the groundhog day project

I turned thirteen the year after Josh did. He got the big city fantasy, the cool job (though inside two months it's feeling less cool by the time he leaves), the girlfriend who (eventually) plays along with his childish ways, the great apartment with the high ceilings and open spaces (I wanted Josh's apartment so much when I would grow up. I mean, how could I not think about the things I would want as a grown up when I'm watching this movie. I've said in this blog time and time again before that when I was younger I didn't think too seriously about the future, because, you know, late - Cold - War World War III fears coupled with cult leanings into the end of the world meant I was bombarded regularly by the idea that I would never actually have to adult. Certainly wouldn't grow up to have some corporate job, fun or not. And, I was a sad, overweight, late - bloomer, so the idea of a girlfriend who put up with my shit or not -- that was a bigger fantasy than most...

1. The

I was going to move on from Stand By Me after yesterday but as I was posting the blog entry and the film was ending, a detail caught my attention. And, having looked again at the book, it stood out. At the end of the film, narrator Gordie explains: As time went on we saw less and less of Teddy and Vern, until eventually they became just two more faces in the halls. It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant. I heard that Vern got married out of high school, had four kids and is now the forklift operator at the Arsenault Lumber Yard. In the book, Vern "was killed in a house fire that swept a Lewiston apartment building in 1966... Someone fell asleep in one of the bedrooms with a live cigarette going. Vern himself, maybe, drifting off, dreaming of his pennies. They identified him and the four others who dies by their teeth." The story of The Body takes place in 1960. So, Vern died when he was only about 18. He married no ...

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...

I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch and write about Highlander another time. I felt I had little to say that wouldn't take me past some breaking point where I might have to obsess, you know, build a blog or a movies-by-minutes podcast around it, dig into each and every detail. I wanted to write more about White Nights the other day, but a) I got to that movie on the 1st of the month and on the 2nd I return to Groundhog Day , 2) it would be awkward (at least in my head) to write about White Nights , step away from it, and then come right back to it after a day away, and d) what I wanted to say about it had to do with the present; I mean, White Nights is okay, but it ain't a great film, but there was something about the dancing, especially some of the stuff Baryshnikov was doing in that cold open, serious strength moves that I was a little envious of because I'm sitting here by my couch, overweight, drinking an adult beverage and lamenting that I can't do th...

Then again , who am I to tell anyone to shut up (not that what I did yesterday was that , exactly? And, who am I to preach about being creative when my only real creative outlet lately is this blog (with barely any audience) or Dungeons & Dragons , where my audience is a whole 6-9 players depending on the week? I had considered getting out a few of my unpublished manuscripts--the good ones--and re-editing them this summer to make available as ebooks, but then I got some summer classes to teach. Great news for the bank account but taking up a lot of my time for several weeks. Maybe I'll still get to the manuscripts. Knowing me, probably not. One little roadblock and I'll put it off, do something else. Story of my creative life. This blog--not strictly speaking an entirely creative exercise--is the one thing in recent years I have been able to stick with for a particularly long time. When I started actively trying to write fiction for the purpose of getting published--with ...

I wrote this movie. You'll get that later. I saw the trailer for Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! this past weekend. It was in front of 10 Cloverfield Lane (which was awesome), and the trailer kinda of made me less interested in seeing the film. Dazed and Confused was so effortlessly set in the 70s and Everybody Wants Some!! looks like it's trying a little hard to be set in the 80s. (To be fair, I don't remember ever watching the trailer for Dazed and Confused ; maybe it didn't seem so effortless cut down to a couple minutes.) The Squid and the Whale is quite effortlessly set in the 80s. Specifically, 1986. There's no Wedding Singer -style ridiculousness, no definitively 80s soundtrack more reminiscent of a VH1 special than the actual 80s. It's just set in that time, that place (Park Slope, Brooklyn).) A couple scenes in, dinner, the family dynamic is set. Frank (Owen Kline), the younger brother, randomly sticks a cashew up his nose and mo...

