the groundhog day project

(So... Altering the plan a bit. This "month" is going to take far longer than a calendar month anyway, so I looked back at the longer list of films I had made before narrowing it down for this exercise in deconstruction, because, my Star Wars VHS tapes still didn't arrive. Options were, skip past it, jump ahead to Heaven Can Wait , or... I looked at the larger list and found Across the Great Divide for 1976. Fits the pattern and I might start adding some other movies from the longer list back into this. This could take a while. But anyway, today... to night , actually; it's a late start because my Thursdays are busy anyway and I was hoping the mail would make Star Wars possible tonight. In fact, as I'm typing this little paranthetical, I'm still watching Critical Role . Their episodes end when their episodes end. So, it's near 11pm and I don't know when the movie will begin.           11:16--that's when.) The weird thing about watching ...

At the end of yesterday 's entry, I noted how in the Him version of the story Conor says that Cody had his eyes, and in the Her version of the story (by way of Them ), he says Cody had Eleanor's eyes. That got me to thinking about this sort of claim to ownership that comes with describing one's child in terms of the attributes he has taken from you. And, already, I want to take back phrasing. Ownership is not quite it. It's something more like a belonging, something like a legacy or a bloodline belongs to you. It is not, necessarily, proprietary. Obviously, there's a genetic component to it. We are naturally inclined (generally speaking) to procreate. We are evolutionarily inclined to put our genes out there into the next generation, and of course we are also inclined to be protective of those genes. And, how do we know they are ours? I mean without going on Maury. We recognize in the resulting child something of ourselves. But, there is something much more imp...

One of my family's videotapes when I was a kid, often watched and rewatched, had Footloose , Romancing the Stone and Splash . But, it's been a while. There was a serious paragraph about religion I had going already before I pushed play on Footloose and then the song started and there's close ups on feet dancing and I just don't feel like ranting. Then, Reverend Moore (John Lithgow) starts talking and I'm tempted to rant all over again. Except he's a pretty good preacher. He gets into it. Hits the podium and everything. And, I really like that the film starts with him before we get to really meet Ren (Kevin Bacon) or Ariel (Lori Singer). We even get dialogue from Vi Moore (Dianne Wiest, who we just saw in Snecdoche, New York recently) before Ren's mother (Frances Lee McCain) or Ren get to speak. (The role of Vi Moore, by the way, is played in the recent remake by none other than Groundhog Day 's Andie MacDowell.) Then, we go off with Ariel and he...

"I love doing stop-motion for no reason except that it's stop-motion... My favorite thing is a puppet not moving, just sitting there and being depressed." That's Dino Stamatopoulos, one of the producers of Anomalisa , quoted in the New York Times . And, somewhere in those two sentences, the real genius of Anomalisa is captured--using stop-motion, a format that made the production take three years, to tell what is mostly a very mundane tale-- that is the primary conceit of the latest Charlie Kaufman film. This story could be told in (and actually was before) as a stage play, a single run-through that takes the 9o-minute runtime. But that is rather the point. Taking the time to tell a simple story. That story, though, is really far larger than its mundanity in being so mundane. Dealing with themes of identity, fidelity, attraction, all while playing with the idea of a Fregoli Delusion. That is, one person's inability to tell strangers (and familiars, for tha...

It would be difficult to talk about Star Wars: The Force Awakens without SPOILING certain elements of its story. There will be ample warning before I get to that. PART I - ON NOSTALGIA AND A LIFE WITH STAR WARS First, it must be said that Star Wars has been in my life pretty much from the beginning. While I do not specifically recall seeing the original--I was only a year old when it came out and am not actually sure when I first saw it--nor do I have specific memory of seeing The Empire Strikes Back for the first time, by the time Return of the Jedi came out, I was very familiar with the previous two, having watched them many times. And, I do remember going to the movie theater to see Return of the Jedi , I remember shopping at Toys R Us for action figures that year (I already had some), and when the Power of the Force line came out in 1985, I bought more. Through the 80s I watched all three films time and time again. I may have invented this but I remember one day home sick f...

I've written before about Inside Out . In my other, less regularly updated blog, of course, but I still wrote a basic review. So, we'll skip past that. (For context, I've seen the movie a couple times already. Tonight was a special screening with Q&A with co-writer Meg LeFauvre courtesy of Jeff Goldsmith (same as The Danish Girl last week. Saer went with me and something she said about how the parents in the film are annoying actually got me thinking...) Structurally, Joy (Amy Poehler)--and to a lesser extent, Sadness (Phyllis Smith)-- is the parent for Riley (Kaitlyn Dias). Mom (Diane Lane) and Dad (Kyle MacLachlan) are important in the overarching plot, of course, but ultimately they don't do anything special for Riley, they don't really affect the plot except inasmuch as the move to San Francisco triggers what would otherwise be a pubescent change, and none of the emotional beats belong to them; even that bittersweet core memory hug at the end of the fi...

Some of the best horror deals in very down-to-earth details, mundane themes with a twist toward something extraordinary. Rosemary's Baby --today's film--deals in fears about pregnancy and parenthood. The Shining deals in alcoholism and... parenthood. Poltergeist deals in suburbia and... parenthood. I'm sensing a theme. The Omen films also deal with parenthood, and of course, the end of the world (because children are, in a way, the end of the world... Ask any single person.) Ghost stories like Crimson Peak deal in hidden pasts coming back to haunt the present (and that one has almost nothing to do with parenthood). Even the Hellraiser films deal in a sort of fear of the perverse and our own sexual impulses. (And, there's that thing about motherhood .) And, that's just movies I've watched this past month for this blog. How about some more recent fare? It Follows , for example, takes old slasher-film themes about the dangers of casual sex and updates them wi...

The Omen again. That whole parenting thing--leave that to the side for the moment. But, not too far to the side. The changeling child idea--central to the premise of the film-- does tie back into the parenting. But it also suggests a larger notion of fear of the unknown, specifically fear of foreign unknowns, of foreign influence. I mean, this film puts us in the realm of international politics at the start. Robert Thorn is made the American ambassador to the UK not long after he and his wife get Damien in their lives. Father Brennan points Thorn and Jennings to Italy and then Israel to find, far from the modern trappings of the Thorns' life in England. Seriously, compare the excess of Damien's fifth birthday party to the ruins seen in Israel later in the film. But, the real danger here is in the child influenced by... maybe it's foreign powers, maybe just belief systems to which we do not subscribe ourselves. I was wondering why certain religious themes were promine...

In case you haven't noticed the trend this month, we're on horror films again because it's October. Last year it was a different slasher film every day. I was going to try something like that with non-slasher films this month but I'm getting stuck on trying to go a little deeper... but also failing a little at that. Don't get me wrong; my two days ( 794 795 ) arguing about Poltergeist as a feminist film was amazing stuff. But, I feel like I'm sidestepping the point of the horror of it-- why we need such a film to give women the power (and why the remake had to take that away), why we fear the unknown voices of technology calling first our kids and then us, why ghosts are inherently frightening even when they're doing nothing to disturb us but to exist. Why does the more visceral (even at its coldest) version of The Shining (Kubrick's) work so much better than the more direct translation from the book in the miniseries version? Why do we enjoy our hor...