the groundhog day project

I saw A Wrinkle in Time today and it occurred to me while watching it that I don't remember ever being disappointed by a movie when I was a kid. Not that I didn't see bad movies back then. Just, I guess, I didn't care or didn't notice. The magic of whatever story it happened to be up there on the big screen (or later on the small screen as we rented a lot of movies on VHS) was bigger than my sense of narrative, maybe. Bigger than my need for great performances. An entertaining script was more important than a good script. Fantastic details or plot twists and turns could make up for faults in the production. When I run out of these on repeat childhood films I'm writing about through phase 4 of this blog, maybe I will hunt down movies I saw way back when that look, now, like they probably weren't any good. I'm looking at the top box office for 1984 right now and really only noticing one that might qualify: Ice Pirates . It's a good year for movies, a...

I don't imagine that I have much to say, if this were a review, about Ready Player One that would sway anyone either way. See it, don't see it. If you want to see it, you will likely enjoy at least some of what's up there on the screen. And, as I used to end my actual reviews on YouTube, if you don't want to see it, see something else; there's always something worth seeing out there . Also, if you don't want to see it, you should probably not let your friends drag you to see it, because it is long and your enjoyment will depend quite a lot on how much you buy into the gaming aspects or the nostalgia aspects of the film. The plot is so slight, you have to be there for, what one Twitter user called, quite aptly, "an overload of metaphorical nerd fantasy porn". I didn't read the book. I read a sample of it on my nook app and it didn't grab me. As I grew up in the 80s, have loved movies since before I knew what they were, and make a habit, her...