the groundhog day project

I saw A Wrinkle in Time today and it occurred to me while watching it that I don't remember ever being disappointed by a movie when I was a kid. Not that I didn't see bad movies back then. Just, I guess, I didn't care or didn't notice. The magic of whatever story it happened to be up there on the big screen (or later on the small screen as we rented a lot of movies on VHS) was bigger than my sense of narrative, maybe. Bigger than my need for great performances. An entertaining script was more important than a good script. Fantastic details or plot twists and turns could make up for faults in the production. When I run out of these on repeat childhood films I'm writing about through phase 4 of this blog, maybe I will hunt down movies I saw way back when that look, now, like they probably weren't any good. I'm looking at the top box office for 1984 right now and really only noticing one that might qualify: Ice Pirates . It's a good year for movies, 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...

To paraphrase Trent and Mike from Swingers , "VHS baby!" That's right, I've got Star Wars on tonight, finally. And I will be refusing for the purposes of this blog to ever refer to it as "A New Hope" because however much that episode title might have been part of the opening crawl, that is not what we called it back in the day... Did I just say "back in the day"? I should apologize. As I would tell my Public Speaking students, that phrase is vague. What I meant to say was that between the first time I saw Star Wars circa it's time in the theater (maybe when I was just a few months old but I'm guessing months later or the next year in some rerelease; all I know is that when The Empire Strikes Back came out, I knew Star Wars even though I was only four. I dont' actually remember seeing Star Wars for the first time. (Some of the first movies I specifically remember seeing in the theater are Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the ...

It would be difficult to talk about Star Wars: The Force Awakens without SPOILING certain elements of its story. There will be ample warning before I get to that. PART I - ON NOSTALGIA AND A LIFE WITH STAR WARS First, it must be said that Star Wars has been in my life pretty much from the beginning. While I do not specifically recall seeing the original--I was only a year old when it came out and am not actually sure when I first saw it--nor do I have specific memory of seeing The Empire Strikes Back for the first time, by the time Return of the Jedi came out, I was very familiar with the previous two, having watched them many times. And, I do remember going to the movie theater to see Return of the Jedi , I remember shopping at Toys R Us for action figures that year (I already had some), and when the Power of the Force line came out in 1985, I bought more. Through the 80s I watched all three films time and time again. I may have invented this but I remember one day home sick f...

At least this movie is not all about sex. Unlike, say, Porky's or Fast Times at Ridgemont High . In the shooting script (1985, July 24), Ferris, Cameron and Sloane do go to a strip club, however--a "garrish, nearly deserted strip joint." I won't paste the entire scene but basically, Sloane isn't impressed--"I'm losing respect for you by the bucket," she tells Ferris early in the scene--and Cameron is amazed (but has very little to do in the scene). Some highlights: Ferris: "You don't think it's amazing that we got in? Sloane: Who wants to get in? ... Sloane: I'm not interested in watching someone jiggle their mammary glands. Ferris: Point well taken. But consider why she does it. Why she does it and you don't. Sloane: I'm not a tramp. Maybe not the best angle for Sloane, but at least it offers a little more depth to her character than the movie really does. Ferris: Maybe her life fell apart. Maybe she lost somebo...

Bob Clark directed Black Christmas , Porky's and A Christmas Story . There is either something really wrong with that fact or something really awesome. On the one hand, those are three very different films. A horror film, a sex comedy and a nostalgic family picture. I don't think the odd man out here is A Christmas Story , though. I think it's Black Christmas . Black Christmas , whatever its faults--check this blog last December for details on that film and A Christmas Story --is a fairly straight forward film, played for realism (unlike the over-the-top remake). Porky's and A Christmas Story , on the other hand, are actually both quite nostalgic. The simpler time for A Christmas Story is 1939-40, before World War II really twisted the 20th century around, before the Cold War. The simpler time here in Porky's , on the other hand, is decade and a half later, World War II has come and gone, young men are fighting across the world in Korea now, but it's not t...

(A small correction: Clark does wear the Santa hat and coat (open), but not the beard, when he goes a little crazy with the chainsaw and places the burnt gifts under the new tree.) Of course, Christmas Vacation and so many other Christmas movies should be about nostalgia. Our enjoyment of the holidays, really, is about nostalgia. Every holiday celebrates something in the past, and usually a slightly invented version of whatever that something is. But, before we even get into invented history and the celebration thereof, there’s Freud. Hutton (1988) tells us about the “lost self” which Freud believed was formed yet largely forgotten as a consequence of the psyche’s encounter with early life experience. One’s sense of identity is forged out of the behavioral patterns established through the psyche’s reckoning with particular experiences, especially those of childhood. (p. 123) Essentially, our experience of self in the present is built on our experience of self in the past. Ad...

The weird thing today is that as the Halloween theme starts playing, I am comforted. On a list of movies I’ve seen, ordered by numbers of times I’ve seen it, this would be pretty close to the top. It’s like the movie equivalent of comfort food. Some people may reminisce about their mother’s cooking or the trees they climbed—actually, I could do that one—or the empty lot they used to play in way back when, you know nostalgia for the olden days.... for me, horror films are that thing. Some of the musical cues are still freaky, but this movie doesn’t scare me. It does quite the opposite. I’ve mentioned before in this blog how the earliest videotapes my family had were the movies we watched time and time again. Halloween was recorded right after The Karate Kid . When we wanted to watch Halloween , which was often, we would inevitably see the last shot of The Karate Kid , then the credits would get going with some cheesy 80s triumphant score going, and then abruptly, it would turn to...