the groundhog day project

Alternatively, I can imagine today that when I was 11 and watching RoboCop for the first time what really mattered was watching Murphy overcome his RoboCop programming and be his own person. At least inasmuch as he does. He can barely access his memories, and in the end he still has to go be a supercop because the regularly police are on strike. It would be another few years before I openly turned against my religious upbringing but already I'm sure I was having issues with it. I'm entering the 7th grade in the fall. This is the year that I write my infamous essay about how I only believe in God because I've been told to do so my whole life and my Bible Class teacher is not a fan. Or was that 9th grade? I'm losing track. Getting old. But, I've got James Murphy to look up to. Or I did once upon a time a few decades ago. Shiny. Cybernetic. Wants to do what's right.                     And, I want to say something a...

I find I can't--or don't want to--write about the third act of Before Midnight . But, who needs to get that far into everything anyway? Instead, I could talk about punctum, or a series of puncta. If you're new, or you've forgotten, a punctum, by way of Barthes, is the piercing, wounding moment that pulls you in, that forces you to identify with a character perhaps, that puts you fully into the story, the small detail that makes it all real for you in the moment. I can avoid the greater wound by dealing with the lesser. (As Jesse is left behind, Hank gone, music starts up and it feels intrusive. I'm sure there was background music in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset but I really don't remember it. If it was there, it wasn't intrusive. Here, and a few instances later in this film, the music is a bit too noticeable, making this film feel more like a movie than whatever the previous two films were.) The first punctum, I suppose, is in the car. The girls are...

(Before we get into this sixth and final day with Ex Machina , a note on something I will not be talking about: There's a line of music that plays as Caleb first enters the house, and again as Ava is leaving it, that reminds me of the theme to Jurassic Park . My son, who knows music better than I do, listened to it and said something along the lines of, if they wanted to reference Jurassic Park , they would not have put the line in a different key. Me--I still think it sounds like it. Plus, both films involve locations accessed by helicopter... Seriously, the structure is the same in that regard. Brief intro ( Ex Machina 's being far briefer than Jurassic Park 's), then helicopter ride to the location, a location where a scientist has perhaps taken things a bit too far, eventually endangering lives (note: in the novel of Jurassic Park Hammond dies in the end just as Nathan dies here), then the survivor(s) leave(s) on a helicopter. As a movie blogger, I gotta say, I think...

To counter yesterday 's Katniss Everdeen, we have Ava (Alicia Vikander) in Ex Machina . Literally programmed to be who she is, Ava demonstrates more agency in one film than Katniss does in three... Maybe. There is a point where the "programming" inherent in cinematic characters by the writer and the director and the actor (let's call this LEVEL 2) conflict with the "programming" of the character within the story by her creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) (which we'll call LEVEL 1, since we're talking about the film here), and where both of those levels of "programming" conflict with the real-life "programming" that a woman receives from the society around her (LEVEL 3). We'll come back to the issue of programming. First--and this entry will be full of SPOILERS big and small--Nathan's introduction is entirely manipulative of both Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) and the audience. Reclusive tech-genius living in (my personal take) an ...