the groundhog day project

Skipping the rest of the sequels, wary of decreasing quality and inspiration. Moving on to the remake... because I'm still a glutton for punishment. Yay, misquoting (quoting some odd translation I can't find through google , anyway) scripture right away. Skipping details, too. This is definitely an Omen film. The various interpretations of the signs are a stretch, as per usual. And, I don't like the opening of this film as compared to the original. Lame end-of-the-world stuff at the Vatican, cut to Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber) on his way to the hospital, rushed. The original was so simple and bleak, its opening line--"The child is dead"--said without much emotion. Thorn explains that the child was everything to his wife, which is a rather pointless thing to say. Like we were figuring, Oh, she probably didn't want the kid anyway, everything is fine . Emotion is nice but there was something interesting about Gregory Peck's Robert Thorn, picking to repla...

There's a danger in moving forward with sequels--today, The Final Conflict (aka Omen III ). See, I glanced at the film's entry at IMDb and, while the original has a 7.6, the second film--which is quite well done--has a 6.2, and this third entry in the series has a 5.5. (The fourth, a made-for-TV movie, has a 3.8.) (Not misquoting biblical passages this time. Instead, inventing apocryphal texts to quote.) The earlier entries are more... original. More creative effort goes into them. If we're lucky, there's some novel notion that leads to the first sequel, but then it turns into a studio-driven exercise in cashing in. Writing duties are farmed out. Or worse, unrelated scripts are coopted to fit into an existing franchise. (This is what happened with at least one of the Hellraiser sequels, for example.) Sometimes there can be a resurgence in creativity later--I think, for example that Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is maybe the best of the Friday the 13th fi...

A few notes: 1. I don't know enough about Vatican II to really speak to the (apparent) decline of Catholicism in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Longtime reader of this blog, Mal, offered some insight in the comments on yesterday 's entry--he described the sense of it as "either lots of priests, nuns, theologians and laymen throwing off the shackles of dogma and tradition, or else a mass submission on the part of Catholics to the fashions of the surrounding culture" and there was "a sense of disorientation and anxiety." 2. I do know plenty about the counterculture, especially in America, and the impression it had on the older generations. (Brag: I'm published on the subject.) And, I can attest that many of the changes going on in America at the time--the pill giving a nice jumpstart to the sexual revolution, for example--created that same "sense of disorientation and anxiety." The Los Angeles Times , 24 November 1968, called Middle Class Ameri...

The Omen again. That whole parenting thing--leave that to the side for the moment. But, not too far to the side. The changeling child idea--central to the premise of the film-- does tie back into the parenting. But it also suggests a larger notion of fear of the unknown, specifically fear of foreign unknowns, of foreign influence. I mean, this film puts us in the realm of international politics at the start. Robert Thorn is made the American ambassador to the UK not long after he and his wife get Damien in their lives. Father Brennan points Thorn and Jennings to Italy and then Israel to find, far from the modern trappings of the Thorns' life in England. Seriously, compare the excess of Damien's fifth birthday party to the ruins seen in Israel later in the film. But, the real danger here is in the child influenced by... maybe it's foreign powers, maybe just belief systems to which we do not subscribe ourselves. I was wondering why certain religious themes were promine...

In case you haven't noticed the trend this month, we're on horror films again because it's October. Last year it was a different slasher film every day. I was going to try something like that with non-slasher films this month but I'm getting stuck on trying to go a little deeper... but also failing a little at that. Don't get me wrong; my two days ( 794 795 ) arguing about Poltergeist as a feminist film was amazing stuff. But, I feel like I'm sidestepping the point of the horror of it-- why we need such a film to give women the power (and why the remake had to take that away), why we fear the unknown voices of technology calling first our kids and then us, why ghosts are inherently frightening even when they're doing nothing to disturb us but to exist. Why does the more visceral (even at its coldest) version of The Shining (Kubrick's) work so much better than the more direct translation from the book in the miniseries version? Why do we enjoy our hor...