the groundhog day project

Writing about Ran at Akira Kurosawa Info , Vili Maunula makes an interesting point about a specific moment in that film: [W]hen told about Ayabe's advance against Jiro's troops, Saburo's General, sitting next to his master's dead body, asks lamenting... "How can this be? Of all things, at this moment, why did Master Saburo have to die? Why did Lord Hidetora have to go?" It does not take much insight to realise that the straightforward answer to the general's question--why did they have to die at this moment--is that the structure of the tragedy mandates these events, as they are the driving force of the story's final catharsis. Noteworthy is also the manner in which these lines are delivered, not facing the other soldiers or the fool, but rather by hesitantly gazing towards the direction of the camera. I've mentioned before how one of the screenplays I wrote years ago ends with the main character stripping off her shirt to bare her scars to th...

After calling heterosexual romantic comedies cheap yesterday , today I'm watching one that I remember fondly-- Two of a Kind . My final film for 1983 in my deconstruction of my childhood experience with film. A reminder: I'm not going back to every film I saw, or the big movies I saw, but specifically the films that I watched and rewatched time and time again as a kid. Two early thoughts rewatching this film after many years: 1. We're getting a POV shot from God flying through the clouds. That might be quite meaningful later. 2. Charlie (Charles Durning) swiping Earl's (Scatman Crothers) golf ball and nothing coming of it is pretty funny. Then we're with Zack (John Travolta), because God wants proof that a regular person can be good or he's going to flood the Earth again. Zack owes some guys some money, he's an inventor (and, interestingly, a bunch of his machines in his apartment seem to be working just fine, so I guess he's a good one), Stuart (Richa...