the groundhog day project

I was going to move on from Stand By Me after yesterday but as I was posting the blog entry and the film was ending, a detail caught my attention. And, having looked again at the book, it stood out. At the end of the film, narrator Gordie explains: As time went on we saw less and less of Teddy and Vern, until eventually they became just two more faces in the halls. It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant. I heard that Vern got married out of high school, had four kids and is now the forklift operator at the Arsenault Lumber Yard. In the book, Vern "was killed in a house fire that swept a Lewiston apartment building in 1966... Someone fell asleep in one of the bedrooms with a live cigarette going. Vern himself, maybe, drifting off, dreaming of his pennies. They identified him and the four others who dies by their teeth." The story of The Body takes place in 1960. So, Vern died when he was only about 18. He married no ...

(Taking a break from talking about feminism, ironically, because I'm watching the very female-centric and female-populated Orphan Black right now rather than another movie for today. The movie I did see was--) It Comes at Night . The kind of movie that refuses to explain itself. And, oh how I love that. No voiceover for the sake of a stupid audience, just get into the action and you can try to figure out what's going on because the script is not going to explain most of what's going on because the characters don't know what's going on. Not big picture anyway. Which brings me right back to yesterday with The Mummy because that is yet another movie that offers up some random text (in this case a supposed Egyptian proverb) and narration. Now, I am not against the use of voiceover. But it has to serve a purpose, like in, say The Opposite of Sex , or a film you've probably heard of-- Memento , but that one actually offers up an onscreen excuse for the voiceover,...

Bernardo (Charles Bronson) makes for an interesting sort of heart to the titular Magnificent Seven . Sure, Chico (Horst Buchholz) is the passionate one, but Bernardo seems to be the one who really feels what's going on. Interestingly, he almost doesn't take the job because he's used to better pay. The prospect of six men (later seven) versus thirty guns causes him to pause in his wood chopping (which he is doing to earn his breakfast when Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen) come for him). "I admire your notion of fair odds, mister," he tells Chris. Against bigger odds before he was paid $600, and $800 for another job. They tell him the offer is $20, then they start to walk away. "Right now, that's a lot," he tells them. And, he goes back to chopping wood. The thing is, he doesn't just need money. He needs something to do. Three village kids come to Bernardo at one point later and he tells them they could be hurt, they rightly point out t...

I never really wrote about the original The Magnificent Seven in this blog. (One of a few times that exhaustion at the end of a long day kept me from really putting in an effort here.) Also, it only just occurred to me, as the men from the Mexican town have come to Chris (Yul Brynner) for help, that aside from one detail--Flik being an outcast from his village rather than a stranger-- A Bug's Life is basically this film, or rather Seven Samurai . And, I'm wondering how I never got that before. It's so obvious. Now, I'm wondering what else I have missed in the movies I've seen, what references went over my head because of particular timing or a lack of familiarity? I have seen Seven Samurai but maybe only once all the way through. It's also the plot of many a D&D module. It's such a simple plot hook--a village is in trouble, and a bunch of men (usually men) have the skills to save it from its attackers. Bring your gunslinging, your knife-throwing...

(This will be the first time I've gone with a made-for-TV version of a story for this blog. Sure, I watched TV shows during that first Groundhog Day year, but I also watched Groundhog Day on those days. And, I watched 12 Dates of Christmas and 12:01 , Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss , but I also watched Groundhog Day on those days. Today's entry, perhaps, opens up some more possibilities for the future.) I The thing that always bothered me about Kubrick's The Shining was the casting of Jack Torrance. Now, since I haven't made it clear the last few days, I love The Shining . I think it is one of the greatest horror films ever made. But, I have read the book, and I longed (prior to the TV miniseries version in 1997) for a version that might offer up a Jack Torrance who did not seem a little bit crazy from the get go. After this version--I'm watching that miniseries today--I'm not so sure that I long for it as much. The miniseries has its problems, of...

Ned Ryerson is going about town on what should basically be a local holiday with his briefcase, as if off to work. I have never found confirmation that schools in Punxsutawney get the day off, or that workers might. Anyway, I figure Ned would carry that thing around whether he had to work that day or not, the way he holds it close when talking; it's like his comfort briefcase. But anyway, the scene in Ned's office--Ned working as Phil's body falls past--didn't make it as far as the final revision; presumably, once the tall building available was posing as the hotel, it just didn't work to also have Ned's office there. But, Ned is present for Phil's suicide. Phil does his swan dive off the Pennsylvanian Hotel tower and ON THE GROUND Somebody screams, and a crowd immediately forms around a spot on the sidewalk. Ned Ryerson pushes through to the front. NED Phil! Phil Connors! I thought that was him! Gee, I wonder if he had life insurance. (p. 90) It...

