the groundhog day project

Saw The Jungle Book (the "live-action" remake) in the theater today. The CGI animals were awesome, but storywise, is ain't a patch on the animated version. Plus, by not going all in with the musical numbers, the two very brief songs come across as very out of place. Watched (and livetweeted) The Ouija Experiment just now. Better than I expected it to be, made good use of its minimal budget. But now, Punch-Drunk Love is on again. And, it occurs to me that the insanity of the opening is a good gauge of Barry's mental state. He's on the phone obsessing about the Healthy Choice/American Airlines promotion, then he wanders outside only to have a car randomly flip over in the street and a cab drop off a harmonium. This is Barry's brain, obsessive and calm one moment then chaos. And, I don't know if--and this is me going all fan-theory on the film, and I hate fan-theories--the phone sex girl really extorts Barry for money. I think that might just be Barry...

Clive Barker talks with Lisa Tuttle in 1991* about creating good gods and bad gods in fiction and he says, I think that is so much more interesting than the division into the white hats and the blacks, between human and non-human, where anything that is defined as "non-human," whether it be slug, shark, crab, Woman, is presented as this terrible threat. It's grotesque, and funny, and simple, and what bothers me is its simplicity. I mind it not because it's grotesque, but because it's simple-minded, and that's boring. You know what I mean? If you turn all of nature into something to be repulsed by, you ignore the fact that whatever is read one way as grotesque or frightening can also be read another way, as something beautiful, as a celebration of variegation and paradox. * original source unknown, but it's reproduced in Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden . I was thinking about why the producers did not want this film to be named, like its source materi...

They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her--oh yes--until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. - Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart So, I wanted to watch all the Hellraiser films this month. However, the rule about sequels that I cited a few days ago is especially proven true by the Hellraiser series. But, I'm a glutton for punishment--and these films are all about punishment--so I was going to slog through it... Then, I came up with a clever notion--watch them in reverse order so they actually get better as I go. Brilliant, right? Except for the obvious catch--I would have to start with the worst of the lot, Hellraiser: Revelations , the ninth in the series, made so cheaply and so quickly (to hold onto film rights) that they couldn't eve...