the groundhog day project

It's in one of those melancholic scenes I was talking about yesterday that Brendan says today's title. He and Conor are sitting on the stairs watching their mother out on the porch. Seems she rushes home from work every day to sit in the sun and read her papers, and she has a drink. Then the sun goes behind a nearby tall tree and she goes inside. Brendan says she wants to vacation in Spain but their father won't take her. And, he wonders what she thinks about. Earlier in the film, Conor spelled out a similar notion, except it's not about the wondering, it's about imagining, deciding for the version of another person inside your head. He tells Eamon, When you don't know someone, they're more interesting. They can be anything you want them to be. But, when you know them, there's limits to them. Eamon says that doesn't make sense, and in some handwritten notes I scribbled sometime last week, I said of Eamon's response, "Clearly, he's n...

Asked by Tasha Robinson at The Verge , in regards to the end of Sing Street : It's clear the scene in the gym [i.e. the band's performance of "Drive It Like You Stole It"] is a fantasy, because it's got that bright candy color, and things happen that are so obviously unreal. But in the boat crossing [i.e. Conor and Raphina running away to England at the end of the film], you spend a lot of time establishing the physical danger of what they're doing. It seems like if it was just a romantic fantasy, you would have just had them sail off together. But there was a point where it looked like it was going to end with them both dying in the Irish Sea. director John Carney responds: I wish they had, in a way. I'm sorry! But there is a side of me that wishes they had. Given the difficulty of people who are making journeys, and end up dying... I don't think it's supposed to be a fully real sequence. I think they're supposed to be quite brave, setti...

Imagine it: last December, I was watching Christmas movies for this blog. It was nice and pleasant... Well, there was Black Christmas (with a brief venture into Silent Night, Deadly Night , but mostly it was... Nice. There was talk of filmmaking and screenplay structure and Christ-Figures, but mostly it was about how good people can and should be to one another. Or, at least, that is how I remember it. How I choose to remember it. And, the year before, when I was stil watching Groundhog Day every day, I also squeezed in a silly little Christmas film-- 12 Dates of Christmas . This year, I find myself inclined toward more serious fare, toward lengthy rants like the other day . To be fair, December usually includes a lot of the more interesting movies for me since that is when Oscar hopefuls show up in theaters. This year, as well, there is a.... What shall I call it? There is an interesting political climate about in America. Donald Trump is still going strong in his campaign for ...

There are too many scenes set at night in Wyatt Earp . And, I say this not even 20 minutes into the film. There's a strange back and forth between very bright daytime scenes and too dark nighttime scenes... I know this movie is long so I'm trying to just sit with it for a bit rather than start typing away and have yet another blog entry so long that no one reads it all the way through. Also, while I want to continue the discussion from yesterday about the good man with a gun , about how we automatically side with the authority, how we decide on impulse who's right and who's wrong, damn the details, I'm inclined to also get into a redefinition (again) about what the Western is because Wyatt Earp is structurally a biopic, not a Western. Not that we have movie rental stores anymore, but Westerns often had their own section, but did we separate other settings? The middle ages from the dark ages, the industrial from the enlightenment? The Western is a strange "g...

I really should just be doing multiple entries rather than these extra long double movie ones. But I like them being numbered nicely. Today: The Searchers and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral . The opening of The Searchers offers us one of the structural oppositions that Henderson (1985) and Wright (1975) discuss--wilderness/civilization. Also inside/outside society. The door opens to the outside wilderness and Ethan (John Wayne) arrives, not unlike Shane yesterday . Henderson's focus is this very film and he offers up an important summary of one of the major themes: The Searchers is explicitly concerned with a number of anthropological issues. On its surface it treats questions of kinship, race, marriage, and the relations between tribes. These questions also have to do with the identity, status, and responsibilities of individuals: who is responsible for the retrieval and burial of the dead, for the search and recovery of captives, for vengeance? Who can marry whom? Which marri...