the groundhog day project

"Crazy" Cora is introduced fighting off two men. Seems their boss has told them they could bring some "white tarts" back with them because they're sick of black women. Meanwhile the titular hero Quigley is on his way to their boss's land for a job he does not know the details of just yet. There is long-distance shooting involved--that's all he knows. Yet he went half way around the world to take the job. Until, of course, Marston tells him what the job actually is. A couple details that matter if you've not seen the film and need to know (rather than going and watching it post haste): 1) Marston has a fascination for the American West and Quigley is visually very much the cowboy of most Westerns, 2) Marston wants Quigley to shoot Aborigines. It's interesting now that the guy who carries the bucket off for Quigley's show-off shot after he arrives at Marston's is apparently called Whitey. It's a movie with a blatantly racist vi...

Opening music: "Hoochie Coochie Man" by Muddy Waters. Minus a point right off the bat. Mark spent the previous night drinking, and wakes in bed with a woman he does not remember. Not a race problem, but still an immediate negative. This guy should not be going to Harvard. (That woman in his bed is Missy from Bill & Ted and Kim from Summer School . Amy Stoch as girl who doesn't even get a name here.) He also has a bucket of tennis balls to turn off two separate alarms (set for noon). He's a Ferris Bueller-wannabe asshole, is what he is. Minor thing in Mark's favor later: as a lawyer he may be able to sue his father over spending money from what his father specifically calls his "tuition account" on a timeshare in a condo in Barbados. Calling it a "tuition account" sounds like at the least an oral agreement, and based on how banks deal with things like that today, the account itself might have been labeled per its purpose and prob...

I was thinking about westerns today, you know, as one does. And, about war films, and cop films, and all those ex-soldiers killing far too many bad guys in the 80s, and there was a clear trend about (mostly) lone white men fighting all levels of evil, this specifically American (but surely understood in many another culture as well) fantasy about how much one man can do on his own (or with a small band of similar heroes). And, while recently we have drifted back into the same fantasy with the prevalence of superhero films, there is an interesting gap through the 90s--full of aging versions of too many of those 80s heroes and young heroes raging against fascist governments--that makes me want to do a serious study, a la Wright's Six Guns and Society or Nowell's Blood Money , but focused on the thesis that all these various types of action films are variations of one genre, not multiple. That westerns and those grungy cop dramas from the 70s, those big buff soldiers (some damage...

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...

...or better. Because, let's face it, when you keep a sex (or a race-- (Just note the early scene in 9 to 5 with the mailroom attendant Eddie Smith, a black man, who is upset by the new hire Judy (Jane Fonda) because he wants to be promoted out of the mailroom; the film acknowledges right away the problem is far bigger than just sex.) --or any group really) down systematically for, well, ever, it's going to take a little more than equality to make it right. Equal treatment isn't going to lift someone up enough--like Judy or Violet or Doralee here--that they would be anywhere near you if you've been lifted up since centuries or millennia before you were born. That is, lift up too unequal parties the same, they will still be unequal. Rich get richer and poor get poorer and all that. Men stay on top, women stay on the bottom, and the system runs as it has always run. Getting stuff like the changes the three leads make here at Consolidated Companies--job sharing, on-...