the groundhog day project

The description on STARZ for today's movie begins: "The best sports film ever?" As I tell my Speech 101 students, don't start with a question. It gets me thinking, gets me not paying attention to you speaking and, in the case of this description, has me thinking about other films. I'm not a sports film kind of guy. I mean, I like some of every kind of movie, I'm sure, but if I ranked my genres--and I recently did just that , actually, while running a bracket of my favorite films on my podcast Cock & Bull --sports film is not near the top. My top 380 has so few that would qualify that when I broke down the list for an excel sheet, there wasn't even a column for it. A couple that might qualify: Meatballs ( 1178 1179 1180 1181 1182 ) Better Off Dead... ( 772 773 ) A couple documentaries: Hoop Dreams Free Solo The Wrestler comes pretty close to what makes a "sports film", and that's on the list as well. But, the ...

                      Today I saw Call Me By Your Name , right now I've got Whose Streets? playing on the television. I'm inclined to write in relation, in response, in my usual twisted sort of echo, to the former rather than the latter. Writing about police violence and Ferguson will get me into a political rant that I am not in the mood for... Which is its own sort of troubling notion, separate from the rant itself. That I get to be tired to such things. That as much as I seek out stuff on social media to argue with, I can turn it off and my life is enough that I don't need to be in the middle of that. When so many people don't have such a choice.           The privilege of my life. I can choose to write about a love story--one trapped behind an 80s anti-homosexual vibe, but--SPOILERS--that ultimately doesn't go the route that one producer apparently wanted by having a villain; instead ...

1. I saw Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets today, and while it had some awesome visuals, the overall plot was fairly standard fantasy fare. Entertaining, sure. But, nowhere as original or as memorable as, say, The Fifth Element . 2. While I have ended my obsessive, extended time with Sing Street , I don't plan to return to the dystopian films to finish out the month. Instead, I think I'm just going to go with whatever comes up. My summer classes are over and I've got time. 3. Despite that image. I'm not sure I want to write about Valerian , really. In fact, the links to Rogue One yesterday got me to thinking more generally about films. Like, what do I want from them> What do I expect from them? Why do I embrace them such that I could, in Fever Pitch -style, outline my life according to the movies I saw at certain times-- Cliffhanger on our senior trip to Maui; Say Anything (not the first time I'd seen it) in a motel in Los Angeles with my then-...

The dog gets my favorite line in Beginners . The full subtitle (because, of course, the dog doesn't actually speak) is: "Tell her the darkness is about to drown us unless something drastic happens now." I've been there. Felt that drowning sensation, the darkness, and had drastic things happen. (By the way, I'm not actually watching Beginners tonight. My Netflix was having some issues, so I moved on. #FirstWorldProblems) I've been diagnosed with depression, been offered prescriptions for medication to deal with it. Mostly, I've learned to deal with it on my own. I've gotten good at compartmentalizing different parts of my life, and I've learned to take time to do fun things. For example, today I went to the Renaissance Faire with friends with whom I play D&D. I also (in case some future reader hasn't noticed the jump in dates or some past reader is confused) restarted this blog, ostensibly as if nothing had changed. I picked up the ...

[Rob Gordon's] Top five dream jobs Journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, 1976 to 1979 - Get to meet The Clash, Chrissie Hynde, Sex Pistols, David Byrne, get tons of free records. Producer, Atlantic Records - Get to meet Aretha, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke. More free records and a shitload of money. Any kind of musician. Besides classical or rap. Settle for being one of the Memphis Horns or something. I'm not asking to be Jagger or Hendrix or Otis Redding. Film Director. Any kind except German or silent. Architect Rob of course readily offers, "I'm not sure I even want to be an architect." Laura critiques his choices: "So you've got a list here of five things you'd do if qualifications and time and history and salary were no object? ... One of them you don't really want to do anyway." Rob proffers, "Well, I did put it at number five." And, Laura makes the point that matters. "Wouldn't you rather own your own record...

"I love doing stop-motion for no reason except that it's stop-motion... My favorite thing is a puppet not moving, just sitting there and being depressed." That's Dino Stamatopoulos, one of the producers of Anomalisa , quoted in the New York Times . And, somewhere in those two sentences, the real genius of Anomalisa is captured--using stop-motion, a format that made the production take three years, to tell what is mostly a very mundane tale-- that is the primary conceit of the latest Charlie Kaufman film. This story could be told in (and actually was before) as a stage play, a single run-through that takes the 9o-minute runtime. But that is rather the point. Taking the time to tell a simple story. That story, though, is really far larger than its mundanity in being so mundane. Dealing with themes of identity, fidelity, attraction, all while playing with the idea of a Fregoli Delusion. That is, one person's inability to tell strangers (and familiars, for tha...

Taking a break from seriousness with Summer School . Not that this movie doesn't demonstrate one of the points I've been trying to make--students have reasons beyond their attitudes that get in the way of schoolwork. Or, the usual Hollywood take on teaching, as Shoop (Mark Harmon) just said, "Inside every so-called bad kid is a good kid just waiting for someone to reach on down through the sleaze and the slime, pick him up and hose him off." It's a nice thought, but a teacher's gotta have a really powerful and long reach to get past the personal obstacles--like Rhonda's (Shawnee Smith) pregnancy--economic issues--like Larry's (Ken Olandt) night job--or other outstanding hinderances that have nothing to do with the kid's attitude or, necessarily, the teacher's ability. But, I said this was a break from seriousness. You know what amuses me about this movie lately? I read Roger Ebert's review of the film today and he hated this film. He ca...

