the groundhog day project

The thing about Murder by Death is that 1) it offers up a group of intelligent characters, capable of Sherlock Holmes-style deductions out of nowhere-- (For the record, even though I know better, when Dick Charleston asks about Marcel recovering from his accident, I assume he's talking about Marcel getting hit by the gargoyle that was pushed off the roof not ten screen minutes before. But, no, he's talking about some previous injury, and references the sound of Marcel's artificial hip, which WE CANNOT HEAR. Considering the Charlestons were also attacked with a gargoyle, it should be even more obvious that Marcel was injured. But, no, it's a previous "accident" with a car.) --but also just dumb (if that's the word) enough to be so wrong about their guesses about the larger situation, particularly those at the end of the film, after Twain has essentially tried to kill them all in their rooms. 2) They, Sam Diamond especially, are capable of being sexist ...

Except , Murder by Death isn't even really a mystery. I mean, it's not like it offers up clues for the audience to solve anything, nor does it even show the detective's discovering useful information for their final solutions (plus all of their final solutions are so far out of left field, and wrong (especially Sam Diamond's (Peter Falk) theory that negates him being himself, which is funny, but ridiculous)). At best, the only things in this film that the audience might be able to figure out along the way, or more importantly, that we see the detectives figuring out, is that there are two dining rooms. Everything else is arbitrary. Which, I suppose is the point. I actually wish I had (back when I was a kid, but also now) more experience with the genre this movie is picking apart. Lionel Twain's (Truman Capote) big speech at the end of the film does however take me in a slightly different direction. But first, here's his rant: You've all been so clever fo...

It's interesting that, as a kid, the big mystery films I watched a lot were Murder by Death (watching it now) and The Private Eyes (watching it sometime in the coming weeks, months, years? Who knows how long this "month" will take). Comedies that parody and/or satirize older detective films and stories that I had less access to. My views of detective stories in film would forever be tainted by these movies.           And, I sit here watching (and being distracted by cats and people, but mostly just watching). And thinking about genres, about how we experience them based on past experience. The same way we experience every film, of course, in context of your history with every other film we've seen. And, with genre, we learn the tropes, the conventions, we learn the character archetypes, the usual plots beats and settings. And, after a while, the details become so common and well known (even outside the films (or stories) themselves) that even if you hav...