the groundhog day project

Yesterday , a few minutes of this movie boiled down to more words than I usually go for in this blog. And, I am tempted to do things like that again, see the trees instead of the forest, as it were. Like, for example, a single shot--Kyoko sitting in the hallway with her shoes off. Or Ava presenting her drawing to Caleb like a child showing off to a parent. And, maybe I will get to another breakdown like that, with this film or another. But, today, I want to deal with something less cinematic, more... philosophical, political. Natalie Wilson at Ms. Magazine says that Ex Machina "explore[s] sexuality and gender in intriguing ways, but fails to explicitly condemn how the sex/gender paradigm is used as a tool of domination in profoundly deleterious ways." But, I disagree. I think the film is all about condemning that paradigm, condemning the ways men manipulate the world, men manipulate other men, men manipulate women, and only to a lesser extent, the ways women manipulate me...

To counter yesterday 's Katniss Everdeen, we have Ava (Alicia Vikander) in Ex Machina . Literally programmed to be who she is, Ava demonstrates more agency in one film than Katniss does in three... Maybe. There is a point where the "programming" inherent in cinematic characters by the writer and the director and the actor (let's call this LEVEL 2) conflict with the "programming" of the character within the story by her creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) (which we'll call LEVEL 1, since we're talking about the film here), and where both of those levels of "programming" conflict with the real-life "programming" that a woman receives from the society around her (LEVEL 3). We'll come back to the issue of programming. First--and this entry will be full of SPOILERS big and small--Nathan's introduction is entirely manipulative of both Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) and the audience. Reclusive tech-genius living in (my personal take) an ...

Mockingjay Part 2 doesn't come out for a week, but today was a Hunger Games day. While grading papers, I've had the original The Hunger Games and then The Hunger Games: Catching Fire playing. Seen those two before, but haven't seen the third one-- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 --before now. As this one gets going, I must voice my primary complaint with the first two because really, I wish Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) had more to do. The problem--the problem with my problem, that is--is that it would be hard to market a story to young readers (and maybe more so the film based on it) in which the main character kills a bunch of other young people, even if she is forced... In America, at least. I know there are those who call The Hunger Games series a ripoff of Battle Royale , a Japanese manga series (and I believe there's a movie, but I haven't seen it) that is very much about teenagers killing each other. In Japan, you can have that plot more readily wit...

It's not a profound thing, but I've been noticing more than usual lately how films often put a trio of characters at the center of the story. Just running back the recent films I've watched for this blog, you've got: Joy and Sadness and Bing Bong in Inside Out ; Samantha and Jake and the Geek in Sixteen Candles ; Andie and Duckie and Blane in Pretty in Pink ; Keith and Amanda and Watts in Some Kind of Wonderful ; Gerda and Einar and Lili (yes, those last two are, arguably, the same person) in The Danish Girl ; Lucas and Maggie and Cappie in Lucas ; two versions of Ronald, along with Cindy in Can't Buy Me Love . Serendipity breaks it because of its deliberate plot division--Jonathan and Sara each get their own sounding board rather than (sort of) sharing one. Then, of course, we get back to Groundhog Day . I've written at least one whole entry just about trios in that movie. Of course, I'm not sure I ever revisited that topic, and with as little screentim...

I've written before about Inside Out . In my other, less regularly updated blog, of course, but I still wrote a basic review. So, we'll skip past that. (For context, I've seen the movie a couple times already. Tonight was a special screening with Q&A with co-writer Meg LeFauvre courtesy of Jeff Goldsmith (same as The Danish Girl last week. Saer went with me and something she said about how the parents in the film are annoying actually got me thinking...) Structurally, Joy (Amy Poehler)--and to a lesser extent, Sadness (Phyllis Smith)-- is the parent for Riley (Kaitlyn Dias). Mom (Diane Lane) and Dad (Kyle MacLachlan) are important in the overarching plot, of course, but ultimately they don't do anything special for Riley, they don't really affect the plot except inasmuch as the move to San Francisco triggers what would otherwise be a pubescent change, and none of the emotional beats belong to them; even that bittersweet core memory hug at the end of the fi...

Backtrack a few years. Give us the setup--sixteenth birthday, parents forgot about it--then a montage of high school scenes under the opening titles. Pretty basic. Samantha (Molly Ringwald) talking to herself is a bit too "voiceover" without being a voiceover. I'm not sure I approve.                   And then there were few words. But, I just gotta say, the chemistry between Ringwald and Michael Anthony Hall in the half car is awesome. And, Samantha is my kind of character... that is, a character like me. Obsesses about a crush that shouldn't amount to anything, practices what she's going to say to him ahead of time, then fails to say anything. Been there. The Geek (Hall), on the other hand, has a bizarre level of confidence for being a geek. Much more than Hall's character in The Breakfast Club . Much more than I ever had at that age. Hell, more than I've usually got to this day. But, getting back to performances, the scene wi...

Howard Deutch starts his commentary track for Pretty in Pink by talking about his director of photography Tak Fujimoto. Then he talks about the importance of the father/daughter relationship in the film and he talks about the film being like his "first girlfriend." Meaning: he remembers specific details about the making of that he doesn't about other movies he would make later. Like the fact that the intro shot of Duckie walking down the hall was left out of the first edit and he had to tell the editor to put it in there. Deutch thought James Spader was an obnoxious creep, but didn't immediately realize that would make him perfect for the part of Steff. John Hughes got him to cast Spader. Improv note: Annie Potts as Iona, saying "It's so... modern." Deutch says, "Jon Cryer, in this part, transcends acting." He's "channeling" this person. (Except, not quite because Deutch and he had a system called a "boner meter" for...