(An apology before I get into today's film... Today's official film; I also watched the Oscar-nominated The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared . (Think Forrest Gump by way of Sweden if in the present Forrest inadvertently stole millions from some criminals instead of telling his story to random people at a bus stop.) Today's film is Horrible Bosses --and no, not as some thematic link to yesterday 's Swimming with Sharks . In fact, I've never seen Horrible Bosses so I'm not even sure how related the two might be. Horrible bosses, obviously. But, that's a big part of so many movies. 9 to 5 , for example. And, that is where we get to my apology. For, you see, yesterday was Day 925 of this blog, and I did not plan ahead so that I would be watching 9 to 5 on that day. And, watching 9 to 5 on Day 925 is just... poetry. Like if I had not watched 300 on Day 300... Which is a despicable example because I did not watch 300 on Day 300 ...

First of all, hello new readers. It's that time of year when people are googling "Groundhog Day." And, well, if you're reading this, that might be you. (If you want to understand the holiday, go to this entry for the basics or this entry for a bit of melatonin science. Otherwise, stick around. Second of all, I'm watching Groundhog Day early. The usual thing for year three is that Groundhog Day falls on the 2nd of every month--and I will watch it tomorrow to be proper--but alas I had a problem. At school from 7am to 10pm, had not really thought about what movie I was watching today until I was on the ride home. I thought about watching The Paper , a little bit of Michael Keaton working at a newspaper as an echo of Spotlight , plus it would tie into the one class I am taking this quarter-- (I believe it is officially called "Constructing LA" and something about narrative. Taught by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez. Involves a lot of narrati...

Two things: 1) When Craig first enters Malkovich's head, he has a piece of wood in his hand. On the one hand, I'm not sure why some random board was sitting in the file room. On the other hand, as Craig points out, that board disappears. On a third hand, the board actually shows back up at the end of the film when Craig is kicked out of Malkovich's head for the last time. 2) There was a piece published on rogerebert.com the other day--"Unfathomable Life: A Writer Grieves for Her Father, Through Five Movies." The title gives it away. Jessica Ritchey writes about her grief and her grieving process by reviewing five movies through 2015. It's remarkably succinct in how big it is, how encompassing of so much of the human experience but also entirely isolated to Ms. Ritchey's experience. It's the argument I make time and time again in this blog--movies can evoke so much, pull us out of our selves, or push us into ourselves just when we need it. Groundhog ...

I can relate a bit too well to the fictional Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation. . The awkwardness, the nervousness, always being stuck in my own head. Laroche as well. His obsessions. His movings on. And Susan Orlean. How she wishes she could end things as abruptly as Laroche is capable. How she wants to want something as much as "these people want flowers." This week two new episodes of The X-Files aired after more than a decade without. I used to have a copy of Mulder's I WANT TO BELIEVE poster on my wall... You can see it in this photo of my small, cluttered bedroom in circa June 2000. The other X-Files poster there was signed by a few actors (including Gillian Anderson) and several of the writers of the show at a couple X-Files -specific conventions. Thinking about this conventions just now I found it interesting how I could waiver between different versions of myself in just one day. Awkward and alone through most of the day then happen to be in line with, as you m...

The thing that really fascinates me about Charlie Kaufman sometimes is how mundane his early writing credits are. A couple episodes of Get a Life --not the most normal of sitcoms but not as strange as Kaufman's films--a sketch comedy show that I cannot remember if I ever watched ( The Edge ), eight episodes of The Dana Carvey Show , two of Ned and Stacey , and then Being John Malkovich . Like suddenly he had free reign and he embraced it. ( Adaptation. was supposed to be Kaufman coming back around to normal and he both fails and succeeds at this.) I don't know if I ever had that moment when I was writing fiction regularly. I think I actually had the opposite in a way. I started by writing fiction with bits of the supernatural in it. My first novel--the writing of which is awful, but which I would love to rewrite now if I had the time--started as an attempt to take the idea of the virgin sacrifice seriously in a modern context. I think I was picturing the stone sacrificial...