the groundhog day project

And then, there's Gordie. Opening scene, now a couple decades older (and I was surprised to learn that Richard Dreyfuss would have only been about 3 years older than Gordie would have been. Of course, in the book, Chris doesn't die in the mid-80s. He dies in 1973. When he and Gordie would only be 25-26 years old. The film does specify on the prop newspaper that Chris died September 4, 1985.) and sitting in silence, contemplating. We see the headline and know he's thinking about death, maybe a friend, maybe a family member. We don't know who Chris Chambers is. We don't yet know who Gordie Lachance is. CUT TO the past and it has long struck me that narrator Gordie saying "I was living in a small town" instead of "I lived in a small town" like he was just passing through. But, he is just passing through this time and place like any of us are. What happens now, what happens here--is finite, specific. Before he even gets to that line, we get...

Stand By Me still hits, emotionally. Even right off, the score is not particularly powerful, certainly not famous, but I recognize it immediately, and I know who Christopher Chambers is in that newspaper headline. I didn't know that first time I saw this movie what that headline was about. And, I also didn't realize that Castle Rock shouldn't be in Oregon, but I guess when they were adapting the novella, the only other marker of geography was Portland and Portland, Oregon was more well known than Portland, Maine. I didn't know Castle Rock at all. (Though it is part of The Dead Zone , which had already had a film version, I wouldn't see any of that movie until one night in a bed and breakfast in Dublin, Ireland in 1987. I wouldn't get to reading stories like "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut", "The Sun Dog", "It Grows on You", Cujo , The Dark Half , or Needful Things until at least a year or two later. That last one I would read on our...

Two movies today-- The Naked Spur and Shane . Twenty minutes into The Naked Spur , I'm wondering why Wright (1975) categorizes it under the vengeance plot. Howard Kemp (Jimmy Stewart) is a bounty hunter... and he did rip off the bottom of the wanted poster where it mentioned the reward, so maybe he's got a personal stake in this. I tend to like writing during the movies for this blog, but reading about a Western that, yes, I've probably seen, but no, don't remember, can spoil what's coming. There's some interesting gender commentary going on in this film. The wanted man, Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) claims he took in Lina Patch (Janet Leigh) because her pa was his best friend. And, the old prospector Jesse Tate, asked if he ever married one of the good women he's known, says he never had to with his good looks. Thing is, the male/female opposition is like a footnote at the edge of the main story. The real story here is Ben trying to put wedge between...

I really wanted to have some fun and write about the homoerotic subtext in Commando for Day 7, but as I was readying to start the movie, I turned on that Siskel and Ebert special I mentioned the other day . (You can watch it in four parts on YouTube starting here .) And, I was reminded of my research for my Rambo speeches a few years back... (fall 2010, I think). One of the things I watched while putting together my two speeches on Rambo was an episode or two of Rambo: The Force of Freedom , Rambo's cartoon that aired in 1986--between Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III . I'll get into Rambo more in the next week (i.e. I'm watching Rambo next for this month of 80s action movies), so I won't get into too much detail there (yet). But, as I'm looking into some information about this special--I do scholarly writing so I like to know the specific citation for my sources (even if, for this blog at least, I sometimes let a hyperlink suffice)--and I find reference ...

In 1985, Siskel and Ebert did a special episode about how Hollywod was "selling war" to children. This was in response to movies like Rambo and Commando , which gave us a very different view of war and violence than older films like, say, The Deer Hunter . War was a commodity to be sold and enjoyed. The last big commercial product of the Cold War was large scale violence as spectacle... Except, that wasn't really something new, was it? The tone had changed (again), but war and violence had been spectacles to be sold for a long time. In the 1980s, though, it seems like that spectacle was quite mundane and almost common. Not just the R-rated action movies or slasher films, but also more "family-friendly" films like Iron Eagle or Russkies . But, I don't really feel like reiterating the same point again today. Simply put, Americans love violent films and in the 1980s we loved them a little extra. And, Commando is so obviously built around the idea of the Un...