the groundhog day project

First reactions to Staying Alive after many years of not watching it: I still know this song , and wow, Kurtwood Smith is in this . [Alas, he disappears quickly.] Roger Ebert called Staying Alive "a big disappointment... [not] really a movie at all, but an endless series of musical interludes between dramatic scenes that aren't there... a Walkman for the eyes." I grew up on this movie and not it's predecessor, Saturday Night Fever ; I'd seen Saturday Night Fever , of course, but for whatever reason--probably because this movie is less gritty and certainly doesn't get anywhere near abortion--we had this one on VHS and watched it often. It may be cheesy, it may be "a Walkman for the eyes" but, you know what, sometimes that is exactly what you need from a film. (Plus, it was #8 at the box office for 1983.) When Tony Manero (John Travolta) eyes the mirror ball at the club where he works as a waiter, I'm sure plenty of people in the audience were...

I never really wrote about the original The Magnificent Seven in this blog. (One of a few times that exhaustion at the end of a long day kept me from really putting in an effort here.) Also, it only just occurred to me, as the men from the Mexican town have come to Chris (Yul Brynner) for help, that aside from one detail--Flik being an outcast from his village rather than a stranger-- A Bug's Life is basically this film, or rather Seven Samurai . And, I'm wondering how I never got that before. It's so obvious. Now, I'm wondering what else I have missed in the movies I've seen, what references went over my head because of particular timing or a lack of familiarity? I have seen Seven Samurai but maybe only once all the way through. It's also the plot of many a D&D module. It's such a simple plot hook--a village is in trouble, and a bunch of men (usually men) have the skills to save it from its attackers. Bring your gunslinging, your knife-throwing...

Skipping the rest of the sequels, wary of decreasing quality and inspiration. Moving on to the remake... because I'm still a glutton for punishment. Yay, misquoting (quoting some odd translation I can't find through google , anyway) scripture right away. Skipping details, too. This is definitely an Omen film. The various interpretations of the signs are a stretch, as per usual. And, I don't like the opening of this film as compared to the original. Lame end-of-the-world stuff at the Vatican, cut to Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber) on his way to the hospital, rushed. The original was so simple and bleak, its opening line--"The child is dead"--said without much emotion. Thorn explains that the child was everything to his wife, which is a rather pointless thing to say. Like we were figuring, Oh, she probably didn't want the kid anyway, everything is fine . Emotion is nice but there was something interesting about Gregory Peck's Robert Thorn, picking to repla...

(This will be the first time I've gone with a made-for-TV version of a story for this blog. Sure, I watched TV shows during that first Groundhog Day year, but I also watched Groundhog Day on those days. And, I watched 12 Dates of Christmas and 12:01 , Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss , but I also watched Groundhog Day on those days. Today's entry, perhaps, opens up some more possibilities for the future.) I The thing that always bothered me about Kubrick's The Shining was the casting of Jack Torrance. Now, since I haven't made it clear the last few days, I love The Shining . I think it is one of the greatest horror films ever made. But, I have read the book, and I longed (prior to the TV miniseries version in 1997) for a version that might offer up a Jack Torrance who did not seem a little bit crazy from the get go. After this version--I'm watching that miniseries today--I'm not so sure that I long for it as much. The miniseries has its problems, of...

Now, I put on the remake of Poltergeist expecting to hate it. I don't know that I expected it to actively annoy me in the first 5 minutes, with the iPad monster game (instead of a television), the slightly creepy music, a weeping willow instead of the mangled tree (weeping willow shaming, in the modern parlance), and putting the title of the film into a field. Not to mention the older daughter Kendra's (Saxon Sharbino) fear of powerlines followed by a shot that positions the towers with the powerlines ominously over the neighborhood. There better be a cemetery and not just some weird powerline bullshit. I mean, next there will be a horror film about how vaccines cause autism and homicidal monsters. Then, younger daughter--Madison (Kennedi Clements)--speaks to the closet, because I'm guessing whoever wrote this remake remembered there was a closet but thought we wouldn't have the attention span to deal with the television first. Or not. For some reason, the son, Gr...

We're introduced to Mattie (Kim Darby) in the original True Grit --I will also be watching the remake later--through a window. She's inside at a desk and she seems to know as much as or more than her father about the business of their ranch. She also has a short haircut that doesn't immediately suggest femininity, at least within the setting. But, True Grit brings up an interesting thing about the setting, about the genre. In an interview with The Guardian regarding the Coen Brothers' remake, Joel Coen compares the film to Alice in Wonderland ... In our minds, we never got real close to thinking about it in terms of the western. We weren't thinking: let's shoot it in widescreen like Sergio Leone. Ethan Coen interrupts. Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing... and it's definitely not opera. And it's definitely not that John Ford tragic thing. Our sensibility has nothing to do with that. Joel continues: If anything... we were thinking ...

Wright (1975) doesn't deal with 3:10 to Yuma at all even though its plot seems like an update on High Noon . Like High Noon before it, this Elmore Leonard story-based film is built more on dialogue and unarmed standoffs more than action or violence. When the remake came half a century later, Roger Ebert said it "restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence." As we'll see soon with this month of Westerns, things turned particularly violent by the 1960s, and as Ebert points out in his review, "The Western in its glory days was often a morality play, a story about humanist values penetrating the lawless anarchy of the frontier... but the audience's appetite for morality plays and Westerns seems to be fading." Or maybe it's long gone. Really, I think we love morality plays, we just don't like them to come as deliberately as Westerns like High Noon or 3:10 to Yuma , or even Gunfight at the O.K. Co...

Watching È già ieri (aka It's Already Yesterday , aka Stork Day ), the Italian remake of Groundhog Day ... again. Filippo's nature show is ridiculous, filmed in front of a blue screen and using fake foreground scenery. But, it amuses me that he's filming a groundhog episode. His complaint when he sees the groundhog: the color is wrong to go with his outfit. Then he complains about the heat. His assignment: to go do a field report about an anomalous migration of storks in the Canary Islands. And, he has a fight with a girl at the station... I wonder if the version of the script they worked from for this remake was the second revision with Stephanie, except this girl doesn't curse Filippo. Filippo doesn't want to go do the report because of the heat. Cameramen draw straws to see who gets stuck going with Filippo—Enrico loses. Enrico asks why the storks made their nests on a volcano. Filippo's response: "Because they're assholes."* *Note: any d...

I finally watched È già ieri (aka Stork Day which is easier to type), the Italian remake of Groundhog Day , today. Note: the Italian title translates not as Stork Day but It's Already Yesterday (or maybe just Already Yesterday . My initial thought: it was rather funny. I mean, I could predict most of where it would go (structurally, there are a few differences between Stork Day and Groundhog Day but the broadstrokes are the same) but it still managed to make me laugh a few times. I will have to watch it again and write a blog entry as it goes, provide some details. For now, know that while Stork Day is actually shorter than Groundhog Day , it's got some sequences added that don't come from the original. For example, Filippo doesn't just Phil Connor the Nancy stand-in but a series of women and at least one man before he gets to Rita (named Rita in both films). He also helps Enrico (Larry) hook up with Marta (Nancy). He gets to know Rosa (the Mrs. Lancaster...