the groundhog day project

Scroll down past the parenthetical if you want to get to the movie. (Author's note: I have not committed to doing this film (and its versions) for the entire month, but I have excluded my original plan for the month because I realized that the next movie ( Blade Runner ) I was going to spend a whole bunch of days on wasn't going to leave as much room for discussion because its versions are just alternate cuts, not deliberately separate versions of the story. The movie ( Brazil ) I was going to end the month with fits a little closer to this, but its variations are all about meddling after the fact, not planning. And, both films have been written about so much I don't know if I could offer much in the way of original insight... Oh, I'd give you something. And, it would, at least at some point, be amazing. But, a lot of it would be repeating other sources' takes on the films in question, especially Blade Runner . (The most original thing I could do there is not act...

I realize tonight--seeing that opening dine-and-dash bit for the eighth time--that the opening scene sets up the dichotomy between Eleanor and Conor pretty well. I'm back to The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them tonight. And, if you know the film, or have been reading this past week's entries, this should make sense... First, a rundown: Opening line, from Conor: "Would you still love me if I couldn't pay for dinner?" Eleanor hesitates, Conor's seriousness taking a moment to sink in. Then, she answers, unsure, "Possibly." Conor laughs. Eleanor realizes for sure he's not kidding. She laughs, too. Conor, smiling, says, "Yeah." [Beat] "What do we do?" Eleanor: "I'm thinking." Conor suggests, "We could have a big row. And throw some shit. They might kick us out." Eleanor dismisses that option. "Uh, been done, and it would draw too much attention." She's already doing something with...

(I'm writing a thesis because my memory is not always what it used to be. Throw some movies in there and they'll stick. But, throw a communication theory and I will absolutely be able to understand it and explain it back to you but later I will have to look up the specifics again. Tonight, I wanted to start with a reference to encoding and decoding in basic communication, and I wanted to reference whoever first used the terms in the way I mean them here, but my theory book is... Well, it's either on a shelf in my office or another grad student borrowed it. Probably the latter. Instead of the book, I google it and find it's totally someone obvious--for we communication scholars, anyway, maybe not for the rest of you--Stuart Hall. 1973, he wrote a piece calls "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" and apparently that's where people started using the terms as I'm about to mean them.) Backtrack to The Beatles and "Eleanor Rigby"-...

The first awesome thing about The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them is how it starts like a romantic comedy and then makes a jarring turn with Eleanor's attempted suicide. Then, it's mostly dark, in different ways. That's what happens when your story begins after a child dies and his mother tries to kill herself. You also get an exploration of self, or an exploration into the exploration of self. Both Conor (James McAvoy) and Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) are trying to figure out who they are. Without their son. Without each other. Lillian (Viola Davis) even teaches a course on Identity Theory. (That and the broken down relationship... No wonder this film is right down my alley.) Stu (Bill Hader) doesn't know how to be Conor's friend anymore because Conor is.... Well, he's occasionally belligerent, a bit isolated, refuses certain conversation. One identity affects another. Lillian reads from Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles , part of the followin...

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them was not supposed to exist. There were supposed to be two movies-- Him and Here --but we'll get to those later. First, the amalgam. Opening sequence: a happy couple acting younger and more in love than they will be through the rest of the movie. Next scene, Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) jumps off a bridge. A scene framed well. She walks, leaves the frame, then we hear what happens. She survives, is hospitalized and we're left to wonder how she got from Point A to Point B. As Eleanor leaves her hospital room she also briefly goes out of frame. I've seen this film once (just the Them version as the other two, even here in LA, were available too briefly for me to get to them), but I don't remember if this is a thing, something writer/director will keep doing, let the camera remain still as characters (maybe just Eleanor) step outside the frame. [Later note: in the flashback where Eleanor and Conor dance by the car, sure enough, C...

Cinderella ‘s kind of a horrible story, too. The idea that love can be found in one dance, that the prince can rescue the girl from a bad situation... except, love can feel like a rescue, I suppose. And, it’s loss can feel like... whatever the opposite is. I saw The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them today and it’s a sad story that invokes the shadow left when love (and romance) are gone. It’s an awesome film, a tragic film with the vaguest sense of hope in the end. Comparatively, Pretty Woman is a slight little thing, hardly worth another thousand negative words... Instead, I offer this. There’s a simple reason that we buy into the “romance” on display in Pretty Woman . Money and the things it can buy are important to us in this country, in the whole of the Western World, to be sure. Where other romantic comedies focus in on the other items on Dowd and Pallotta’s (2000) “norms,” Pretty Woman recognizes that all love is a transaction. Recall my discussion of social penetration ...