the groundhog day project

Sometimes, I see a new movie and I wish I dealt in something more like reviews. Less of this unstructured discussion. This afternoon I saw Black Panther and I wanted to come home and fashion a brilliant review that celebrated the statement the film makes for Africans and African-Americans, and indicted white folks for, well, all of the shit they've done and do, and for their paranoia regarding Black Panther itself. I saw a post this morning--on Twitter I think... Nevermind the vagueness; I looked it up to check. It was the Twitter handle The Trump Train . They posted this: It's very fitting that the same people who claim to support equality and diversity also glorify a movie that idolizes black supremacy and establishing a black-only ethnostate. There was also a line about liberals and hypocrisy but it's that bit about Black Panther that gets me. Even before I saw the movie, and before I saw replies on Twitter confirming it, I knew that Black Panther is quite explici...

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...

Long day. Oscar nominations at 5:30am. Some teacher stuff I had to do on the computer, while setting up an Oscars page on Facebook. Busy, busy, busy, as a Bokononist might say. Caught up on some TV in the afternoon, then Republican Debate. And that went overtime. Finally, just watched and livetweeted Galaxy Quest in honor of Alan Rickman, whose death was announced this morning. Great actor. Don't think I said enough about him when I blogged about Die Hard ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ) a year ago. I figure I'll get back to Charlie Kaufman soon, maybe tomorrow... or I might watch a few of the Oscar-nominated films I haven't seen yet first. Thoughtful today. But, not feeling too wordy. (Especially after tweeting through the debate and a movie. Go read my tweets if you like.)

Got Life Itself playing again right now. Also watched 45 Years today--not a film for people who don't like it slow, but I loved it until it didn't seem to really end, it was just... not on anymore. #NoClosure Sorry for the hashtag, but I just spent a couple hours watching and livetweeting # JurassicWorld on the Groundhog Day Project 's Twitter (after livetweeting (though I didn't actually tweet much for this one) the State of the Union with my personal Twitter ) and hashtags were getting thrown around a lot. I considered just copying and pasting the tweets here as today's blog entry, but I realized I have not gotten to something I really wanted to get to when I watched Life Itself the first time . I used Roger's line about movies being a machine that generates empathy as my title and never really got to the empathy thing. Plus, the tweets are probably best enjoyed in the format in which they were posted. Click the link above and check them out. Blasco an...