the groundhog day project

Explorers opens with Ben asleep with his TV on ( War of the Worlds is on), dreaming about flying over a Tron -ish circuitboard reality. He wakes and frantically draws a piece of his dream. Then he calls up Wolfgang to talk about it. As you do. A good dream. A good movie. You gotta share with someone, gotta talk about it. Or at least I do. This blog is some of the obvious evidence. The Junior High the boys attend here is Charles M. Jones... That is, Chuck Jones, the cartoonist. Not the name of the High School where they filmed, but chosen deliberately. Because the cartoon reference matters. This is a movie about creativity and imagination and I just found out that Wolfgang's house is not far from where I'm writing right now, and I love that.           This Island Earth is the next movie we see, after some science fiction magazines and books. But, per the movie later, the island is not isolated. Like the immigrants in yesterday's An Am...

I think I forgot that Dean (Kurt Russell) makes art with chainsaws. That's how we are introduced to his character before he heads off to work on the yacht Immaculata . Later, there's some artistic stuff going on with the miniature gold course, but the artwork there comes from Joanna (Goldie Hawn); he handles the technical aspect and the building. Which his work in Joanna's closet at the start of the film sets up his engineering ability fairly well. His "objects de art" kinda gets lost. Looking back at Overboard with a modern lens, the plot is problematic, but the classist leanings outweigh the sexist leanings to create something more positive than the plot implies. Especially in the hands of director Garry Marshall. Still, even in '87, not everyone cared for the film. Michael Wilmington, Los Angeles Times , 18 December 1987: Unfortunately, Joanna eventually turns goody-two-shoes herself. All those layers of snobbery peel off to expose a bouncy, bubbly...

Why is The Jerk funny? I mean, is absurdity enough? It holds up as something funny, so perhaps absurdity can be timeless. Roger Ebert makes a distinction in his review between what he calls Funny Hat and Funny Logic approaches. For example, it is funny that Navin grew up with a black family in Mississippi and thinks he is black. When he learns that he was left on their doorstep, and he sets out on the road, he wears a bomber's helmet with goggles. He looks ridiculous. But, there is no reason that he grew up black (except for a little racial/cultural appropriation in the satire to come, maybe), and no reason he wears that helmet, except that the imagery is, on a very simplistic level, funny. (Like the visual of Navin's birthday dinner: tuna on white bread with mayonnaise, a Tab, and two twinkles.) This is Roger's Funny Hat humor. The hat is funny because it looks funny. The humor does not come from the reason Navin wear's the hat, it just comes from the visual. Sim...