the groundhog day project

I tend to like weird little movies. A couple of my favorites from last year were The Lobster and Swiss Army Man . A couple of my favorites from this year now would be Brigsby Bear and Dave Made a Maze . I'm gonna watch both of those again tonight because... Well, because I can. The year is coming to an end. It's Oscar season, the Golden Globes are just over a week away, and it's time to start putting it all together, some perspective on 2017 in movies—putting off the perspective of my childhood in movies for a few days from now (but I will get back to that)—and make some recommendations perhaps... First, there's this—when Dave Made a Maze art director Jeff White was asked by Tessa Morrison at Other Worlds , "Knowing everything you learned from this, what would you travel back in time and tell yourself on Day One of fabrication [of the cardboard sets]?": I'm not sure that there was anything I could tell myself at that point that I would have believed. ...

It's 1995. The internet is still mostly a fantasy. A scary fantasy. We had Lawnmower Man a few years ago. Later this year we'll have Virtuosity and Hackers . Right now, it's July and we've got The Net . When we meet Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock, and that name means Blessed Angel; we'll get to that below), she's playing Wolfenstein. Killing a computer virus. She's got a friend who collects them. I had a friend like that in high school. She orders a pizza online--state-of-the-art stuff right there--and "A Whiter Shade of Pale" plays and that's a love song, right? Her and the pizza? Back up. The movie begins with a politician killing himself at Hains Point in DC. The camera pans up and over The Awakening-- --and I'm wondering if the choice is deliberate, a metaphor for... For the Internet struggling to dig it's way out of the earth into regular use? Humanity (like Angela) struggling to live life while being buried by an increasingl...

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. - Ernest Hemingway I was asked recently, "What the fuck is with this Groundhog Day thing?" I was also asked, less crudely, if I had laid out in this blog what I would do if I was stuck in a time loop. I've mentioned some things before, and there are things that would go in my "adolescent" phase that are more personal than I care to disclose at this time. I think I'd get to my "good deeds" phase pretty early, but mostly because I'd be conscious of the similarity to Groundhog Day and I'd want to manage more lives saved in one day, not that I could get that into Guinness... except maybe I could, as long as I was committed to a) saving those same lives every day on the off chance is was the end of the time loop and b) getting a Guinness Adjudicator (or at least someone with a video camera-- (Apparently, the ...