the groundhog day project

I made the mistake--and, in this case, it was a mistake [it made hating this thing even easier]--of reading Roger Ebert's review of The Natural before I pressed play on the film tonight. I remember this film as a weird sort of film noir that somehow involves a baseball player. And, it opens now with Robert Redford (who we will find out later is playing a character called Roy Hobbs) waiting for and then getting on a train, not useful dialogue, not characterization effort, just Redford. CUT TO: flashback montage, Roy as a boy learns to play baseball while his father says some lines that someone thought were philosophical when they wrote them... A storm. Montage of sports pennants in the flash of the lightning. Then the tree out back gets struck, Roy carves a bat out of its trunk and I get something Roger says. Roger explains: As for the baseball, the movie isn't even subtle. When a team is losing, it makes Little League errors. When it's winning, the hits are so accurat...

Watching Midnight Special in the theater today, yesterday 's theme came back to me. First of all, great movie, takes a potentially huge narrative and squeezes it into a very small scale; writer/director Jeff Nichols set out specifically to explore the strength of a father/son relationship, what it means to be a parent. And, I'm watching this movie and thinking, there it is again ; we're embedded with Roy (Michael Shannon) so we understand that he loves his son (Jaeden Lieberher), so when he pulls a gun on a cop, or his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) shoots that cop, we are sympathizing already even before we understand what's going on with the boy, and where this story is going. Watching Mrs. Doubtfire one more time, I gotta reiterate, the whole birthday party scenario plays the way it does so we sympathize with Daniel (Robin Williams). Miranda (Sally Field) tells him, "Don't make me out to be the monster, here," but the movie has already done that. In mo...

This morning in the hotel breakfast room, there was a guy who works on scripts for AMC and the History Channel--their war shows--talking with his friend about script policies. Among other things, he said they had to downplay battles that we lost and to avoid referring to any time that we retreated. Scripts needed "high five" moments. I imagine the Western genre as something a lot like this, promoting the Western myth as fact, though cloaked in fiction. Today, for example, we were driving up the 70 to Roswell, New Mexico and we passed the location where John Tunstall was murdered (a moment we've seen in The Left Handed Gun already this month and that we will see a couple more times; the Billy the Kid story is one that bears repeating. I was surprised at how the location was situated in a nice green valley, surrounded by hills. I seem to recall the location being depicted more like a desert in film. Even when we emerged out of the valley, there were low hills and grasslan...