the groundhog day project

Todd's business idea early in Campus Man is for people to be able to check their shoe size by putting their feet up to their tv screen and then the right size shoes will be mailed to them. Not horrible. But, not good. Worse is that he's walking around in public with his pants tucked into his socks. I mean, I had some pants with Velcro-closing cuffs about this time, and there were parachute pants... about (?) to become briefly popular, so tight around the ankle but somewhat baggy otherwise was a thing. But, Todd approximating it by tucking his pants into his socks is both kinda of awful and very much on the nose for his character--thinks he's got business savvy but fucks up his college tuition and goes to a loan shark when the bank won't front him $12,000 for a calendar. (Which is specifically because it's a "pin-up calendar" not because it invokes men, so how did Todd fund the previous calendar?) Somehow he got, I guess, a different loan for his pre...

High Road to China makes sure pretty quickly that we understand it's the 1920s. Old cars, men in suits, and flappers. Vincent Canby explains , High Road to China "is set in a sort of mythical 'Roaring 20's,' which can be immediately identified because a young woman is seen doing a mad Charleston in an early scene." Also, some guy gets shot in the opening scene and I have no idea who he was. Eve (Bess Armstrong), the young woman dancing the Charleston, needs to find her father before he dies or his business partners will have him declared dead and take his business. She needs a plane for this and hooks up with O'Malley (Tom Selleck). That's the setup. Simple. She's a "society dame", he's an alcoholic. They head (initially) for Afghanistan (from Istanbul) and, well, basically, this is an adventure plot with a romance sprinkled in. Half an hour in, I gotta agree with Roger Ebert's conclusion : "High Road to China" is ...

So, right away, a complaint: the introduction of the woobie is lazy. Kenny has presumably had the woobie for, like, his whole life. Alex knows not to mess with it, and probably messes with it all the time. But, Caroline warns him not to touch it, as if it's something new... And, this is John Hughes writing, so I'm a little disappointed. Of course, later moments, like the entire Rocky conversation, or the recipe sharing (though something about the scorching butter line feels off to me), or the poker game, make up for that. And, there are little bits all over this movie that are great examples of writing. The "disability" gag with Larry (Christopher Lloyd). (Side note: I feel sorry for Tom Leopold, who plays Stan. He's in scenes with Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, and Jeffrey Tambor, and I'm like, Who's this other guy? .) Jack's growing interest in The Young and the Restless . The 220, 221 exchange. "I'm going to sleep on the fat cou...

It barely matters that The Man from Snowy River is Australian; the messaging fits right in with American films of the time--a lot of masculinity on display in various levels of toxicity, men being men, women being submissive to those men even when they're not. Seriously, Jessica stands up to her father, he hits her, and she runs away and falls off a cliff to be rescued by Jim. (And, to be fair, as I have learned just now online, Australia also had a part in Vietnam, and in the 70s was undergoing a wave of nationalism.) And then, there's the overdramatic musical cues which almost ruin the lovely music everywhere else in the film. Brumbies arrive and the music lets us know their dangerous if we can't figure that out from the exposition-filled dialogue. The new Colt gets spooked by a dog and the dramatic musical cues jump in. The Stallion leader of the Brumbies tramples over Jim and we not only get overdramatic musical cues, we get insane freeze-frame closeups. And, ther...

It's actually strange watching Grease 2 again after many years because it is wide screen. I think our copy was recorded off cable, back when they just cropped the edges rather than having black bars at the top and bottom. And, kids, back in my day, the television screen wasn't wide enough to show the whole movie without doing one of those things. Immediate observation: the opening scenes of this movie move a little too quickly. It's the first day of school, it's a week later, it's bowling night, then it's time to work on the talent contest. Michael (Maxwell Caulfield) and Stephanie (Michelle Pfeiffer) have a two-part meet cute , with him enamored by her when she' spitting on the skirt over her capris, and then her kissing him to piss off Nogerelli (Adrian Zmed) at the bowling alley. It's both too simple and weirdly complicated. More than half an hour before "Cool Rider" gives Michael a goal and him writing essays for the T-Birds for money give...

It comes down to this: is it funny that Phyllis' little monologue about her see-through nightgown disarms Winship and Tart? Yes. In fact, as Tim Conway points out in the commentary track (which I listened to yesterday ), if you watch Don Knotts' face through that scene, his reaction is so hilariously nuanced and complex, while Conway's is simple shock. These two detectives, already proven to be inept in just a handful of scenes, are taken aback, frozen, and that moment is emblematic of so much more. I've said before (and I will say again) that any movie is a window into the time it was made—a time capsule of the technology in play in making the film, a time capsule of the talent (or lack thereof) behind the film, a time capsule of the social and cultural structures in place at the time and in the place where the film was made, and a measure of the larger society around it. From the 60s into the 70s, Hollywood wasn't afraid to deal in sex or sexual innuendo. Phylli...

