the groundhog day project

Opening narration: 53% of the American workforce is female. Three generations of women that turned 1,000 years of tradition on its ear. As little girls they were told to grow up and marry doctors and lawyers. Instead they grew up and became doctors and lawyers. They moved out of the "pink ghetto" and into the executive suite. Sociologists say the new working woman is a phenomenon of our time. Take JC Wiatt, for example. Graduated first in her class at Yale, got her MBA at Harvard. Has a corner office at the corner of 58th and Park. She works five to nine, makes six figures a year, and they call her the Tiger Lady. Married to her job, she lives with an investment banker married to his. They collect African art, co-own their co-op and have separate but equal IRA accounts. One would take it for granted that a woman like this has it all. One must never take anything for granted. Of course the narrator will not return; it's one of those openings. Plus, you know, the usual b...

At the emotional climax of the film, Caldwell gets drunk (off very little alcohol) and sits with Maclure on the roof of Maclure's building, and he has a poorly-written but fairly well-executed monologue as part of his conversation with Maclure: Maclure: Sometimes I think it was easier winning that medal than wearing it. Think any of those people over there give a shit about us? Caldwell: Do we give a shit about them? That's what matters. You know what I think? I think America is like a big fancy house. And we're the Doberman Pinschers.  Maclure: Doberman Pinschers?  Caldwell: A guy hears a noise downstairs, he's really happy to have his big ugly dog. But, the next day when he's got his friends coming around, he locks up the dog. Why? 'Cause he's embarrassed. But at night, sure as shit, he unlocks the dog to protect his big fancy house. If some guy comes in and the dog doesn't bite his ass, he's gonna take a rolled-up newspaper and smack h...

Matt Melis, writing for Consequence of Sound says, regarding Bernard Malamud's novel's ending—had it made it to the big screen intact: Malamud's ending undoubtedly stands as the more compelling conclusion (and more true to experience); however, I cannot imagine people lining up at the box office to see Roy Hobbs strike out and the movie end with Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley), Red Blow (Richard Farnsworth), and Bobby Savoy [George Wilkosz] huddled in tears in the dugout. Yep, the novel The Natural ends with a downer. And, it does so deliberately. (Hollywood ruins it.) And I am distracted as the movie gets going because, do you realize that 48-year-old Redford is supposed to be just 19 years old during the first act of this movie? Couldn't be bothered to cast a younger version of himself to carry the first half hour, so he just plays 19. INSERT, me sighing. In his introduction to Malamud's novel, Kevin Baker calls it an "anti heroic tale about a baseball pl...

My impulse for today was to write about the so-called manic pixie dream girl . Madison in Splash is perhaps an early prototype for a such-labeled character. But, then I was looking up pieces about those stereotypical cinematic women who, according the the TV Tropes definition, exist to "come along and open [the] heart [of a "soulful, brooding male hero"] to the great, wondrous adventure of life" and I realized something interesting... And not entirely unbelievable given the patriarchy's ability to self-perpetuate: the term coined by Nathan Rabin at AV Club that implied a weakness in "the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors" turned into a way to put down female characters instead of their creators. As Zoe Kazan, who starred as an all too easily labeled manic pixie dream girl who quite literally sprung from the fevered imagination of a sensitive writer in Ruby Sparks (but that character actually came from Kazan's own imagination, a...

Shall we talk about Never Say Never Again ? Or shall I ignore Octopussy , playing now, to talk about the four other movies I watched today to finish off this year's Oscar nominated films, with a couple weeks to spare? Because, I totally did that. An extra day off, and this week is speech week in my classes, so I've got nothing to prep, so I ignored the olympics for today, ignored any Dungeons & Dragons planning I might need to make soon, and turned on three documentaries ( Last Men in Aleppo , Icarus , Strong Island ) and one foreign language film ( On Body and Soul ) (all conveniently on Netflix, hence putting them off to the end). But, how about that Never Say Never Again ? Actually, I don't intend to talk about the film itself. I think I only ever saw it all the way through the one time, in the theater. I was seven, mind you, and I knew about the copyright issues that led to there being two different James Bond films in the same year. Never Say Never Again and Oc...

It comes down to this: is it funny that Phyllis' little monologue about her see-through nightgown disarms Winship and Tart? Yes. In fact, as Tim Conway points out in the commentary track (which I listened to yesterday ), if you watch Don Knotts' face through that scene, his reaction is so hilariously nuanced and complex, while Conway's is simple shock. These two detectives, already proven to be inept in just a handful of scenes, are taken aback, frozen, and that moment is emblematic of so much more. I've said before (and I will say again) that any movie is a window into the time it was made—a time capsule of the technology in play in making the film, a time capsule of the talent (or lack thereof) behind the film, a time capsule of the social and cultural structures in place at the time and in the place where the film was made, and a measure of the larger society around it. From the 60s into the 70s, Hollywood wasn't afraid to deal in sex or sexual innuendo. Phylli...

