the groundhog day project

Opening shots are of Quigley's cowboy implements. His boot. His bedroll. His saddle. His rope. His belt and cartridges. Plus, his hands, nails short. His knife. His rifle sliding into its case.Spurs going into a bag. His pocket watch. His hat. And then the map. The setup is simple enough. We've got a cowboy on our hands traveling to a faraway land, but the piecemeal shots maybe suggest a deconstruction at play. Reminds me of, at the same time, the gearing up sequence in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and the fictitious magical costuming in Chaplin . One of the first things Quigley does, before he's even off the ship that brought him to Australia, is, on the behalf of an old woman, hit another guy between the legs with his gun. We've got basic masculine cowboy imagery, and then a nice hit to the balls to drive home the idea that... well, either we've got a serious man on our hands here, or we've got something very much else. Next thing he does is save Cora and s...

The thing is, while I looked up Gregory Widen (the screenwriter) I couldn't find anything connecting him to gay themes or whatnot. Couldn't find much about his life at all. But, Russell Mulcahy (the director)--yeah, he's gay. "No one has ever known we were among you... Until now." Then there's the soundtrack songs by Queen. We open on professional wrestlers, men in tight clothes jumping on each other. CUT TO men in furs tackling each other in the past. And, then MacLeod has to run off to a secret meeting in the parking lot. MacLeod, by the way--Lambert was cast before the director even knew he was only just learning English. Basically, he was cast for his look. It isn't just because it's an 80s action movie that it leans into a homoerotic male gaze. That's kinda the nature of film. If a shot is going to linger, of course it will do so lovingly a great deal of the time. How else do you stare at anything but with strong emotion. ...

It's time to cheat a little. Today I'm watching Highlander which was not really a fixture in my life until my teens, though I did see it in the theater when I had just turned 10 and I loved it. There are numerous movies, surely, that I've skipped because they weren't fixtures. Influence doesn't have to come from repetition. Trying to figure out what some of those movies might be, though, I noticed the first few I thought of were films I had already covered in some context other than this deconstruction of my childhood experience with film. Regarding Highlander , though. Saw the sequel in '91, was amused but did not like it--if you aren't familiar with the Highlander franchise, the second film not only contradicts the post-original reality but also retcons the backstory into a thing that doesn't make sense. And, it shoves it into a near-future dystopia for no particular reason. Third one in '94 was unnecessary but held up far better than the...

Had a good day so far. Ran a Dungeons & Dragons game then came home to watch the Golden Globes. Now For Your Eyes Only is playing and I almost want to be brief, after livetweeting the Globes. So, there is this: James Bond, regardless of the version (though, to be fair, I have only read one of the novels, and it wasn't one of Ian Fleming's originals; it was John Gardner's novelization of Licence to Kill ), is a horrible role model for young boys. He's a womanizer who far too easily gets every woman he meets to fall for him. He's an expert at everything (so much so that it amuses me when he checks his map early in this film, as if James Bond does not have every street of, well, all of Spain already memorized), and there is never any actual chance that he might die. (Sharks won't even try to kill him when he is openly bleeding.) No one should ever try to be James Bond. But, so many boys--me included--looked (and look) up to him. It wasn't just an 80s t...

I was always a bigger fan of Luke than of Han. Probably because I was so young when I first came to them, or they first came to me. Luke made for the more interesting fantasy. So, I'm looking up articles about this, Hand versus Luke, and I really wish there were a serious study, but I might be the only person who would think studying that would be worth it for the sake of, say, a film program, a communication studies program, a psychology program. Glenn Geher, PhD, writing for Psychology Today , 5 March 2013, talks about a class discussion in a graduate course in social psychology... The conversation touched on several themes relevant to evolutionary psychology--mate choice, optimal features of long-term mates, optimal features of short-term mates, morphological features of sexually attractive mates, the handicap principle applied to high levels of testosterone, inbreeding depression, and so forth... Let's unpack a bit of that before moving on. Evolutionary psychology is sp...

