the groundhog day project

The question then: why does something like Highlander II happen? The explanations have been offered of course, stuff like economic collapse in Argentina just as production was underway there, for example. But, that is just an explanation for or why some of the awfulness exists. Obviously, there was some initial script, before there were money problems or investors taking over problems, and that script included aliens from the planet Zeist, and that script ignored a great deal of the original. What kind of cynical Hollywood puts this kind of thing together and ever thinks it's a good idea? Or does it think it's a good idea, at all? Is it just after money? Is it simply Hollywood banking on the familiarity of a name? Regarding that last question, I got curious. For anyone to think you could bank on the Highlander name (for anything beyond a syndicated late night tv series, as Highlander would have a year after the awful sequel), science fiction and fantasy had to be doing part...

Fargo playing but I just finished live tweeting Terminator Genisys , over a hundred tweets, and looking forward to this, a much better film. On the Oscars front, Fargo was nominated for seven awards (Best Picture, Supporting Actor (William H. Macy), Director (Joel Cohen), Cinematography (Roger Deakins), Editing (Ethan and Joel Cohen)) and won two (Actress (Frances McDormand) and Original Screenplay (Ethan and Joel Cohen)). Notably, McDormand won as Lead when she's got less screentime than Supporting nominee Macy. I was thinking about this film just yesterday, about cinematography specifically. Deakins here makes a good show of framing the wide open spaces of North Dakota. Deakins is up for Cinematography again this year--for Sicario . I saw Sicario opening day, four months ago and I'm forgetting how many wide open shots that film--a couple good ones, I suppose. The opening shot, for example, a tract home neighborhood, not the most beautiful of visuals, but the wide shot fr...

(No, I'm not watching The Terminator .) Three guys dead in the first four minutes, cut to a mysterious guy walking through the woods with a chainsaw. It's like a horror film until we see the comforting sight of Arnold Schwarzenegger's face. Then it gets really scary. I mean, what had he been at this point, anyway? (Strange I-camera bit going on as his daughter sneaks up on him. He should've just turned the axe on her and saved himself a lot of trouble later... Was that callous? I can't tell. The Terminator was just feeding a deer on my screen. Nothing seems real right now. So, who cares about the life of Samantha Micelli?) Hercules in New York --dubbed. The Villain , Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer , in which he can barely say some lines or emote properly, and The Terminator , in which he doesn't have to. Being Conan certainly made him hero material, but coming into this movie, I think I probably was hoping for something like The Terminator , ...

In their essay, “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture," Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis give us a slightly different take on Phil’s experience than Daughton’s (1996) notion that “Phil’s situation… parallels that of the economically disenfranchised, the Other”; Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis tell us “what comes under attack” in the film “is a particular manifestation of cyclical temporality that actually exists in capitalist societies.” One essay’s take on the “cyclical temporality” implicit in Ralph’s line, “That about sums it up for me” matches up with another’s take on Phil’s trap linking to him the disenfranchised, which arguably includes Ralph. That “arguably” of mine is a key point where many might disagree, though. Usually, we would only use “economically disenfranchised” to describe people living, say, below the poverty line, people without many options in their lives, people stuck… well, see, I’m already blurring the definition just enough to be sure I can include the likes of Ralph,...