RITA There’s something so familiar about this. Do you ever have deja vu? PHIL All the time. (p. 71) A moment where, presumably, Bill Murray’s sense of humor overcame Harold Ramis’. Murray’s line is a classic— Didn’t you just ask me that? —whereas All the time is plain, boring, forgettable. Just after that, Larry has a nice moment in the final revision that he doesn’t have in the film. In the film, we see Phil steal the distributor cap from the newsvan, but we don’t get to hear that some horse’s ass bought every distributor cap in this town. That detail was in earlier revisions (as early as the Ramis’ second), but this revision adds one more detail; Larry tells Rita, I’m going down the street to try and steal one. Wish me luck. Page 72, Phil recites the French lyrics, but Rita doesn’t suggest he speaks French. Instead, he immediately follows up the French with: It’s Belgian, not French, of course, but I like it. The lines are, of course, French. The author: Belgian. I read tha...

Wright (1975) doesn't deal with 3:10 to Yuma at all even though its plot seems like an update on High Noon . Like High Noon before it, this Elmore Leonard story-based film is built more on dialogue and unarmed standoffs more than action or violence. When the remake came half a century later, Roger Ebert said it "restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence." As we'll see soon with this month of Westerns, things turned particularly violent by the 1960s, and as Ebert points out in his review, "The Western in its glory days was often a morality play, a story about humanist values penetrating the lawless anarchy of the frontier... but the audience's appetite for morality plays and Westerns seems to be fading." Or maybe it's long gone. Really, I think we love morality plays, we just don't like them to come as deliberately as Westerns like High Noon or 3:10 to Yuma , or even Gunfight at the O.K. Co...

(Before I get into Rent for today, a note: Once again, I am writing a blog entry on a plane--on the way to Ohio for a speech tournament--and it still amazes me that I can do this. I know my thesis I'm working on--and after this week in Ohio I'm planning on getting into the work part of it finally, going back through the more than 600 entries now and coding them for content--is ostensibly about the presentation of self, the re-creation of self through writing... through blogging, but there's something to be said for the practical part of it as well. I started this blog in a one room apartment, writing on a desktop computer while Groundhog Day ran on my tablet next to the desktop monitor. I was stuck in one place if I wanted to save time and write while the movie was one--and I did want to do that. An hour and forty-one minutes a day for that movie was a lot of time as things kept going. Writing during the film (most of the time) made things a lot easier. I graduated for ...

The film version of Rent starts with a song--"Seasons of Love A"--that doesn't come until Act Two in the stage version. On the one hand, this is because a film, even a musical, doesn't have the two act structure common to stage musicals. But, this song also serves as a sort of love letter to Rentheads who will probably be disappointed by other changes made for the film--from small stuff like Mark never actually calls Alexi Darling to quit his job (seriously, though the lines are there, he's nowhere near a phone), or Mark opening up the film (after that initial transplanted song) with dialogue rather than singing; to big stuff like cutting half of "Goodbye Love" because director Chris Columbus thought it was emotional overload. Similarly, the film never explicitly lets us know that Roger's ex-girlfriend killed herself because Columbus thought that would be "too much." It's a musical about a bunch of poverty-stricken artists, many of w...

Let's work backward. Start with another 30th anniversary screening tonight--made it to the sold out 7:30 show this time and it was nice watching this movie with a crowd. Run back through the past week of viewings, seven times in seven days, keep going back three decades, a viewing now and then, not as many times as I've seen some movies but more than others. Back to 1985, February 15--the day The Breakfast Club was released into theaters. Keep on going to March 24, 1984, the Saturday on which Andrew Clark, Claire Standish, John Bender, Allison Reynolds and Brian Johnson sat down as strangers in Shermer High School's library and left as friends... perhaps to become strangers all over again come Monday. Go back further to... Actually, the screenplay draft I found has no date on it. It's not the shooting script. It still has Robin Robertson in it-- (March 25, 2015, Karen Leigh Hopkins tells The Hollywood Reporter about how she was cast as a gym teacher (character, ...

Winding down on Rambo --I gotta wonder if there isn't some (probably unconscious) juxtaposition between the prison at the beginning of the film, working the rock quarry, and the traveling POW camp group, working those prisoners harvesting crops. An enslaved group working the fields--no, that couldn't be worth exploring. There are always topics left behind when limited to a week. Hell, I've still got things to say about Groundhog Day and I've watched that somewhere around 400 times (and will be watching it again a week from tomorrow). There is an implicit homoeroticism in how the camera loves Rambo's body (or John Matrix's body last week, John McClane's the week before, Martin Riggs' the week before that), but I've left that topic as maybe an occasional aside. I haven't written about how rude Rambo is to Ericson (Martin Kove), who seems genuinely excited to meet him. Lifer, on the other hand, is a bit of a dick. There's some room for a discu...