Maybe it is because I am old, or because this apartment is often quite noisy, or just because, but I like having subtitles turned on when I watch movies, especially when I'm writing this blog. The Private Eyes ' DVD has no subtitles. And, tonight, I've got a commentary track playing--costar and cowriter Tim Conway and director Lang Elliott--and can barely hear the dialogue from the movie. Fortunately, I have seen this movie so many times that I know the dialogue anyway. Lots of talk about the Biltmore House to start. Then, some talk about the car--I'm fairly sure Conway is kidding, but he implies that they didn't tell the car's owner they intended to crash it into the water. A bunch of things right away that are in the IMDb trivia section--stunt guy nearly drowned when that car was stuck in the mud, a valuable book went missing from the library and the FBI got involved. Perhaps once we're past the opening credits, there will be more interesting insights. C...

Perhaps the lesson of The Idolmaker is that whether you're the one being used or the one doing the using, there's hope for you in the end. But, with new accusations of sexual harassment and abuse from men in power virtually every day lately, I figure those men get to the back of the line when it comes to hope. Seriously, the scene with Tommy Dee and the 14-year-old girl in the car is on and I see on my phone that Twitter is blowing up with comments about Trump supporting Roy Moore, implying that all of Moore's accusers are liars. It's like some sick sort of poetry. This is a movie in which the protagonist, the hero of the story, blames a young girl for being alone with his artist (though, he yells at Tommy Dee afterward, he then offers to hook him up when he wants a woman, so there's that), bribes DJs and (sort of) magazine editors for airplay and good press, yells at the woman he's with (and has already come on to), calls women "god damn broads",...

I decided on my titles for writing about The Villain on day one. For this one, I was going to, with tongue somewhat in cheek, talk about how this film portrays women, or wom a n. No, wom e n. There is, beside Charming, also the old woman that Handsome helps across the street. And, while Charming is rather idiotic in choosing to help her (with a bit of force) across the street simply because she's standing nearby, she is presented as a bit shrill. Handsome deserves her ire, but I can't help but point out that her ire is still presented as an overreaction. And, Charming--both oversexualized and cartoonishly demure. (It occurred to me last night, by the way, that when Cactus Jack asks Nervous Elk what he does with the white women after he captures them, it feels a little like maybe Cactus Jack doesn't know what men do with women any more than Handsome does. And, I'll return to that conversation later.) The film sends up the usual and has Charming be the one who want...

In her review of Sing Street , Sheila O'Malley points out, "There are pitfalls everywhere in a coming-of-age period piece like this one." She argues that director John "Carney avoids them easily, keeping the film on its proper track" And, she explains how this works: "It's extremely confident: It knows what it wants to be, what story it wants to tell." And--coming back to the advice of the the other day--that's what a person needs to be, too. Gotta be confident. Gotta know what you want to be. Gotta know what story you want to tell, the story being you and how you present that self to the world. Easy to fake on the Internet. (I wrote a whole master's thesis about it.) Harder to fake in the real world. And, I mean real confidence, not the pathetic arrogance and ego-centrism that pretends to confidence online or, lately, in politics. Party lines draw people into corners where they're quicker to defend their positions out of the illusio...

Rob Gordon lives in Apartment 2B. I don't know if that's from the book--I can't be bothered to check--or if it's even on purpose. But, I noticed it and noticeable things matter. Echoes of "to be or not to be" or maybe I'm reaching. But, in a story about a guy trying to figure out who he is, it makes sense. A corny, on-the-nose sort of sense. And then there's the deus ex machina of Laura's dad dying, without even the setup of him being sick. (The script tries to cheat by mentioning that her dad never knew she and Rob broke up because he "wasn't up to it.") Kinda ruins the movie the more I watch it. I mean, it was a lame bit of plotting in the first place. But, it gets more offensive with each viewing. But, I keep viewing anyway, because... (And, really, he just compared Charlie to 'Nam? That's gotta be offensive to someone.) Seriously, what is Rob's problem? You don't own every woman who's kissed you. Sex isn...

