the groundhog day project

Today is Day 1279, which means that 1278 days ago... No, that's that not true. Day 1000 , I stopped this blog. I had completed (except for a few edits required by faculty later) my master's thesis about blogging and about the presentation of identity on the Internet, and I decided a few days earlier that 1000 was a nice round number and I would finish up this thing and do something else. I tried my hand at YouTube movie reviews for a bit, tried to build a review blog , and eventually made my way back here. So, really, it was 1644 days ago that I sat down to watch Groundhog Day and write about it. Every day. For a year. And, I altered the course of my life. Now, arguably, every little decision does that. One of the points you could take from Groundhog Day . Each little decision has repercussions. I wish the shows around them were better (so I could recommend them), because Joan of Arcadia had a science fair scene and John from Cincinnati had a parking lot barbecue scene th...

So then there's little ol' me. I'm two, I'm three, I'm four, I'm five. I'm all the ages since. And, honestly, I am still figuring out what the fuck all of the things around me are for, and I am blessed with the wonder that is cinema. Movies are just one of many stimuli that get injected into the mix. And, Halloween is just one of those movies. But, oh what a movie. And what a great movie to see often growing up, watching the way it is put together, the way it is structured. There's not really any fluff. There's odd choices here and there--Annie could have just driven past rather than stop and talk to her father, for example, then there's no risk of getting caught with that joint. But then, does Brackett tell Loomis about the robbery details? And, do we know just how worried Laurie is at getting caught over this one transgression? Each detail serves the whole. And, some of the details are beautiful. That high pitched music cue when the light g...

I was going to leave today's entry blank. Well, not totally blank. That felt like cheating; I was going to have a single period as a hyperlink to my Twitter account. I was going to livetweet through Sharknado 5 , but I got bored and mostly ignored the movie (though I left it playing on the TV because, well, rules). I was going to watch bad movies this month... Actually, I'm still going to watch bad movies this month. But, I want bad movies that were genuine attempts at good movies. I'm pretty sure Tommy Wiseau thought, and still thinks, though he apparently sometimes claims otherwise, that The Room is good. I'm pretty sure Claudio Fragasso thought that Troll 2 was good. But, some recommendations made for me on Facebook--maybe I should have been clearer than "so bad it's good"--are not movies that are trying to be legitimately good movies. Or maybe I'm just being picky because the last week has been mentally exhausting and my insecurities and anxie...

I watched Beginners for this blog before . It was during my ""six degrees of Kevin Bacon" month. It was one link in a chain of connected films... But, as per the usual line here, every movie is such a link, and the chain just keeps getting longer. The movie begins quietly enough, without much pretense. Oliver (Ewan McGregor) cleaning up after--as it will turn out--his father Hal (Christopher Plummer) has died. No voiceover at first. Though there will be plenty more later. Good voiceover, by the way. I made that point before. Like in Mills' more recent 20th Century Women , the voiceover and the cutaways offer "real characterization instead of simple information we could better receive another way" (which is how I put it last February). (It's been a while since I saw his Thumbsucker but I think it did something similar as well.) Then fireworks after the cleaning. Then Oliver talks to the dog, gives him a tour of his apartment and whatnot. Then ...

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...

It was only this morning, going into the afternoon, but I cannot recall the exact order. Two things that twisted together into an idea to explain something here in this blog. The first (or second) was someone posting some photo on Facebook and referencing Barthes' punctum . The second (or first) was that I was watching last week's episode of Showtime's The Affair and Noah (Dominic West) is drunk and starts to make out with his publicist and... sure he had an affair throughout the first season (that was the setup for the show, of course), and much of this second season has been about how the various characters circling around the central couple(s) are all imperfect, they make mistakes, and sometimes things turn out okay anyway. But, here--and I've written in this blog before about how I can get attached to characters fairly easily sometimes--I was mad at Noah because this seemed like one mistake too many when he is supposed to be... or maybe I just want him to be a bet...