the groundhog day project

The big problem I've got with Heaven Can Wait is that so much of it plays as just too easy. Joe dies, and he's the only dead person who doesn't want to get on that Concorde at the way station? He gets to inhabit (temporarily) the body of a rich business man, and he can reverse all the bullshit corporate norms that just happen to be awful in reality with one board meeting? The first woman he meets in his new life just happens to be the love of his life? This one is really part and parcel of the point of the film, but he buys the Rams and they rush him and rush him to let him know they don't want them there and one successful pass and they're already turning around? Tony is setting up to kill Leo (Joe) a second [correction: third; I forgot about the ceiling mirror collapsing onto the bed] time and the film has set up the cannon firing when they take the flag down at the end of the day, so that detail is fine as a coverup of the gun noise, but Joe just happens to stan...

#OscarsSoWhite continues. Jada Pinkett Smith (married of course to Will Smith, who is one of the oft cited actors of colour who could/should have been nominated for an Oscar this year) put out a few tweets and then a video about boycotting the Oscars. Spike Lee joined her. So did Michael Moore. One person that specifically spoke out against Jada was her husband's old costar from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air , Janet Hubert. But, she had to go and start with a somewhat sexist-- I'm getting ahead of myself. How about Jada's tweets first, set some context beyond just the fact that in the past ten years worth of acting nominations (just to narrow it down to one field), the Academy had only nominated 26 people of colour and 174 white people. Colourless people, if you will. Because the Academy was last reported as being 94% white and 54% over the age of 60 (with an average age of about 62), so this is an organization of, you know, old white men. Anyway, Jada's tweets: At th...

Sometimes, I just can't mince words. The Big Short made me angry. Not because it was a bad film. Far from it, in fact. The ensemble is great, Steve Carell giving the best performance probably, Christian Bale a close second (though Brad Pitt has the best moment in the film). The film makes use of clever voiceover--take note, Danny Rubin --and deliberately bazaar (and out of context) celebrity cameos to explain confusing investment terminology. And, it does a great job of mixing some documentary-style montages to offer up context as to the timeline of events. It tells the story of Inside Job in a simpler fashion, and expands Margin Call 's story into a larger setting. If you don't know either of those films, the former is a documentary, the latter a scripted film, and both are about the financial crisis of 2008. The Big Short begins a few years earlier, when Michael Burry (Bale) basically creates the "credit default swap" and banks let him buy a whole lot of them...

(Cross-posted between my daily Groundhog Day Project movie blog and my far-less-regularly updated Against the World political blog.) The Naturalization, Alien Friends, Alien Enemies and Sedition Acts of 1798. Anti-German and anti-Irish sentiment in the mid-1800s (and beyond; is not the drunken Irishman still a staple of film?). More anti-German sentiment around the two World Wars. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Anti-Italian sentiment from the 1800s into the 1900s. (For example, the largest mass lynching in US History was that of nine Italian-Americans who had been found not guilty of murder and let go in New Orleans, 1891. They and two other Italians held on unrelated charges were dragged from jail and lynched. Arrests followed, but not of those who did the lynching. Rather, more Italians. In a piece at cnn.com , 10 July 2012, Ed Falco describes how President Roosevelt called the lynchings "a rather good thing.") Anti-Catholic sentiment just ...