the groundhog day project

Klinton Spilsbury is not actually that bad; the adult version of his character barely has to emote for the story as presented to work. And, the dubbing over of his voice was done quite well; even knowing it was dubbed, I could only really tell in a few spots. Michael Horse is fine, though his characters role is both expanding upon older versions and reducing it, so it is hard to gauge just how much he matters to the plot, if not the legend. Christopher Lloyd is good as Cavendish. Jason Robards is fantastic as Grant (though I'll get back to Grant below). Everyone else is so minimally affective to the story that their performances don't matter much as measure of the film. The structure is fine as long as you don't have expectations of Lone Ranger action. An origin story, if it is going to be an origin story, should take some time, set up its pieces. The stuntwork is awesome, especially for 1981. As is the pyrotechnics. Merle Haggard's "balladeer" narration i...

Roger Ebert apparently never reviewed The Empire Strikes Back when it came out. He wrote a review for it in 1997, though, and he's got a great description of why this film is the reason the trilogy resonates. He writes : After the space opera cheerfulness of the original film, this one plunges into darkness and even despair, and surrenders more completely to the underlying mystery of the story. It is because of the emotions stirred in "Empire" that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart. It's an interesting idea, actually--that one film in a series might be the one that really makes the whole work. In the case of Star Wars , with only three films--the prequels and the new Disney-produced films are a separate case--and with repeated actors and filmmakers (and George Lucas behind all three), it is much easier to understand how this works. These three films connect more than, say, the Fri...