the groundhog day project

A few complaints before I move on from Thelma & Louise : The simple ones I mentioned in brief parenthetically yesterday . When Thelma and Louise need money, Louise needs Jimmy to get some to her. The talking through of their relationship that comes after her call to Jimmy is an interesting scene, and I'm not sure how the film would really play without it. Louise needs to realize both that she has that relationship waiting, that there is a chance for her in the regular world, and that--remember, when she can't tell him what's going on, Jimmy gets angry and breaks a lamp--even this relatively healthy relationship has an obvious problem: Jimmy is still a male, in a world where men can rage with jealousy and it's accepted. She keeps something from him and, generally speaking, we're supposed to see that as wrong. Here, she's actually protecting him from getting into legal trouble. But Jimmy is still of that man's world, and you don't keep information fro...

I argued the other day , every movie is about gender. Or, at least, every movie tells us something about gender. West Side Story mostly upholds the usual gender binary. Men are men (or boys are boys) and Women are women (or girls are girls). Anita is quite... what's the polite way to call her pushy? She can hold her own against Bernardo. (She also justifies the boys fighting as them having "Too much feeling." The fact that Baby John cries is highlighted, but then again, his name is Baby John. Not the most manly name. One character that exists on a sort of brink between male and female is Anybodys. She dresses like the other boys, but the Jets mostly dismiss her because she's a girl. I think it's Action who responds to her request to be in the gang, "How else is she gonna get a guy to touch her?" It's also Action who later calls her a "freak." And Graziella calls here "an American tragedy." But, it's actually quite progre...