the groundhog day project

For a movie that hinges on some rather exciting sequences, Iron Eagle starts out with some really slow, boringly scored footage of jets flying. Like we were all going to get off just seeing jets flying... which maybe we were in 1986. I know there were these books in our school library that were basically just visual and technical guides to military vehicles and it was like pro-America propaganda and war porn wrapped up in a series of... I guess they were Time Life books, but I was never as into them as a couple friends of mine were. But, give me a good action movie with Americans taking on Communists or Arabs for, you know, whatever reason, and surely I cheered like anyone else did in the theater. Iron Eagle was, of course, one of a string of jingoistic action movies in the 80s that offered an extra bit of fun for a kid--the protagonist was not some stuffy adult, was not some guy who follows all the rules (And, how was it so fucking common for protagonists in so many 80s films,...

(We interrupt the planned programming here at The Groundhog Day Project --because my VHS set of Star Wars films didn't arrive and I don't feel like skipping ahead--to bring you a brief bit about mother! --because I saw it again today, and however much it is horrifying some people, I liked it even more the second time than I did the first time.) Honestly, you probably won't like mother! . I mean, statistically, most people won't like it. Maybe, taking into account the limited scope of this blog and the side of the Venn diagram of film aficionados who might come to my blog regularly, you're one of the few who will not only like it but love it. An Aronofsky fan, perhaps. A fan of divisive, provocative, polarizing cinema, maybe. Let's get some stuff out of the way right off. You know, SPOILERS. You're gonna get overloaded with imagery of violence, of gratuitous religiosity, of Jennifer Lawrence's breasts, of a newborn baby's half eaten corpse, and ...

Elijah Wood, especially as a kid, has a tone to his voice that limits his vocal range that doesn't mean he has to be as ridiculous and melodramatic as he was a few too many times in North . Today: The War . Same year as North , but a much better showing from Wood. The film doesn't have too many notes to hit, and it hits them in such obvious ways most of the time, but I have loved it since I first saw it at a free screening at USC just before it was in theatres proper. (Full disclosure: I also used parts of this film in two different interp speeches my first two years competing in speech and debate, so I'm a little attached.) It's got this nice combination of childish innocence and a keen adult sense of how horrible life can be. Something I loved about some of Stephen King's early novels, a tone I put into the a few of my own. I guess it's easier to explore some of the darkest of the see through eyes that don't understand it, because we all love to imagi...

Allow me to get the obvious out of the way after last week's Hunger Games marathon : in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 , Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence, in case you're living under a rock) actually does stuff throughout most of the film. Almost all of it is even her idea. The interesting thing, though, is that the story still manages to let Katniss kill almost no one. She kills some Mutts--and not the dog-type like in the first film, but some naked albino 28 Days Later -style zombies instead... In fact, that sequence does a great job of building some real tension and giving weight to an otherwise obvious set of deaths to winnow down the main group in the film--oh, SPOILERS will happen in this entry. If you want to see the film and have not read the book, you probably should not be reading this. My complaint regarding that sequence is that the score suggests action film when the sequence plays more like something out of a horror film. Actually, that sequence is one of severa...

Clint Eastwood once again (directing as well as starring)-- The Outlaw Josey Wales . By the time the opening credits come to Eastwood's director credit, we've seen the titular Josey's wife and son murdered by Union soldiers and Josey join up with Confederate guerrillas. We've seen more war footage already than in the entire Civil War section of How the West Was Won , and just barely over ten minutes in, the guerrillas are surrendering. But, not Josey. He stays right where he is and says, "This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! He didn't get out of the cock-a-doodie car!" Sorry, wrong film. More like, they just cheated us, we lost the war and have to be one country again. The cheating follows, actually--the massacre of the surrendered guerrillas... And, the Western hinges on the Civil War once again. And, it's a sore subject in this country in the present. As Josey tells Lone Wa...