the groundhog day project

I gotta watch Sing Street this week for a podcast, and Fran's outburst here in Strictly Ballroom that was yesterday's (and today's) title reminds me of Raphina's line there: "You can never do anything by half." A basic enough message. You want something, you gotta go for it. What you'd expect from a romantic comedy. Or drama... I mean, movies inherently involve some protagonist going after some goal, some dream, some love, some whatever. Messages aren't going to run deep, and sometimes they're obvious, but that doesn't make them lesser. Like, I've written in this blog a few times about About Time and have a currently running podcast about that film and some of the negative reviews about it complain about its central message--to slow down and appreciate the things around you. And, yeah, that's a basic message, but if more of us followed that advice we wouldn't hear that message so much. Like this movie: don't ...

And, I have decided to go backward for the remaining/additional movie life list movies. So, let us jump forward to 1992... -ish. Really, since we saw this movie at the second-run theater with a movie released in April 1993, we're jumping forward to 1993. And, I'm a senior in high school In the theaters, we saw Strictly Ballroom alongside Benny & Joon , but, while Strictly Ballroom made it into our home and got watched a bunch more times by us and by visiting friends, Benny & Joon did not. At least not as much. And, maybe I'm delusional about the whole thing because Strictly Ballroom is not even on our family "movie list" last updated by me 8 June 1999. So, who knows? Either way, I'm watching Strictly Ballroom today as I work my way backward through a few other fixture movies to, you know, encapsulate my childhood, or something. Baz Luhrmann's first film. Some nobody from Australia. A romance about ballroom dancing. But, we loved it. ...