Then, there was The Principal . Actually, in movie terms, this movie came before Lean on Me . It's a different beast, perhaps, because it's fiction. Doesn't start with school. Rather begins in a bar. Rick Lattimer (James Belushi) is clearly an angry, violent man. Making that clear right away, as he goes after his wife's divorce lawyer/new boyfriend with a baseball bat. Afterward, cop asks him his occupation. Wait for it--school teacher. We're supposed to be surprised. I'm not sure why we should care (except of course we know already this is a movie about a principal (who could very well also be a teacher). He's also a disgusting bachelor-type. Smells the bad milk, is revolted, puts it back in the fridge, for example. (Box office aside: I saw this movie at The Academy, a second-run theater in Pasadena, so I'm not sure when I saw it. But, looking at the weekend it came out, I like that I saw all of the top 12 ( The Principal was #4), but only about ...

Return to teachers. Get a little Roger Ebert in at the top for the transition back to the sort-of-ongoing theme... "Dangerous Minds" tells another one of those uplifting parables in which the dedicated teacher takes on a schoolroom full of rebellious malcontents, and wins them over with an unorthodox approach. Movies like this are inevitably "based on a real story." Maybe they tell you that because otherwise you'd think they were pure fantasy. He calls "this version" of the story "less than compelling." I mostly remember this movie in pieces. I worked at a movie theater in 1995 when it came out (20 years and 3 days ago). The movie opened #1 at the box office. If I remember right (and I probably do), our theater also had Something to Talk About (#4), The Net (#6), Casper (#13), Batman Forever , and Braveheart at the time. (Saw a lot of movies in the six months I worked there because in addition to being able to see our own theater'...

Stand and Deliver is distracting me from ignoring it to write about something else. Police in the office investigating a crime as Escalante (Edward James Olmos) shows up for his first day. Even if that's what really happened, it's one of those details that is too on the nose to be believable. (Like John Dillinger taking seventeen people hostage with a wooden gun--changed to only three people to be more believable in Public Enemies per Cracked 's "5 True Stories Cut from Movies for Being Too Unrealistic.") And, movie classes are way too short. The scene starts like it's the beginning of class, but like a minute later the bell is ringing. A little better writing/editing and we could get into class in media res, or, you know, leave the scene before the bell rings. Just because it's a movie set in a classroom doesn't mean we need to be dismissed by the bell. Timeline is a little odd, too. He's been at the school "for a few months" and we...

Taking the music teacher (not that Dewey Finn was supposed to be a music teacher) a little more seriously today with Mr. Holland's Opus . We start with Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) conducting an imaginary orchestra, playing the titular opus. Conducting music that isn't there (an important idea for what's coming). Like Finn, Holland didn't intend to be a teacher. He got stuck with it. Not the most positive portrayals of being a teacher. At least John Keating seemed to have become a teacher on purpose. Classic teacher mistake, going to the textbook that early on day one. Me--the textbook is just support material; if the students read it they'll do better on the final, but if they just show up and listen/respond to my "lecture" they'll do just fine anyway. (For now. Being a graduate teaching assistant, I've been stuck with a preexisting syllabus and book, and a final exam primarily written by someone else. The situation could change once I ...

Teacher movie. Kid Movie. Seems only logical today's movie should combine the two. School of Rock . It's been a while since I've seen this movie, so I'm mostly just sitting and watching. But, I just go to include Dewey's (Jack Black) first lesson to his class: Give up. Just quit. Because, in this life, you can't win. Yeah, you can try, but in the end you're just gonna lose. Big time. Because the world is run by the Man. The Man. Oh, you don't know the Man? He's everywhere. In the White House. Down the hall. Ms. Mullins--she's the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank. And there used to be a way to stick it to the Man. It was called Rock 'n Roll, but guess what? Oh no, the Man ruined that, too, with a little thing called MTV. So don't waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome 'cause the Man is just gonna call you a fat, ...

I've mentioned Dead Poets Society in this blog before (I'm pretty sure). Despite some arguments to the contrary--I will get to one in particular in just a moment--I think John Keating is a great teacher. Somewhere between the way he teaches and the way Tripper in Meatballs ... counsels? is how I want to be when I teach. I want to inspire students to want to know more. I want to offer them more than is on the syllabus or in the textbook. For context, I'm watching the movie in a classroom tonight. Asked to sub a class in which a movie I love was already on the schedule--that was a no-brainer. A short lecture about the four organizational frames--structural, human resource, political and symbolic--and we're into the film. Ostensibly, we're going to discuss the organizations within the film afterward in light of the four frames, but since I'm here, typing away at the back of the room in the meantime, I'm interested in how different people see certain films dif...

I'm in a thoughtful mood tonight. As Groundhog Day started tonight, I was eating a piece of cake with my face on it. That's not why I'm thoughtful, but it seemed like something worth mentioning. The entire cake had a group photo of our speech team on it. Tonight was our end-of-the-year banquet. It was just like the banquet at the end of Groundhog Day , if Phil were actually three coaches and a team president and the people talking were not approaching to thank him (them) but to, well, sort of roast them. And, instead of auctioning people off, our head coach handed out a few awards and we had cake. And Tracey, Vice President of the team for next year after only one year of doing this, performed an awesome piece with us coaches as birds (first eagles, then phoenixes--our official mascot is the golden eagle), the students as, well, the birds we're raising up to be eagles. I can't do it justice here. I don't know if any of my fellow coaches (who are graduating...