the groundhog day project

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 ...

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...

Stephen Spielberg knows how to start a film. From the storming of the beach in Saving Private Ryan to the revolt here in Amistad , he can pull you in. I also like how he avoids subtitling Mende. I've said in this blog before that I don't like to deal in "snubs" when talking about Oscars, but damn it, looking at the nominees that year, I can barely fathom how Djimon Hounsou was not nominated. In fact, you've got a bit of the #OscarsSoWhite problem. For this movie, very much about the experience of its black characters, the acting nominations (at the Oscars, anyway*) are limited to Anthony Hopkins. (* Hounsou was nominated for a Golden Globe.) Also in the supporting category, you've got Robert Forster, white guy, nominated for Jackie Brown , a film led by black actors. Of course, a) Anthony Hopkins is amazing in this movie and b) a nomination for Director or Best Picture wouldn't have mattered in the year of Titanic . I think there's a familiarit...

In those moments where I forget how much this blog has held my existence together in recent years, I do occasionally wish for time off. Sometimes, I want time off from lots of things in my life. (And, here comes an awful segue.) I figure the same is true of great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. as well. Watching Selma tonight and feeling a little lost... Not because of this film. I've seen it before, and I know the history of it, too. And, damn if that explosion doesn't work really well in cinematic terms. In story terms, I don''t think this movie offered anything I didn't already know. But, my bachelor's was in history and my focus (when there was an opportunity for one) was 1960s US history. When I first saw Selma , I think I wasn't as impressed as a) a lot of other people (even white folks) were, nor b) as much as I should have been. I try to take each film on its own terms. How well does it do what it is trying to do is like the first question on ...

I'd like to talk about something else--and I will try tomorrow--but I am stuck. Deliberately stuck, but stuck nonetheless. I could write about Room again; I didn't really say much about it before, not specifically. I could make a good comparison between the "room" section of the film to Groundhog Day , take this blog back to year one. All Groundhog Day , all the time. (If I were coding this entry for my thesis, that would be code 6--reference to another film besides today's film.)           (There should be a code for neglecting to write while I watch the movie.) I feel like there is something more about the Oscars and specifically #OscarsSoWhite that I need to say. (Tomorrow, I hope to have something done outside of this blog related to all that.) Like people who say that black actors (because people on both sides of this issue keep neglecting other people of colour) should get better roles and, you know, act better if they want to be nominated. Nev...

Opening shot of The Revenant : Hugh Glass and his Native American wife and child. That's one white guy, and two people of colour. Suck it, Jada Pinkett Smith. Or, you know, watch the rest of the movie, which focuses quite a bit on the white guys. Plus, that wife and kid are soon dead. But, that sort of anecdotal evidence is all the rage among the... Whatever you would call the anti-#OscarsSoWhite crowd. Republicans? There's a list going around among the crazy conservative groups I follow on Facebook, a list of something like 56 people of colour who have won Oscars in the past 16 or so years. I went after the list on Facebook with some math pointing out that 56 out of 1840(-ish) nominations-- And that thought got interrupted by the opening battle sequence in The Revenant . If Inarritu wins the Oscar, this is why. Not the somewhat gimmicky thing of only using natural light so his shooting time per day was reduced but a sequence like this, dozens of actors and extras, practical...

As a screener of The Big Short plays and I must do my best not to get angry at Wall Street, I really don't want to talk about #OscarsSoWhite today. Spent too much of the last couple days arguing pointlessly about the topic on Facebook and Twitter. A little tired of it... which bothers me, actually. Inevitably it will come up because I have decided to get into the McNamara piece from the Los Angeles Times and that hinges on the race thing. But, I want to talk about McNamara's other angle--plot. See, she starts off with some hyperbole--"The winner of the 2016 Oscar in practically every category is ... white men facing adversity." She's making a point about it being white men, of course, but as she goes she also angles in on the "facing adversity" charge. Her take on the Best Picture nominees: "...with a few notable exceptions, follow a dishearteningly repetitive story line of white men triumphing over enormous odds." Because, of course, triu...

Outside of the #OscarsSoWhite problem, there's always folks labeling the snubs. Not just Will Smith for Concussion or Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation or Kiana Kiki Rodriguez for Tangerine but, you know, what about Tom Hanks or Mark Rylance for Bridge of Spies , or Helen Mirren for Trumbo ? People talk about Samuel L. Jackson for The Hateful Eight but no Walter Goggins? Not Kurt Russell? Michael B. Jordan for Creed but no Jake Gyllenhaal for Southpaw ? How about Oscar Isaac for Ex Machina ? And what about Gunes Sensoy for Mustang or Geza Rohrig for Son of Saul ? Why must the role spoken in English to matter? And, where's Ex Machina in the Best Picture list? Hell, where's Krampus in the Production Design category? Where's It Follows for Cinematography? Those last couple might seem silly, but that's my point. The nomination process is not only complicated but subjective to start with. If all you saw this year were the Marvel movies and The Revenant , of c...

Robin Thede made a point I liked last night on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore ; she said, referring to black people of course, "You can't say in one breath how proud we are when Hale and Mo'Nique and Denzel and all those people win but then when we're not in there say that we don't care." On the one hand, I agree, it's a little two-faced. On the other hand, they should care all the time. And, so should we. So should everybody. As I said yesterday , the racial makeup and the racial prejudices in the Oscar nominations and the Academy membership do matter. Mary McNamara explains it well--and this was why I didn't get into critiquing her yesterday. She writes in the Los Angeles Times : ...a growing chorus wants to know why anyone really cares. With all the troubles in the world, do we really need to worry that a bunch of relatively rich and privileged filmmakers are mad that their movies didn't get an Oscar nomination? So what if the nominees ...

#OscarsSoWhite continues. Jada Pinkett Smith (married of course to Will Smith, who is one of the oft cited actors of colour who could/should have been nominated for an Oscar this year) put out a few tweets and then a video about boycotting the Oscars. Spike Lee joined her. So did Michael Moore. One person that specifically spoke out against Jada was her husband's old costar from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air , Janet Hubert. But, she had to go and start with a somewhat sexist-- I'm getting ahead of myself. How about Jada's tweets first, set some context beyond just the fact that in the past ten years worth of acting nominations (just to narrow it down to one field), the Academy had only nominated 26 people of colour and 174 white people. Colourless people, if you will. Because the Academy was last reported as being 94% white and 54% over the age of 60 (with an average age of about 62), so this is an organization of, you know, old white men. Anyway, Jada's tweets: At th...