the groundhog day project

Take Anaconda , for example. Arguably the birthplace of more recent crap fare like Sharknado . Except, this was a real movie, meant for the theater, meant to be taken (relatively) seriously. It's inherently ridiculous, but hey, so is Jaws: The Revenge and that was born out of one of the greatest thrillers ever--the original Jaws . There's a thin line and a slippery slope between a movie that should be taken seriously and a movie that exists to entertain the simpler-minded in its audience, and/or to make some quick cash for a very cynical version of Hollywood. The cast alone here suggests something more serious. It's not A-listers. But, it's not all has-beens either. Eric Stoltz, Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuhrer. And the setup--a documentarian headed into the Amazon--is far more... highbrow isn't the right word, but it's far "better" than an ex surfer saving the world from freak weather. The music is almost too happy and...

I was going to leave today's entry blank. Well, not totally blank. That felt like cheating; I was going to have a single period as a hyperlink to my Twitter account. I was going to livetweet through Sharknado 5 , but I got bored and mostly ignored the movie (though I left it playing on the TV because, well, rules). I was going to watch bad movies this month... Actually, I'm still going to watch bad movies this month. But, I want bad movies that were genuine attempts at good movies. I'm pretty sure Tommy Wiseau thought, and still thinks, though he apparently sometimes claims otherwise, that The Room is good. I'm pretty sure Claudio Fragasso thought that Troll 2 was good. But, some recommendations made for me on Facebook--maybe I should have been clearer than "so bad it's good"--are not movies that are trying to be legitimately good movies. Or maybe I'm just being picky because the last week has been mentally exhausting and my insecurities and anxie...

I love the way The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou begins, and I really love the way Roger Ebert's review of it begins. The film begins with an announcer speaking Italian, with no subtitles. He introduces a documentary with Steve Zissou, a Jacques Cousteau-esque explorer and documentarian played by Bill Murray. The movie separates us from the action by putting this initial footage on a narrower screen framed by curtains. We see the audience watching the footage. Within the footage, we see the film crew, a camera, the boom mic. (Plus the undersea life is blatantly fake--part of the whimsy of the film, not the documentary within the film.) And this is a Wes Anderson film, inherently artificial, deliberately stylized, and explicitly distancing itself stylistically from the usual film. Roger's review begins like this: My rational mind informs me that this movie doesn't work. Yet I hear a subversive whisper: Since it does so many other things, does it have to work, too? Can...