So a few pet peeves. One about something that happens in movies. One about how people react to movies. And one about life. I'll be as brief as I can. One, and this one occurred to me watching 9 to 5 , is when a conversation is split over two scenes. The example in 9 to 5 isn't even the most egregious example--Judy waits until she is at the store with Violet to ask about Doralee, when realistically she would have asked, you know, on the way there. Some movies, though, it's like midsentence, or between question and response, and that is not how people talk. It's a cheap manipulation of the medium. (To be fair, it can be used well, to suggest a conversation that happens again and again. Because one character just can't let something go, for example. But, too often it's just cheap.) Two, and this one occurred to me watching The Mummy , is about how people measure a film too much by what they wanted it to be. In this case, so many reviews referencing the 1999 The ...

The question for today is this: how do you measure a film's... Worthiness? Greatness? Must it be objective, or is the subjective as or more important? See, today, I saw Wonder Woman . (And, right now, I've got Groundhog Day playing because it's the 2nd of the month, but I'm not sure how much I might say about that film tonight. Additionally, I should probably get around to a recap entry sometime soon, but that won't be happening tonight either. Also, I'm starting to have ideas for themes for upcoming months. I think this blog might be here to stay for a while. At least until, say, August 1. That would make it three full years. But anyway, Wonder Woman ...) First, a story from just after the film. See, I'm thinking about stuff I might say in this blog all through the movie, and I'm trying to figure out how to get into the subjective versus objective thing. I mean, there's the obvious (and oft repeated here) bit from Benesh (2011) about how every...

Speaking of a repetitive day-to-day, Phil Connors embodies that. I mean, in Pittsburgh, going to the station, repeating the same barely accurate weather information day in and day out, then a little banter with Nan and Kenny, then out on the town to pick up a woman to bring back to his apartment. He's already made his way through the secretarial pool, even has to avoid a few of those women. He's starting to feel as if he will never be able to settle down... at least in the moments that it occurs to him that he should. And, in an earlier incarnation of the script, he has found Stephanie. He didn't mean to treat her badly. He even told her, explicitly, that he didn't have time for a "real relationship." One of these days, a major network is going to call him up and he doesn't want to have to worry about a girlfriend or, worse, a wife, to affect his decision to go. His immediate decision to go, that is. Leave Pittsburgh as far behind him as he did Clevela...

For some reason, every time I watch The Exorcist , I forget that it starts with that sequence at the excavation in Iraq. Of course, the movie is not called The Possessed (though I am pretty sure that I have seen more than one movie with that title); it is not about Regan (Linda Blair) but about Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) and, even moreso, Father Karras (Jason Miller). Something Clover (1992) tries to explain "this gendered division of narrative labor--to understand what it is about the male crisis that needs harnessing to a narrative of female hysteria or indeed psychosis" (p. 70). While Regan's story drives the narrative, the narrative belongs to those two men (and primarily Karras). Man versus the devil. The girl is just their battleground. But, what kind of battleground is she? Kinder and Houston (1987) write about the "psychological interpretation" presented in the film to explain Regan's initial extraordinary behaviour--her parents' divorce ...

Seriously, though , fuck the rules. I could probably spread out discussion of Fight Club over several days. I don't know that I need to, however. I would like to begin the discussion with my usual go to -- Roger Ebert . His review ranges from insightful--"eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights"--to the... well, not quite getting it, I think--"the movie stops being smart and savage and witty, and turns to some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed." Regarding the first quotation there, I get it. It's like the homoeroticism that sat right under the surface of so many manly 80s movies grew up to become this. Damn the women--except Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), but we'll get to her later--you don't need to include every gender to explore every gender... or to explore gender at all. I know, I've said numerous times in this blog that every film offers commentary on (or at least insight into) ...

Moulin Rouge! is a movie. I don't mean that the obvious way because, well, that's obvious. I mean that the movie is almost constantly separating itself from the usual emersion and suspension of disbelief. It throws its contents in your face and then takes everything overboard so you cannot help but keep looking even as you recognize every falsity. The opening shot, for example, is a theater proscenium and the orchestra conductor conducts the Fox logo after the curtain opens. This framing device is deliberately artificial. But, that one's obvious. Less obvious is Toulouse's role as pseudo-narrator. The opening lines are his, and yet the rest of the movie tells us that it is Christian telling us this story. This means that Toulouse is telling us the story of Christian telling the story of, well, all the events we see. And, Toulouse is within that proscenium. Get into "Spectacular Spectacular" and you're several story levels deep. And, Christian is effect...