the groundhog day project

The context for a given film is interesting. I mean, going back to movies I watched time and time again in my childhood is interesting because I can imagine what I thought of the movie on first blush. I mean, had I even seen any time travel movies before Back to the Future was in theaters? Time After Time came out in 1979 but it's not like I saw that in the theater. I had watched every episode of Voyagers! , but cinematically, I'm not sure. Maybe some crap low budget thing available on VHS for rental, but I can't think of what movie it might be. But, what I really wanted to talk about, looping back around to Back to the Future after drifting away from it last time, is this discussion of late I've seen online about how Marty's parents not recognizing him--looking, as he does, just like that guy Calvin who helped get them together 30 years ago--as a plot hole. (Remember, I don't like the use of that term plot hole in the first place.) A) This is not a...

I don't know if, as a kid, I realized that Ed (Eugene Levy) was deliberately fucking with Clark (Chevy Chase) in the opening of Vacation --forcing the sale on the Wagon Queen Family Truckster. Eventually, I got it, but the first time, in the theater, I think I just thought it was an honest mistake.           And, I laughed at a line I don't think I ever found funny before. Clark tells the kids about the St. Louis Arch, "the Gateway to the West. It's over 600 feet tall and there's an elevator all the way to the top." Rusty asks, "Dad, can we go up in it?" Clark replies simply, "No." Like so many vacation details, road trips past all the interesting places because you don't have the time to stop everywhere. For example, they show the sign for Gatorworld on a postcard during the opening credits. When our speech team was in Florida my last year as coach, we drove past Gatorworld, but we weren't even there for a vacation; we were t...

There was an asterisk next to a paranthetical "sort of" right at the end of yesterday 's entry, my seventh and last with Halloween II . I had intended to add a footnote, but with the "works cited" bit, a footnote would have looked odd. So, now that footnote: * Not that it is an interesting footnote. I just like to imagine sometimes that there is some reader here that pays close attention to the details and loves to nitpick when I get things wrong. I called Halloween II my final film for 1981, but it turns out, when I was sorting out my 1982 movies the other day, I figured out that the release date I had for today's film was wrong. On Golden Pond was released in December 1981, not January 1982. Or maybe--and I'm writing this on the eve of the Oscar nominations for 2017--it had a limited release in December, a wider release in January. I'm sure Hollywood distributors were playing that game back then, throwing their award-hopeful films right into the...

A bit of a cheat, here. Technically, Escape from New York is not a fixture of my childhood the way (most of) these movies have been in this deconstruction. That is, it is not a film that I watched a lot when I was particularly young. I don't think I even saw it when it was new. I did see it on tv or cable or video when I was still quite young, but it really only became a fixture, in terms of repetition, when I was a teen. Still, it makes the list. And the reason is simple: parts of this film stuck with me. I'm saying this as the movie begins, and it has been several years probably since I last watched this thing, so I'm not 100% sure this is even the movie I'm remembering remembering. Some ugly, mutant-looking guy attacked Snake--that was a scene that stuck with me. Like, for years, I remembered one particular detail of the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland before I went on it again and fixed the rest of it in my memory; it was the wood door bending, and I had nig...

1) Back to the childhood deconstruction. It's 1981. I turn five at the end of January. For whatever reason, the first film from 1981 that made my list didn't come out until May... According to IMDb. However Wikipedia says the film was not out in Australia until December of '81 but came out in the US in 1980. Roger Ebert's review is dated 1 January 1981, but he also mentions Raiders of the Lost Ark , and IMDb says the explosion of hte compound was filmed 22 July 1981, so who knows? I'll have better dates for the rest of the films from 1981 because they weren't imports. 2) This is a bit of a cheat. This is supposed to be a deconstruction of my childhood in terms of the films I watched time and time again when I was young. I did not have The Road Warrior on video until I was a teenager, but I know I watched it more than a couple times on TV. And, I think I saw it in the theater. I am not sure about that. But, as I have said before, the memory is often more impor...

No Private Eyes today. Instead a long day culminated in seeing The Disaster Artist again . Took my daughter and her friends. To be fair, despite my choice of title for today's blog entry, today was not a bad day. It was far from a great day, but it had its moments. I slept in because I've been feeling a little sick the past couple days, then had to deal with some car issues for a few hours, watched a little tv, fell asleep on the couch. Then, The Disaster Artist which, among other things, about embracing the things you do as they are, accepting yourself as you are. There are limits, obviously, to such a thing, but those limits come from actions that hurt other people and making a melodramatic little movie that has become beloved for entirely different reasons than your making it--well, that just isn't that hurtful. And, I'm there in the theater, sitting there thinkin', you know. About all the stories I've written, the poems, the screenplays, some of them ...

