the groundhog day project

I wrote about Footloose --my first film for 1984 in this childhood deconstruction--once before in this blog. I used it to begin my Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon -inspired month back in February 2016. And, speaking of tying things together--the title of that entry, taking its title from a line from the film, was " all of our lives are ties up with each other "--the film begins with random pairs of feet dancing to the titular Kenny Loggins tune. No characters, no faces. It's deliberately universalizing in its fun. Those feet could be anybody, any of us. And then, there's the preaching, and then high school girls being bad (and doing dangerous things; at least Ariel (Lori Singer) risk serious injury, anyway). I wrote before several attempts to link the characters to The Tempest through the name Ariel. I didn't write much about religion, but religion is all over this film. From Reverend Moore's (John Lithgow) opening sermon to the oppressive atmosphere all over the...

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...