Women have been a plot device for male entitlement for as far back as stories were being told, as trophies for creepy behaviour, as the spoils of war, as the property of men, as the maiden-in-waiting for her adorable coercive, overly-persistent prince-charming. (Meagher 2015) Vincent Vacarri is not a nice man. He is our protagonist in The Idolmaker but he is not a nice man. In fact, he is at times an awful, awful man. Tommy Dee gets a young girl to accompany him to his car, ostensibly to get a copy of his record before it is officially released, and he tries to get more than that. We don't know how old Tommy Dee is, but he seems to be somewhere close to the age of the actor playing him--Paul Land was 23-24 when The Idolmaker was filmed. However old the actress in the scene is, Vincent says her character is 14. When Tommy Dee demands more than just a thank you, she kisses his cheek. He calls that sisterly, and goes for more. Vincent comes to her rescue. But, does he reprimand...

A note before I begin: tonight's dinner is burritos and there are some chips and dip. This is the kind of meal we used to serve when we'd have people over to watch movies. Of course, there's no actual meat in the burritos anymore, as I'm a vegetarian now. But, it's an echo of the stuff we'd make when folks were coming over to watch a movie like this one... Most of the people coming over to watch movies happened in the latter half of the 80s and into the 90s, I'm pretty sure. But, this "month" is bundling all of it together. (Secondary note: apparently, I’ve been misnumbering the blog days for the last couple weeks and only just noticed. Today is Day 1141 even though I called yesterday 1040 on Twitter and Facebook.) Now, on to Adventures of the Wilderness Family one last time. One scene that undermines some of what comes later in Adventures of the Wilderness Family comes just after the family meets Boomer (the mountain man who wanders into the...

There's an echo--or whatever the opposite of an echo is--of Joe Versus the Volcano in the much briefer opening of Snowball Express . Baxter doesn't have a terminal diagnosis, of course. Rather, his great uncle (who he apparently didn't even know) died, and this is Baxter's new lease on life. Get out of the "smudge pot" of the city, the office, and go run a hotel in Colorado. I just learned this is based on a book called Chateau Bon Vivant --a true story apparently--about newlyweds Frankie and Johnny O'Rear who "arm themselves with a four-hundred-page volume entitled Theories of Hotel Management , two cases of bourbon... and a Vermont beagle" and set about a "twelve-year comedy of errors" running a ski-lodge in Quebec" (Back Cover Description, near as I can tell). Some details have been changed, of course. Frankie is Susan. Johnny is still Johnny but he left the office instead of the navy. Instead of two cases of bourbon, they...

There are more notes scribbled from yesterday's viewing of her . Like this line from the movie, in blue: Wha'ts it like to be alive in that room right now? And this below it in pink: Isn't this the longing of any relationship, at any distance? And, I think I'm going to ignore the rest of the scribbles because I'm in that moment as this month nears its end. Appropriately, I just finished watching the third season of 12 Monkeys . Time travel show, in case you don't know. Based on the film . Had a great line--one of the episodes of the show did--about women and what they mean: "The history I've seen is one of great women sung badly by clumsy men." Because, yeah, so much of history is told by men, smudging the details to make the men they want to be important seem more important than they actually are, or were. I mean, sure, we look at the present as having advanced the place of women, like suddenly they're more important. What we don't ...

I'm looking at the trivia section for Thelma & Louise in IMDb and I notice that it says the trailer presented the movie as a comedy. So, I watch the trailer and two things are immediately necessary to point out: 1. Yes, the trailer presents the film absolutely as a fairly light comedy, two women up to some crazy shenanigans. Police get involved, sure, but we don't really see how much. The trailer even explicitly cuts around the gun that Thelma points at the cop in his car. Shows him getting out with his hands up, but avoids showing the gun. We see an explosion, but there's no context, just more happy screaming and laughter. Like this is just a fun romp. Far more Outrageous Fortune than Kalifornia . Since Stephen Tobolowsky is in this, they should have just thrown in a shot of Ned Ryerson saying "Bing!" (Except, that footage wouldn't exist yet, obviously.) 2. What else were they going to do? 9 to 5 only worked like it did because it was a comedy, and ...