the groundhog day project

I will be up front about this. I am watching Suburban Sasquatch again rather than get back to High Road to China . It's just so fun. Also, I saw Every Day today's--long time readers of this blog might recognize the name. I wrote about David Levithan's book back when it was still Groundhog Day every day. In particular, I quoted this bit: What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contains such enormity? I suddenly realize why people believe in deja by, why people they've lived past lives, because there is no way the years I've spent on this earth could possibly encapsulate what I'm feeling. The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations--all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secrets arrows were points here, ...

(We interrupt the planned programming here at The Groundhog Day Project --because my VHS set of Star Wars films didn't arrive and I don't feel like skipping ahead--to bring you a brief bit about mother! --because I saw it again today, and however much it is horrifying some people, I liked it even more the second time than I did the first time.) Honestly, you probably won't like mother! . I mean, statistically, most people won't like it. Maybe, taking into account the limited scope of this blog and the side of the Venn diagram of film aficionados who might come to my blog regularly, you're one of the few who will not only like it but love it. An Aronofsky fan, perhaps. A fan of divisive, provocative, polarizing cinema, maybe. Let's get some stuff out of the way right off. You know, SPOILERS. You're gonna get overloaded with imagery of violence, of gratuitous religiosity, of Jennifer Lawrence's breasts, of a newborn baby's half eaten corpse, and ...

Adventures of the Wilderness Family is an interesting case, potentially. Watched it a lot as a kid. And, I mean a lot . My sister Bobbie recently informed me that this was the only movie our parents would let us watch on Saturday mornings; that was the sabbath for us. (And, that I grew up attending church regularly and going to a church-owned private school will become important below.) I remember hating it, or at least really disliking it. I guess, if I hated it, I probably would not have sat there and watched it every time. (I also remember associating the opening shot of this film--showing the Bonaventure Hotel being in downtown Los Angeles under construction--with the sitcom It's a Living , which was set in a restaurant at its top, but that's just an arbitrary link, however permanently fixed it is in my head.) Officially, I thought it was boring. But, I can't have been completely against it to have watched it so often, and to have sat through its sequels more ...

I saw two good movies today. One a horror film, far better than it should have been (though with one annoying flaw right at its center). The other a nice family drama with echoes of last year's Captain Fantastic (which I loved), and based on a true story. That is, Annabelle: Creation and The Glass Castle , respectively. But, right now, I'm watching The Happening because, I suppose I hate myself. Now, The Happening isn't all bad. Until Mark Wahlberg shows up on screen, telling us (or his students) about some article about bees that Shyamalan (or Wahlberg's character, though I'm not sure he has one) read in the news, the movie is actually pretty good. A slow burn handful of minutes, that lady losing her place in her book twice then slowly pushing her hairpin into her neck, all of those bodies leaping from the construction site... And then Elliot (Wahlberg) teaches science but doesn't understand what "theory" means. Cameron Fry has become a princip...

To counter yesterday 's Katniss Everdeen, we have Ava (Alicia Vikander) in Ex Machina . Literally programmed to be who she is, Ava demonstrates more agency in one film than Katniss does in three... Maybe. There is a point where the "programming" inherent in cinematic characters by the writer and the director and the actor (let's call this LEVEL 2) conflict with the "programming" of the character within the story by her creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) (which we'll call LEVEL 1, since we're talking about the film here), and where both of those levels of "programming" conflict with the real-life "programming" that a woman receives from the society around her (LEVEL 3). We'll come back to the issue of programming. First--and this entry will be full of SPOILERS big and small--Nathan's introduction is entirely manipulative of both Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) and the audience. Reclusive tech-genius living in (my personal take) an ...