the groundhog day project

At the emotional climax of the film, Caldwell gets drunk (off very little alcohol) and sits with Maclure on the roof of Maclure's building, and he has a poorly-written but fairly well-executed monologue as part of his conversation with Maclure: Maclure: Sometimes I think it was easier winning that medal than wearing it. Think any of those people over there give a shit about us? Caldwell: Do we give a shit about them? That's what matters. You know what I think? I think America is like a big fancy house. And we're the Doberman Pinschers.  Maclure: Doberman Pinschers?  Caldwell: A guy hears a noise downstairs, he's really happy to have his big ugly dog. But, the next day when he's got his friends coming around, he locks up the dog. Why? 'Cause he's embarrassed. But at night, sure as shit, he unlocks the dog to protect his big fancy house. If some guy comes in and the dog doesn't bite his ass, he's gonna take a rolled-up newspaper and smack h...

RoboCop is a movie where I'm sure I didn't get all the satirical elements when I first saw it, but it was science fiction, and full of violence, soI loved it... And, I can't even start by reminiscing because, the news report and commercials that start the movie are amazing. The anchors talk about potential nuclear conflagration in Africa with the same cheerful tone as they talk about the President getting accidentally left in zero-g visiting a space station. And, then there's a commercial for branded artificial hearts. And, then they get to the news reports that will actually matter to the plot. Then armored cops, locker room, casually co-ed and before 11-year-old me can even be excited by the casual nudity, it's brought down by talk of strike and removing the name tag of the recently-killed Frederickson. Then we're off to a corporate meeting--but this is the folks running the police and that was a crazy idea to me even if I didn't fully understand its ...

As far as criticism goes, the biggest flaws in An Officer and a Gentleman come from pieces of the premise itself, pieces of 1982 American society as depicted. That there were towny women like the Puget Debs is believable. That their relationships with the men in Officer Candidate School might go like those of Mayo (Richard Gere) and Paula (Debra Winger) or of Sd (David Keith) and Lynette (Lisa Blount) is believable. Any inherent sexist bullshit, as I might term it most days, comes from the era more than the film. What I find remarkable within all that, though, is that--and obviously, Richard Gere got me thinking of this--is the differences between this and, say, Pretty Woman . An Officer and a Gentleman comes from screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart coming off of The Blue Lagoon , and director Taylor Hackford coming off of Idolmaker . A combination that seems set for romanticism of some sort, to be sure. Roger Ebert says in his review , "Love stories are among the rarest of movie...