the groundhog day project

Alternatively, I can imagine today that when I was 11 and watching RoboCop for the first time what really mattered was watching Murphy overcome his RoboCop programming and be his own person. At least inasmuch as he does. He can barely access his memories, and in the end he still has to go be a supercop because the regularly police are on strike. It would be another few years before I openly turned against my religious upbringing but already I'm sure I was having issues with it. I'm entering the 7th grade in the fall. This is the year that I write my infamous essay about how I only believe in God because I've been told to do so my whole life and my Bible Class teacher is not a fan. Or was that 9th grade? I'm losing track. Getting old. But, I've got James Murphy to look up to. Or I did once upon a time a few decades ago. Shiny. Cybernetic. Wants to do what's right.                     And, I want to say something a...

Opening music: "Hoochie Coochie Man" by Muddy Waters. Minus a point right off the bat. Mark spent the previous night drinking, and wakes in bed with a woman he does not remember. Not a race problem, but still an immediate negative. This guy should not be going to Harvard. (That woman in his bed is Missy from Bill & Ted and Kim from Summer School . Amy Stoch as girl who doesn't even get a name here.) He also has a bucket of tennis balls to turn off two separate alarms (set for noon). He's a Ferris Bueller-wannabe asshole, is what he is. Minor thing in Mark's favor later: as a lawyer he may be able to sue his father over spending money from what his father specifically calls his "tuition account" on a timeshare in a condo in Barbados. Calling it a "tuition account" sounds like at the least an oral agreement, and based on how banks deal with things like that today, the account itself might have been labeled per its purpose and prob...

The Money Pit . I write about it yesterday, and my sister Brooke comments on Facebook that it's one of her and her husband's favorites. My friend Jeff comments that "it holds up as a solid comedy." And He adds, "Also, check the run time 1:31 minutes. It never overstays its welcome, does it... Judd Apatow." I don't quite get it. I mean, yeah, it is joke after joke after joke, and it doesn't give you much chance to think about any of it unless you're a nut like me (or, really, like Jeff, since he is also a movies-by-minutes podcaster). The movie both takes too long to get started and feels like it is trying to rush through the beginning to get to the house falling apart. Then, it's a series of visual gags with things breaking, and then a couple nice relationship moments and it's over. And, it still has time for the entirely useless opening and closing with Walter's father.           And, I really want to believe there...

I don't think I even like(d) today's movie, and I am only watching it because it's free on Netflix. I barely remember the beats of the story, but I feel like we must have watched it a lot because one scene in particular I know I saw a lot when I was young. And, I don't mean like certain "adult" scenes might've gotten extra watches from me when no one else was home. I mean, we just must have watched The Money Pit many times. Even though we had a much better Tom Hanks movie-- Splash at hand. So, the movie starts and already I'm like what am I watching. Some old guy marrying the princess from Gymkata and I guess he's Hanks' father or something. Confirmed on the cut to new scene. Hanks and Long voiceover as we focus on mail. This movie is weird. I know they're going to... Buy? Inherit? A house that turns out to be crap. And, I think Shelley Long is going to have an affair with the blonde dancer-looking dude from Die Hard , and I t...

Now, we let that madness go and return to childhood. I'm eight years old when Top Secret! arrives in theaters. It's absurdist visuals work for me very well. It's utter ridiculousness still holds up, unlike some other , similar comedies. I did write about Top Secret! in this blog before. But, no return to my childhood, and all the movies that were on regular repeat would be complete without this one. (In other news, I saw Rampage in the theater today. Not much to say about it but if you want to see it, you will probably enjoy at least some of it. Of note for this blog, though, as I'm sitting through the end credits, a name jumps out. Rick LeFevour. Actually, it turns out it, double checking on IMDb when I got home, to be Rick LeFevour, Jr. (Also a Matt LeFevour listed under stunts for Rampage , but while all three work for Midwest Stunts, I have not confirmed that Matt is related to the Ricks.) Anyway, Rick LeFevour was the stuntman who jumped off the top of the Pe...

Coming on the heels of On Golden Pond , the central premise of Annie --that the presence of a kid will inject some life in an old man (though Daddy Warbucks is not as old as Norman Thayer, Jr, of course) is quite a cliché, but Annie is built of different stuff--a shallow surface of classist structures and a rags to riches plot that might as well be a romantic comedy (a little bit Pretty Woman ). Oddly enough, it is also a big departure from the comic strip. Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks was not even always a regular presence in the comic. In the place of Warbucks' secretary (or whatever her title is) Grace Farrell (Ann Reinking), there's a Mrs. Warbucks in the comic, and she is not the nice woman Grace is. She doesn't like Annie and sends her back to the orphanage more than once. (An orphanage run initially by Miss Asthma and then by Miss Treat.) The first time she tries to return Annie, a "society friend" sees her and she keeps Annie instead. Then Oliver ret...

I've seen Annie live a couple times, for a History of Popular Culture class I read a bunch of old Annie comics... (Though I swear I didn't end up using any of those for the resulting paper. I wrote about some other comic that I had never heard of before that-- Bringing Up Father .) I saw the 2014 film version. (But not the 1999 one.) And, I have seen the 1982 film version of Annie more times than I can remember. And, a warning, if you don't like musicals, I've got three on my list for 1982. In fact, it might be very easy to establish up front what I got from 1982 films on repeat in my home--I got a love of musicals. Just last week, my daughter and I saw the new production of Disney's Aladdin at the Pantages. And, we're thinking of getting some of the rush tickets for the Pasadena Playhouse's production of The Pirates of Penzance . The film (and any stage production) is just the origin part of the Annie story, rounded out into a self-contained thing. T...

