the groundhog day project

The thing about Police Academy --in particular, but also several of the other films from my childhood that preached irreverence through most of the story--is that that, in the end, the status quo is held up. At the beginning, these new recruits are jokes. By the end of the film, they have all bought in to the police academy, even Mahoney, who was forced into it, and Jones, who happened into it because of Mahoney. The film reifies law and order, promotes conformity, and reinforces heteronormativity. Regarding the latter, the film starts in on masculinity at least right away. The second segment is Mahoney at work and he shames a guy for having a wig. Losing your hair is an easy mark for a measure of one's manhood. McCann, Plummer, and Minichiello (2010) explains: Humour's role as an 'othering' technique has two functions: first, it marks out what is to be taken seriously such as stoic, heterosexual masculinity, and what can be devalued by being laugh at. (p. 519) Fla...

Opening crawl*: On March 4th of this year... ...newly elected Mayor Mary Sue Beal announced that she was changing the hiring practices of this city's police force. No longer would height, weight, sex, education, or physically strength be used to keep new recruits out of the Metropolitan Police Academy. Hundreds of people who never dreams of becoming police officers signed up immediately. Naturally, the police completely freaked. * it doesn't really crawl but that's the whole reading bit to open the movie and set up information (and, in this case, a nice punchline) we will learn later anyway. Plus, here, this text appears over a background of the cityscape, drenched in pouring rain. I also think naming the mayor Mary Sue is deliberate--and only just learned that the use of Mary Sue to suggest a wish fulfillment character in fan fiction dated back to 1973. I thought it was more recent. In this case, though, the Mary Sue is ironic. Like, the liberals want everyone to g...

This entry is for new arrivals. It is unfortunate that a sad event--the death of Harold Ramis--might bring me new readers, but I welcome you nonetheless. This is The Groundhog Day Project where I watch Groundhog Day every day--today is day 210--and blog about it (or inspired by it). If you want to catch up, there are indexes (of everything prior to February) on Day 180 , Day 121 , and Day 62 . Or, if you just want to understand why I'm doing this, maybe read this , this or this . In the meantime... I meant to write about e' gia Ieri today. That translates as "it's already yesterday" but the film is also known as Stork Day . It's the Italian remake of Groundhog Day . Variety , 15 February 2004, tells us that producer Riccardo Tozzi and director Giulio Manfredonia "were talking about making a 'what if' comedy and decided to go straight to that subgenre's original source." The thing is, I never managed to watch it today. And, it...