the groundhog day project

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...

All the conspiracy stuff people see in The Shining (like this stuff ) aside, Kubrick is clearly playing with cinematic structure and staging. The opening credits running up the screen, for example. The impossible sets for another. The deliberate dismissal of the tension of Jack coming upon Wendy reading his book, for a third. In fact, there's so much out there about this movie, I'm not sure what I can add to it. (Clearly, I can play with it, though.) Not to the movie anyway, not even really to the conspiracies or theories about theme. In a Mother Jones piece by Maggie Caldwell--"The 6 Weirdest Theories about "The Shining"--one of the theories referenced (but not specifically cited from any particular source) is that The Shining is "Kubrick's meditation on the weight of all of of history on the present moment." And, that's got me thinking not about what theories are true or not about The Shining but more a question of why we find so many t...

Now, I put on the remake of Poltergeist expecting to hate it. I don't know that I expected it to actively annoy me in the first 5 minutes, with the iPad monster game (instead of a television), the slightly creepy music, a weeping willow instead of the mangled tree (weeping willow shaming, in the modern parlance), and putting the title of the film into a field. Not to mention the older daughter Kendra's (Saxon Sharbino) fear of powerlines followed by a shot that positions the towers with the powerlines ominously over the neighborhood. There better be a cemetery and not just some weird powerline bullshit. I mean, next there will be a horror film about how vaccines cause autism and homicidal monsters. Then, younger daughter--Madison (Kennedi Clements)--speaks to the closet, because I'm guessing whoever wrote this remake remembered there was a closet but thought we wouldn't have the attention span to deal with the television first. Or not. For some reason, the son, Gr...

Where was I? Actually, I've got some time before I can return to the play-by-play of Poltergeist in order to (maybe) prove it's a feminist film. That entry yesterday only took me to the halfway point in this film, then my tournament downtime--of which I had very little--was over and I didn't get to the second half of the movie until hours later, on the drive home. Now, it's on again, but, per the blog rules, I gotta get through the first half of the film before I can get back where I was. In the meantime, I would note the peaceful music playing over the establishing shots of Cuesta Verde, and how deliberately pleasant it is. This begins as a simple story about a family living in a recently built suburb of Los Angeles. The mother and father get along fine, but the father occasionally falls asleep in front of the TV because fathers do that. The kids have the usual monsters in their closet... which just happen to turn out to be a bit real. (Sidenote: I just noticed th...

The one thing that Poltergeist is, aside from a three-decades-old horror film that holds up pretty damn well despite a few structural flaws-- (For the record, those structural flaws include the late introduction of Steve's boss, and the very late lead in, thereby, to the explanation of what's going on, or rather why. Its is also, arguably, a structural problem that all those potential metaphors I mentioned yesterday pretty much get forgotten after the first act... or get twisted up into the one metaphor I'm going to play through today. The movie hints at things that are not followed up on. Why do Dr. Lesh and Tangina exist as separate characters at all? (I might figure out how to answer that last one below.) And, for the record, there is definitely something going on in this film regarding suburbs and tract homes, but that also gets twisted into today's actual topic. Actually, the potential dangers in domesticity--those kids with the remote control cars that purpos...

I was thinking about trying to turn Poltergeist into a metaphor for marriage, but then the film just prominently started with the "Star-Spangled Banner" playing over a black screen and I'm wondering if there's not something more interesting going on here. I mean, as I remember the film--and I last watched it last year or the year before--is that there isn't much metaphor to it. The married couple are doing fine; they even smoke a joint together which is a nice cinematic visual for them being quite comfortable in their situation. The family is doing okay more generally. If anything, there's something about the cemetery property getting built on, or something about the ubiquity of television... That last thing would fit with the national anthem starting the film because the opening is actually a TV network going off the air for the night. You know, when they still used to do that. Maybe this is about the family idyll breaking. It starts with the daughter tal...