the groundhog day project

It's remarkable sometimes how the silliest of films can work just as well as the best of them to bring me back to long ago, you know, happier times, when I was a cute little kid without a care in the world except for, well, the second coming of Jesus, Armageddon, the apocalypse, and everything* that I've ever cared about ceasing to be. (* except for my loved ones, of course, but damn it, what about my toys? What about these movies I loved? What about books? Games? The important stuff in life.) No cares but the biggest. And, Top Secret! , in particular, plays on some of that biggest stuff. Late in the Cold War... And then I got to wondering about exactly when this film takes place. I mean, Nick's music is very Elvis. So, I paused on the Billboard Top 40. Nick Rivers has #1 #2, & #4, with "Skeet Surfin'", "Skeetin' USA" and "Skeet City", respectively. He also has #3 in a duet with Tammy Wynette on "You're Skeetin' He...

Something I didn't know: a Broadway revival of The Pirates of Penzance had apparently done quite well in 1981. Universal pushed for a film version, but it wouldn't come out until 1983. In the meantime, Fox pushed out the send-up The Pirate Movie , beating the straight adaptation to the big screen. But, I really didn't want to talk about the pillaging of the theater but rather the pillaging of women, the patriarchy, and all the usual stuff I might talk about. The "noble custom" that dictates that the eldest daughter marry first, the youngest marry last, with nary a question of whether or not any of them want to marry. But, even on the other side, Frederic asks of Ruth (apparently before he's met other women, even though I'm sure he and his shipmates have raped and pillaged and plundered plenty) if she's beautiful. Almost immediately after meeting Mabel, he declares that he loves her and may want to marry her, because that is what he thinks non-pirate...

Han Solo likes it when Leia calls him a scoundrel. He gets involved with the rebellion only because he's out for cash. And, decades later (presumably after some brief attempt at settling down and starting a family with Leia) he's a smuggler all over again. And then he dies. Delve into the Expanded Universe--most of which is no longer canon--and he used to be an Imperial soldier. He defected when he saved Chewbacca from being enslaved by the Empire. That's why Chewbacca owes him a "life debt". One bright light of action in an otherwise scoundrelous (c) existence-- (Which brings to mind an interesting sidenote: How did I know about that life debt as a kid? Was that something they put on the description text of the Chewbacca action figure? Like everybody knows those smaller furry forest folk in Return of the Jedi are Ewoks, but no one ever calls them that. We know it because of licensed products, action figures, books, promotional materials. (Similarly, I wonder i...

"Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up." - Hard Harry Hard-On No teachers today, again , except as antagonists... Well, I suppose my take was that Joe Clark was the antagonist of the larger story if not the throughline of Lean on Me . And, for so many high schoolers, plenty of teachers are the antagonists. Not just teachers--parents, other adults; like they're all the phonies Holden Caulfield saw them as. The perspective here: this movie puts us on the side of the teenagers. Hard Harry Hard-On (Christian Slater) starts us out with the radio show we will learn is an unlicensed broadcast--that's the basic setup for Pump Up the Volume . Hard Harry Hard-On, of course, is also Mark Hunter, a fairly shy (meek may be a better descriptor) high schooler. Mark's parents grew up in the sixties but have turned establishment--his father is the "youngest school commissioner" in Arizona's history...