever, that means I was too tired at the end of the movie to remember. Sorry.) (If there’s a photo, that is because I am committed to doing this right and, damn the tiredness, I will have the image I want.) I will explain the mistake in a moment. First, this: I had been leaning the other way the last few days, wanting to continue this blog past this month, coming up with a way to free up what I’m doing but still have... something here every day, a movie every day. Then...

The thing is: he didn’t. Let me back up. The final line in Christmas Vacation is Clark saying, “I did it.” But, really, he didn’t do much of anything. He went to get the tree, forgot a saw, got the tree home, put part of it inside and broke a couple windows. He wanted to prove Santa was real to his niece but even if she thought that plastic Santa flying through the air was the real thing, he didn’t do that. He put up those 25,000 bulbs but without his wife flipping that switch there never would have been any light to them. He only got his Christmas bonus because Eddie kidnapped his boss. Clark accomplishes pretty much nothing in this movie. Even his freak out results not in him getting violent (like in the original) but Eddie. Hell, he breaks a hole through the “floor” of the attic yet doesn’t climb down through it to get out. Instead, he sits in the attic and reminisces about old times that don’t really exist. That last bit is kinda the point, though. Christmas here, is just a...

I don’t mean to talk about television again. I really don’t. But, there is more to say. Regular reader of this blog, Maolshechlann, for example, wrote in his blog a couple years back about television , specifically about being “brought up by television.” An idea I can relate to. An idea I’m sure Samara Morgan in The Ring can relate to, though for her it is almost forced upon her in her loft high up in the barn. Maolsheachlann writes, So when I claim that I was brought up by television, I really mean that everybody my age was brought up by television... TV was out first window onto the wider world, and one’s earliest influences always imprint themselves upon the imagination. The blank slate is gone forever... Even all my romantic notions of the simple, the pre-technological and the traditional were supplied by television. In setting myself against the cultural influence of television and popular culture, I am in a sense like some post-colonial African leader who was educated at Oxf...

A couple mishaps but we just rolled with it. That’s the short description for the Day 365 party. The waffles didn’t work out, pretty much because I hadn’t used my waffle maker in a while and forgot about getting the surface oiled just right (and I probably needed to compensate for the blueberries added to the recipe with some dry ingredients). And the projector, which I had tested out twice at home—even watched Groundhog Day projected big on the living room wall last week—decided not to work when darkness fell and it came time to watch the movie. But, we crowded into my sister’s living room instead and watched the movie on DVD—the easiest way to roll with the punches is to be prepared with a DVD copy in your bag… (Well, that may not apply to all punches.) Anyway, showed off my LEGO Gobbler’s Knob, ate some good food, flapjacks made by my daughter Hayley, sticky buns, white chocolate cheesecake, fudge, and chocolate pie with almonds and marshmallow topping (thus being a Rocky Road p...

There's an X on page 37 of Benesh (2011), but I don't want to talk about Benesh today. Still, I'll explain the X. By the way, there's a yellow tab labeled "self-awareness/Rita-awareness" on pages 37/38. Highlighted bit: "Phil responds, 'That's not true. I don't even like myself.' That is humor, perhaps deflective and defensive humor, but, like his calling Nancy by Rita's name, an unconscious revelation of a deeper truth..." "He may, at this point believe he sincerely admires Rita, but at the same time he is coming to the realization that he hasn't earned her" (p. 37). Then the X through the end of this bit: "Later his moral profess is confirmed when he states, as she sleeps (her sleep signifying he has, unlike before, neither means nor motive to impress her), 'I know I don't deserve you'" (ibid). Phil does not say that. When I was describing È già ieri on my second viewing, I would pause an...

Benesh (2011) makes the point (citing Dawson (2008) and Beebe (2008)) a few times that while the protagonist provides a focal point for audience identification... neither a critic nor social science researcher is advised to confuse such a figure with a real person, nor apply to such a figure methods of analysis better suited to such a person. Instead the case or psyche should be seen as the whole of the work, and often the protagonist is viewed as the work's ego-consciousness, which is not to be confused with the whole. (p. 115) Benesh gives this as the reason that she doesn't analyze the transformation of Phil Connors specifically (as I have done many a time now) but "the depiction of transformation." As to cautioning one not to confuse the protagonist with being a real person, I say, where's the fun in that? ...on the one hand. But, on the other hand, yes, sure, you should look at the whole text and not just one character... and , I think, you should also loo...