the groundhog day project

I don't imagine that I have much to say, if this were a review, about Ready Player One that would sway anyone either way. See it, don't see it. If you want to see it, you will likely enjoy at least some of what's up there on the screen. And, as I used to end my actual reviews on YouTube, if you don't want to see it, see something else; there's always something worth seeing out there . Also, if you don't want to see it, you should probably not let your friends drag you to see it, because it is long and your enjoyment will depend quite a lot on how much you buy into the gaming aspects or the nostalgia aspects of the film. The plot is so slight, you have to be there for, what one Twitter user called, quite aptly, "an overload of metaphorical nerd fantasy porn". I didn't read the book. I read a sample of it on my nook app and it didn't grab me. As I grew up in the 80s, have loved movies since before I knew what they were, and make a habit, her...

Call this PART II of my Oscar predictions . Groundhog Day playing again, but I probably won't mention it again today. First up: Adapted Screenplay-- Call Me By Your Name The Disaster Artist Logan Molly's Game Mudbound --should go to Call Me By Your Name . It's the only Best Picture nominee here. Plus, James Ivory has been winning this one like it's a lifetime achievement award. Long shot goes to cowriter (and director) Dee Rees for Mudbound because the Academy might want to give that film something and this might be the only place it can. Original Screenplay-- The Big Sick Get Out Lady Bird The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri --is an interesting contest because any of these could win. Really, it's between The Big Sick , Get Out , and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri , but that doesn't narrow it down much. The Writers Guild gave this to Get Out , as did Critics Choice, but the Golden Globes' single screenplay cate...

Groundhog Day is playing, and I saw Foxtrot this morning, but I will probably say next to nothing about the former, and only comment on the latter briefly. See, I also just watched the Spirit Awards a few hours ago (had to put some scores in my gradebook for this semester, and help my daughter sort some songs for a theater playlist in the intervening hours), and tomorrow is Oscar day. Groundhog Day is the welcome background noise, basically, as I elaborate on my official predictions (and my personal preferences) for this year's Oscars. Call this PART I . And, I might try to enlighten you a little on what some of these "lesser" awards are actually for. First up for me is Film Editing. The nominees: Baby Driver Dunkirk I, Tonya The Shape of Water Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri I, Tonya won today and should win tomorrow. But, for it should be noted that the ACE Eddies (the guild award for film editors) had separate categories for drama (where Dunkirk wo...

I've mentioned before in this blog the sound effect I call Wilhelm's Car Horn. I'm watching This Is Us right now (the episode after the Super Bowl one--I got a little behind on tv with classes starting and then olympics stuff to watch) and they just had a Wilhelm's Car Horn. Randall is learning to drive, almost runs a STOP sign and a delivery truck swerves out of the way while honking. Try that some time. Swerve your car abruptly while honking. Even if you could manage to do both at the same time, you wouldn't. Not in the moment. This sound effect was already on my mind because I was thinking about writing about the movie I saw this morning-- Game Night --and their use of Wilhelm's Car Horn was just one of the little details that annoyed me. That movie isn't bad. The plot moves along nicely, and there are a few good laughs. But... And, here is where an interesting thought struck me. I wrote last week about Black Panther , and I said the movie "is...

It barely matters that The Man from Snowy River is Australian; the messaging fits right in with American films of the time--a lot of masculinity on display in various levels of toxicity, men being men, women being submissive to those men even when they're not. Seriously, Jessica stands up to her father, he hits her, and she runs away and falls off a cliff to be rescued by Jim. (And, to be fair, as I have learned just now online, Australia also had a part in Vietnam, and in the 70s was undergoing a wave of nationalism.) And then, there's the overdramatic musical cues which almost ruin the lovely music everywhere else in the film. Brumbies arrive and the music lets us know their dangerous if we can't figure that out from the exposition-filled dialogue. The new Colt gets spooked by a dog and the dramatic musical cues jump in. The Stallion leader of the Brumbies tramples over Jim and we not only get overdramatic musical cues, we get insane freeze-frame closeups. And, ther...