My first thought upon turning on The Idolmaker is that even more than we watched the movie when I was a kid, we listened to the soundtrack. On vinyl. And, that gets me thinking about other soundtracks we listened to a lot. Somewhere in Time 's soundtrack was one of them, and I don't think I mentioned John Barry's score at all last week while watching that one. There was the soundtrack to Grease 2 , which will come up in this deconstruction sometime in the next month or two, probably. (The pace of this thing is not out of hand, exactly, but it is increasingly slow.) And plenty I'm forgetting. I remember a 45 single of "All Time High"--that's the theme to the James Bond movie Octopussy , which is also going to show up in this deconstruction at some point. And, outside of movie soundtracks, there were musicians from the 50s, stuff my parents liked. And, seriously, Tommy Dee (Paul Land) starts singing "Here Is My Love" and I still know the lyrics....

I should talk about the merchandising. But, 1) I don't think I'd have much to add that won't be covered by some other stuff I'll say below, and 2) I'd rather start with Artoo. Because I realized something yesterday. When Artoo gets shot at the end of the movie, when they're attacking the Death Star, it's tragic, sure. Artoo is funny... although watching the film again these past few days after not watching in a while, Threepio is funnier. "No, I don't like you either" is a great line, with fantastic delivery. And Luke clearly is attached to him, and a little too attached to Obi-Wan as well--seriously, he grieves for that old guy he met in a cave just--as far as we know the way the movie plays out--this morning, or maybe it was yesterday, more than he grieves for Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen, and maybe Uncle Owen was hard on him, but Aunt Beru seemed like a sweet woman who would always offer up a nice cold glass of (blue) bantha milk when you were t...

In her rogerebert.com review of Sing Street , Sheila O'Malley explains quite well something that should be an obvious idea: "A song can 'take you back' to specific moments in time, connecting you to a younger self, memories and dreams in a continuum." (Works the same for me with most movies.) For example, I will always think of a pool hall/arcade in Trabolgan, Ireland when I hear Bon Jovi's "Shot through the Heart", Peter Murphy’s "Cuts You Up" has me at work, sharing an office with two of my sisters, in 1995, "Your Eyes" from the musical Rent doesn't just take me back to the musical but also to a bus stop outside Pittsburgh, PA, Pearl Jam's "Black" has me in a karaoke room, my friend Jasmine screaming with surprise at how good I am (#humblebrag). When it comes to movies instead, I link Lethal Weapon 2 with a ferry, Ghost with a theater in Eastbourne, Cliffhanger with a theater in Maui. The odd movie vie...

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 ...

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her has me thinking about versions of self. More accurately, how the self we project and the self that others actually experience are probably never the same thing. Not exactly, and sometimes barely at all. Like the difference for the class clown between the class laughing at you or with you. You hope for the latter, but it's usually the former. It's like that encoding/decoding thing again --you choose how to present yourself and other people get it or they don't. The interesting moments are not when they get you wrong in a negative way--that laughing at you bit--but when they get you wrong in a positive way. Like someone likes you and you don't get why. I feel that sometimes... mostly when I'm not feeling that great about myself so maybe it's an entirely different issue. My self-esteem issues and/or depression rearing its head. (Ten minutes before Stu shows up.) I understand Eleanor a little too well I think. That need...

Instead, we get to Beginners from August: Osage County , the opposite direction of the original plan for this month. Things go backward sometimes. Plans fall apart. Marriages end. College plans get changed. A particular movie isn't available so a month has to be reconfigured so it will all still elicit the same poetry it was supposed to from the start. Poetry may be overselling it, but we'll get to that. (In the meantime, an aside: tomorrow is the Oscars, yesterday I saw the last of the nominees--Foreign Language Film nominee Embrace of the Serpent . This is only the second time I have managed every nominee. I've got a party of a sort tomorrow, but I don't even know how many people are coming. A speech tournament and a conference and a whole lot of sickness will be keeping people away. But, no big deal. Whoever comes comes, and we'll eat, drink, and be merry and I'm sure I'll tweet a whole lot (under my personal account, not the Groundhog Day Project o...

It's strange that Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) is almost a cypher in his own story. He drives the plot, sure but he is not really changed by anything here... well, not very much. There is, arguably a change in that at the end of the film he not only makes a bag for someone else (Grandfather) but also empties his own bag of dirt from Trachimbrod onto his own grandfather's grave. (We don't actually see this happen, but the film cuts from the dirt in Jonathan's hand to dirt in Alex's hand at Grandfather's funeral, implying that Jonathan will let that dirt go.) He changes enough to give up an item from his collection to connect these two men. (To be fair, we have no particular reason other than presumption to think he has not given up an item before.) The emotional beats in the story belong to Alex (Eugene Hutz) and Grandfather (Boris Leskin) and Lista (Laryssa Lauret). (Considering one of the deleted scenes, in which it seems that Sammy Davis, Junior, Juni...