It's the first half of Ishtar that is the problem. If you can just work your way through that, it gets better. The whole torture of that first hour, the awfulness of Rogers and Clarke's songs, their absolute lack of upward career trajectory--it even gets paid off when Clarke breaks down in the desert and asks, "What have I done with my life, Lyle?" And Ebert calls the desert sequence pointless. The desert sequence is the point. It's the answer to the question of the first half... Specifically, look at where the movie begins and ends. The same song in both places. Telling the truth can be dangerous business; Honest and popular don't go hand in hand. If you admit that you play the accordion, No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band. But we can sing our hearts out. And, if we're lucky, then no neighbors complain. Because life is the way we audition for God. Let us pray that we all get the job. It's trite. It's simplistic. But, it'...

The only time I saw Ishtar from beginning to end was on a plane. We were flying to England, I think [My sister tells me it was a trip to Hawaii.]. The movie felt longer than the flight. But, I have very little memory of the content from then. I've seen scattered moments from the film in the intervening years, but I have never sat down to watch the whole thing again. Supposedly, it's one of the worst films ever made; that's a superlative I should have sought out before now. Yet, here I am.           Twenty-two minutes before we get to the desert. I remembered none of that from seeing this before. And now, it feels like a different movie... And, I'm reminded of Spies Like Us , which also had a couple losers getting inadvertently involved in international affairs. Except, with better comedy, and, considering the timing ( Spies Likes Us came out in 1985, Ishtar in 1987), Spies Like Us made for a better twist on the tail end of the Cold War... Except I'm n...

Let's be clear. Yesterday was full of contradictions. Watch bad movies. Don't watch bad movies. Associate only with those like you. Associate with those different from you. Or everything and anything in between. Just, whatever you do, try if you can to make the world better by doing it. Laugh at whatever makes you laugh. Laugh loudly. Cry at whatever makes you sad. Wail if you must. Rage at the politics (or movies) that disturb you. And lament for failure, in whatever form. Put some thought into what you do and do what makes you happy (barring anything that hurts anyone else). Rant and rave and contradict yourself. It's fun. But, enough about yesterday. Tonight I watched Howard the Duck . I'm not sure if I had watched the whole thing since I saw it in the theater in 1986, when I was 10. I'm sure I had seen parts of it now and then on cable. But, mostly, I had forgotten what supposedly made it so bad. The thing is, it's not that bad. In fact, for 1986, for a fa...

Subtitle: thoughts on the film without the politics... if that's possible. For example, the costumes: Judy's. Outfit is far too conservative, far too reserved. While Violet's is looser, with a looser, Chinese pattern. to it. Her outfits are loose, practical, but her colors are subdued. (I rather enjoy Grace and Frankie and that's totally, if deliberately not explicitly a reunion of these two characters... Except I cannot imagine that Frankie ever worked an office job.) Doralee's costumes are somewhere in between, and far more showy. The office is stale, too practical, visually something out of the 50s with rare elements from the 60s--like Mr. Hart's office, a lot of Browns, a wood desk, wood paneling, but then some chairs that feel more modern (for 1980). One of the big changes, visually, later with the three women making the decisions, is that the office takes on a lot more color--very 70s. And, there's the scarf. Violet has to buy it for Mr. Hart...

...or better. Because, let's face it, when you keep a sex (or a race-- (Just note the early scene in 9 to 5 with the mailroom attendant Eddie Smith, a black man, who is upset by the new hire Judy (Jane Fonda) because he wants to be promoted out of the mailroom; the film acknowledges right away the problem is far bigger than just sex.) --or any group really) down systematically for, well, ever, it's going to take a little more than equality to make it right. Equal treatment isn't going to lift someone up enough--like Judy or Violet or Doralee here--that they would be anywhere near you if you've been lifted up since centuries or millennia before you were born. That is, lift up too unequal parties the same, they will still be unequal. Rich get richer and poor get poorer and all that. Men stay on top, women stay on the bottom, and the system runs as it has always run. Getting stuff like the changes the three leads make here at Consolidated Companies--job sharing, on-...

The voiceover at the start of Network gives us like an entire other film's worth of plot. Howard Beale (Peter Finch) has just learned that he will be off the air in two weeks after his ratings have been in consistent decline of late. Also something about a problem with alcohol. He tells Max Schumacher (William Holden) that he will kill himself on the air, then he even announces it on the air. This movie came out in 1976. In 1974, talk show host Christine Chubbock had killed herself live on the air. Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway) who heads programming, wants to air footage of a bank robbery, filmed by a SLA-like group as they performed the robbery. She might even want to make a series out of it. "The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them." That's what a study Diana quotes says. And, I can't help but tie this into the present, the people who like Donald Trump as presidential candidate because "he says what I'm thinking....

The yurodivy is a kind of "holy fool" - the person who sees what's really going on in society and has the audacity to say it, but only in a kind of code. If there's a crooked government, the holy fool will maybe perform a weird pantomime or tell a story, one that gets everyone to laugh at first; sooner or later, the more perceptive members of the yurodivy 's audience will also recognize in the fool's antics a hidden message. – ( Saint Paul Sunday ) The… article quoted above goes on to use Gogol’s Dead Souls as an example, and I loved that book (though I admit I probably didn’t get all of the nuance of its satire). Groundhog Day isn’t satire, though. Still, it comments so readily on the human condition in the modern world, repetition and inanity hitting us from all side. Yesterday, I suggested a) that Ralph and Gus were Phil’s holy fools and b) that Phil was ours. Phil’s sarcasm, his dry wit, his sardonic humor—this is all him commenting on the world, sure...