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. ...

Today: a deconstruction of this year so far in film... for me. I saw Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri this morning--and loved it--and got to thinking about the little movies that not enough people see. Take for example this list of things that bother me (an incomplete list in not particular order): War Christian rock Factory farming Racism People leaving spreading knives in the sink, you know, because they're so damn hard to clean Sexism Domestic abuse Self-indulgent filmmakers who are not also clever, or who were once clever but turned out to be one-trick ponies Tax breaks for the rich Donald Trump People saying it's a bad year for movies when they've seen maybe two, and those only because they were playing on a few thousand screens, and they make no fucking effort at all to seek out better movies, more movies That last one. Bugs the crap out of me. Especially in a year in which one of the biggest films at the box office-- Wonder Woman was also pretty good. E...

The last recap was Day 942 - what we got here is a little game of show and tell . Today is Day 1000. So, how about a quick reminder of where we've been lately. Day 943 - the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth took Murder in the First as its jumping off point, ended the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon month and was maybe the thematic end to this blog because that's where every movie was every other movie and the message was on repeat. Day 944 - i'm going out to punxsutawney was a thing I wrote for class about my pilgrimage to Woodstock, Illinois and meeting Danny Rubin, and Danny Rubin later sent me a lovely message about it on Facebook. Then I drifted. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them 945 946 947 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him 948 949 950 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her 951 952 953 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them 954 955 Antichrist 956 The Squid and the Whale 957 958 959 Mrs. Doubtfire 960 961 ...

Twelve Monkeys starts with some lame text-exposition-- "...5 BILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM A DEADLY VIRUS IN 1997... THE SURVIVORS WILL ABANDON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET... ONCE AGAIN THE ANIMALS WILL RULE THE WORLD..." --but then makes it awesome by tagging it as "Excerpts from interview with clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, April 12, 1990 - Baltimore County Hospital." Great counter to get us going. The movie doesn't really leave much room for James Cole (Bruce Willis) to actually be insane--far too much detail (as one might expect in a Terry Gilliam film) in the future opening and later future scenes. But, as long as we can understand that Cole might question his reality later, the drama works fine in that regard. Meanwhile, we get what is probably the best time travel movie ever, or high on the list certainly. Like Timecrimes , Twelve Monkeys never contradicts its time travel. It doesn't play with time and the ability to alter the past. I...

The Help is the kind of movie about black folks that we--white folks, that is--like. We like 'em as slaves or ex-slaves, as servants or in some way magical. And, in recent years, we occasionally like them as cops or, well, God. Or funny. A few black actors have made the grade for big box office--Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Chris Tucker I suppose. But, mostly, if they aren't in a film that's really about white people--like The Help is about Skeeter (Emma Stone) playing the saviour and collecting the stories of the poor black women--we mostly just don't care. Straight Outta Compton , Creed , Tangerine , Chi-Raq --these are a little too black for us. Creed passable because it's attached to a beloved series about a white guy. And, of course, we nominate that white guy at the Oscars. For The Help , we nominated two black women--Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer--but balanced that out with one of the white women--Jessica Chastain. Spencer won. The film was also...

Sometimes, things don't go as you plan. The movie I had planned for today--it turned out it was unavailable. Couldn't even steal it, not that I'm admitting I would. Watching What's Eating GIlbert Grape the week that DiCaprio is going to, as they say, finally get himself an Oscar, seems appropriate. It was even on one of the earlier incarnations of this month's schedule. Then, it had to start with some unnecessary voiceover. It's like a sickness. Like Hollywood doesn't have confidence in its ability to introduce a story without some extra exposition... It occurs to me now that I'm doing the same here. You don't need to know that the order of movies got mixed up. I could just jump right into What's Eating Gilbert Grape . To be fair, this blog is not a movie. Also, I have never written a screenplay that used voiceover. Plus, I'm not sure there is a main action today. I hadn't planned for this movie--combine that with it being a movie ...