the groundhog day project

I was going to start today's entry with a note I neglected yesterday: the first Grease does have one beat that the sequel doesn't--while Sandy changes for Danny and Michael changes for Stephanie, Stephanie doesn't change at all for Michael, but Danny does at least try to change for Sandy. He tries out for varsity sports, tries to clean up his image. It doesn't really take but Sandy's change covers the distance between them enough to make up for it. Stephanie, on the other hand, gets away with not even trying, yet Grease 2 almost feels like it wants us to see her as a feminist icon of a sort for the 60s setting, whereas Sandy was a good girl from the 50s until her makeover. I was going to argue, counter to the obvious point I made yesterday--that the message of both films is a bad one--that taking as singular instances, they're not so bad. If Sandy wants to change for Danny, that's on her. If Michael wants to change for Stephanie, that's on him. But, ...

Foxes and hounds are both canids. They can even be interbred. I read a thing about some Russian scientist purposely doing so, and others have continued his research for decades. But, The Fox and the Hound presents their difference as something bigger. On TV Tropes ' page for the film, under the link for Have You Tried Not Being a Monster? , there is a good description of what this film is doing: The original story was an allegory for racism separating two friends. The film is sometimes interpreted as depicting an innocent summer romance between two boys torn asunder by divergent career paths and the folly of machismo. Sometimes it is seen as showing how men repress their feelings as they come of age, and lose touch with their innocence. I don't know who actually wrote that, or how the TV Tropes staff works, but the description seems quite valid in all parts. (The original novel, by the way, is far more dark; Chief is killed by the train, Tod is killed (after having both of...

This weekend, my daughter performed in Twelfth Night three times and had a voice recital. There were rehearsals three times a week for several weeks now and I generally sat around and worked on this blog during those (the rehearsals and the play were 30 something miles away, so it wasn't worth it to, you know, drop her off). And she's got auditions for new things coming up quite soon. For me, fall classes get started this week and I'm teaching a new class I haven't taught yet (though I have covered some of its material as a debate coach). My son's college classes for fall get going tomorrow. My older daughter's last year of her bachelor's gets going in September. My ex (with whom I share an apartment) has already returned to teaching this past week. Like most anyone, we are all so very busy. But, with the right distractions, the right amusements, I at least have figured out how to deal with the stresses of modern life... Until Trump tweets something inane o...

Honestly, though, we need more people to just go ahead and make movies regardless of how good they are. I mean, sure, movies with scripts that are good are better, and movies with budgets for sets with doors that stayed closed when you close them. are better, and movies that can actually afford to film on real rooftops are better. But, The Room is entertaining, is amusing, and is strangely captivating. Some bad movies are boring, or offensively bad. This one just works. It certainly doesn't work, you know, well. But, it's dealing with serious topics. Love, loyalty, the patriarchy, suicide. Plus, Johnny has the best take on life: "You can love someone deep inside your heart, and there is nothing wrong with it.. If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place to live." I've been avoiding turning to politics this month, but if you want to solve the problems of partisan politics, you just gotta listen to Johnny... (There's also Peter'...

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...

So a few pet peeves. One about something that happens in movies. One about how people react to movies. And one about life. I'll be as brief as I can. One, and this one occurred to me watching 9 to 5 , is when a conversation is split over two scenes. The example in 9 to 5 isn't even the most egregious example--Judy waits until she is at the store with Violet to ask about Doralee, when realistically she would have asked, you know, on the way there. Some movies, though, it's like midsentence, or between question and response, and that is not how people talk. It's a cheap manipulation of the medium. (To be fair, it can be used well, to suggest a conversation that happens again and again. Because one character just can't let something go, for example. But, too often it's just cheap.) Two, and this one occurred to me watching The Mummy , is about how people measure a film too much by what they wanted it to be. In this case, so many reviews referencing the 1999 The ...

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...

(Before we get into this sixth and final day with Ex Machina , a note on something I will not be talking about: There's a line of music that plays as Caleb first enters the house, and again as Ava is leaving it, that reminds me of the theme to Jurassic Park . My son, who knows music better than I do, listened to it and said something along the lines of, if they wanted to reference Jurassic Park , they would not have put the line in a different key. Me--I still think it sounds like it. Plus, both films involve locations accessed by helicopter... Seriously, the structure is the same in that regard. Brief intro ( Ex Machina 's being far briefer than Jurassic Park 's), then helicopter ride to the location, a location where a scientist has perhaps taken things a bit too far, eventually endangering lives (note: in the novel of Jurassic Park Hammond dies in the end just as Nathan dies here), then the survivor(s) leave(s) on a helicopter. As a movie blogger, I gotta say, I think...

To counter yesterday 's Katniss Everdeen, we have Ava (Alicia Vikander) in Ex Machina . Literally programmed to be who she is, Ava demonstrates more agency in one film than Katniss does in three... Maybe. There is a point where the "programming" inherent in cinematic characters by the writer and the director and the actor (let's call this LEVEL 2) conflict with the "programming" of the character within the story by her creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) (which we'll call LEVEL 1, since we're talking about the film here), and where both of those levels of "programming" conflict with the real-life "programming" that a woman receives from the society around her (LEVEL 3). We'll come back to the issue of programming. First--and this entry will be full of SPOILERS big and small--Nathan's introduction is entirely manipulative of both Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) and the audience. Reclusive tech-genius living in (my personal take) an ...

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more... That's Lord Byron, from "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." Those lines start the film Into the Wild . With those lines, that last one, especially, we get a clear picture of how Jon Krakauer, who wrote the book, (or Sean Penn, who directed the film), if not Chris McCandless himself, saw things with this story--McCandless wasn't necessarily turning away from people--from society maybe, but that's a separate thing. He was turning toward nature. And, I get that. I live in the city, have lived around Los Angeles virtually my entire life. But, I like getting out of here when I can. The recent roadtrip involved far too much time in the car, not enough time outside, but there were still some nice moments, at Willow Canyon, at Meteor Crater, at Acoma... (I shared...