I don't figure that people are inherently bad, or inherently damaged, or inherently incomplete. I figure we start out fine and if we go bad at some point--and, for the record, "bad" is entirely subjective, defined by societal tradition and whatnot... I'm not exactly sure what I mean to say. I saw Mustang this evening. Since you probably haven't heard of it, it's a French/German/Turkish film--though the language of the film is Turkish, Mustang is France's official Oscar entry. It is about five young sisters who, after having a little too much freedom, are basically locked in their house until their uncle and their grandmother can marry them off. Since the five actresses are all pretty new to film, I'm not sure how old they actually are, but I'd say they range from around 11 to 18, and in their world--which doesn't seem all that far off from the one I live in--they are expected to remain pure and virginal until their wedding night, and that n...

More Star Wars , more SPOILERS. Not that I will make a particular effort to SPOIL things this time, but since I do not deal in straight reviews in this blog, it is inevitable that I will bring up details of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that are SPOILERS. Proceed with caution.           I was going to write today about how it is okay that The Force Awakens echoes plot points from the original trilogy because there are only so many available plotlines anyway, and as Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong'o) describes it, the fight going on in the present is the only fight, the same fight that keeps happening in different guises. Whether it is the Sith or the Knights of Ren or some megalomaniacal dictator who isn't even force sensitive--Domhnall Gleeson evokes a good Hitlerian vibe in his General Hux, and it really a different type of villain than Star Wars has had before. We can assume that Palpatine made some big speeches like Hux's but we've never been shown those thing...

The problem with American Psycho --and there are many, of course, but one in particular that gets to me--is that Patrick Bateman is depicted as crazy. Sure, it's not entirely normal to kill people. And shouldn't be entirely normal to destroy the lives of others through mergers and acquisitions (though, to be fair, we do not see Bateman actually doing his job, taking over any companies, laying anyone off; we just kind of have to know that's what he does). But, aside from a few key moments, Bateman might as well be homicidal, yeah, but not necessarily mentally ill... He knows what he's doing. And he enjoys it. Only briefly at the end of the film does he seem to show any regret--when he calls his lawyer and confesses to the crimes we've seen and many more. Not long before that call, he has his truly (cinematically) insane moment; when he's standing at the ATM, the ATM tells him to feed it a stray cat. It's debatable (but pointless to debate) whether or not muc...

Derr (2013) argues "'feminism' is not simply the absence of 'sexism'" which is good news for American Psycho , directed by Mary Harron and written by Harron and Guinevere Turner. Even though it's satire, it is difficult to suggest that American Psycho -- (For the record, unless I say otherwise--and I might later--I am referring to the film, not Bret Easton Ellis' novel. I have never read more than a few pages of the novel once upon a time in the 90s.) --is not chock full of sexism. Still, Harron has defended the film as feminist. von Busack (2000) argues though, " American Psycho is feminist only at the level that it suggests that men can be vicious and selfish..." (von Busack smartly critiques the film version by pointing out that the satire of the novel gets its power from being close to the 1980s--the novel came out in 1991--and "The only way to give American Psycho teeth would be to set it in the present. We can mock the fashi...

(As this month of Westerns winds down, it comes in handy that I've got a few extra films on my list. Turns out I forgot to find a copy of Wild Bill to borrow, it's not on Netfllix or Hulu, and there isn't even a good torrent of it available. So, the choice was watch it through iTunes and be stuck with a small screen or skip on past it. So, skip on past it, it is. The Quick and the Dead boils a whole lot of Western tropes into the gunfight. the standoff in the street. Here, it's an organized contest, with a handful of stars, a few of which have been in Westerns before. The throughline is a vengeance plot, but with the elements out of order, saving explanations for flashback as The Lady (Sharon Stone) joins an otherwise all-male shoutout contest and immediately wants to challenge the big man in the town of Redemption, John Herod (Gene Hackman) to a fight. But, the setup is a bunch of duels. The direction is fun, Sam Raimi's usual moving camera and angled shots co...

I'd like to comment on the symbol Klytus wears (and that is on the wall here and there in Ming's palace in Mingo City)--like the Masonic symbol: There's probably something there, with Ming and Klytus not only representing a foreign (alien) menace but a subversive secret society (also probably something to Klytus being a bit effete), but there's something more important to talk about since this is my last day with Flash Gordon . (This 3-days-only system leaves very little room for rambling.) (I'd also like to write something about how Ming basically created the various tribes of Mongo as they are. He gave the Leonans of Ardentia their claws and fangs. He gave the Coralians their fins and gills. He gave the Avions their wings, the lizardmen (not sure what they're properly called) their scales. He is effectively a god, which could put a religious angle on the film.) I'm more concerned with an old standby--gender. And, I don't mean to diminish the ...