the groundhog day project

More Star Wars , more SPOILERS. Not that I will make a particular effort to SPOIL things this time, but since I do not deal in straight reviews in this blog, it is inevitable that I will bring up details of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that are SPOILERS. Proceed with caution.           I was going to write today about how it is okay that The Force Awakens echoes plot points from the original trilogy because there are only so many available plotlines anyway, and as Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong'o) describes it, the fight going on in the present is the only fight, the same fight that keeps happening in different guises. Whether it is the Sith or the Knights of Ren or some megalomaniacal dictator who isn't even force sensitive--Domhnall Gleeson evokes a good Hitlerian vibe in his General Hux, and it really a different type of villain than Star Wars has had before. We can assume that Palpatine made some big speeches like Hux's but we've never been shown those thing...

Got Star Wars out of my system... at least until I can get one of my kids to go see it so I have an excuse to go see it again. Now, back to our irregularly scheduled blog about a political movie. (If you're somehow here because of yesterday 's Star Wars SPOILERS post, you should know that this month I have been trying to alternate between political films and fantasy films (though the definition of both of those things has gotten a little blurry). Anyway, the other day I watched Bulworth --a movie I have liked since I first saw it in the theater but which always bugs me in some of its particulars. One of those particulars was really getting to me after watching it again this past week, and I want to get back to it now. See, the good thing about this film is that it offers a politician so broken by the system of which he is a part that he a) doesn't want to live anymore and b) doesn't want to lie anymore... to the point of volunteering some very offensive notions to m...

It would be difficult to talk about Star Wars: The Force Awakens without SPOILING certain elements of its story. There will be ample warning before I get to that. PART I - ON NOSTALGIA AND A LIFE WITH STAR WARS First, it must be said that Star Wars has been in my life pretty much from the beginning. While I do not specifically recall seeing the original--I was only a year old when it came out and am not actually sure when I first saw it--nor do I have specific memory of seeing The Empire Strikes Back for the first time, by the time Return of the Jedi came out, I was very familiar with the previous two, having watched them many times. And, I do remember going to the movie theater to see Return of the Jedi , I remember shopping at Toys R Us for action figures that year (I already had some), and when the Power of the Force line came out in 1985, I bought more. Through the 80s I watched all three films time and time again. I may have invented this but I remember one day home sick f...

Today might not make any sense. Or it might involve insights into filmic structure and the visual tendencies of cinema... especially within the Star Wars films. See, I’m going to watch a video built from all six previous Star Wars films playing at the same time. (I was going to link to it, but to copies have been taken down from YouTube and the site where I’m watching it now might just lose it also. (Oh, just in case .) There is another version that has (present tense—that one has not been taken down) them laying over the top of one another, but it is hard to really look at that one for too long. I tested this one out a few days ago to make sure it wouldn’t be utter chaos. It’s not. Much. Positive thought: without the ability to make out a lot of Lucas’ cheesy dialogue, maybe this will make some of this more awesome. Anyway, here goes. (I’ll keep it simple— The Phantom Menace is ONE, Attack of the Clones is TWO, and so on.) Note: this video uses the “Special Edition” versi...

Let's think about the biology of a mogwai. It can't get wet, yet it's got blood. Blood--human blood, anyway--is like half water. Technically, it's like 55% plasma and plasma is 90% water. And, Gizmo's blood seems to be similar to human blood--it's red, it's translucent. Gremlin blood is a bit different, thicker and a dark green. Still liquid, though. In terms of evolutionary biology, the idea that a species would evolve that did not involve water in a major way... (All Stripe needed to do when all of his kids got blown up was run around in the snow for a bit. That would get him plenty wet.) Of course, just because the old Chinese shopkeeper (or rather, his grandson) says you shouldn't get the mogwai wet, doesn't mean that getting it wet is a bad thing. In fact, in Chinese tradition, the mogui mating season coincides with rain because rain signifies, you know, growth and whatnot. Water is life. Chinese tradition? Glad you asked. Just like "g...

At the start of Bulworth , Senator Jay Billington Bulworth (Warren Beatty, also directing and co-writing) is in the middle of a crisis. His vote is expected by a particular lobby--something to do with an insurance bill--but he's... Well, he's over it. He's been up all night watching his campaign ads, and he's... He's depressed. Tired of lying, I suppose. He hasn't eaten or slept in three days. And, he's about to hire someone to kill him after making a $10 million deal with a lobbyist for his daughter. He doesn't get along with his wife (Christine Baranski, playing her coolest) but I suppose he cares about his daughter. We don't meet her, so we must assume. He's off to a junket in Los Angeles, starting with an African-American church, when one of those ads he was watching before was against affirmative action; I don't think we can assume that he has much support among the African-American community. For the record, I've seen this movie...

"Dragon breath" is racist. That's 1. But then you throw a gong into the soundtrack after? That's 2, and that's 1980s casual racism. Gremlins again . Kieran's watching with me. He just made the connection between this and The Wizard of Oz . "Pointless dialogue." - what Kieran said about the mother's line about her husband's inventions not working. Because, no duh. Also, I realize, I may have been a little rude to Lynn Peltzer (Frances Lee McCain), identifying her just by her relationships to two males. Saer's also here. She just called Billy a goober for telling Gizmo to smile for the camera. Also, she might be drunk (for the record, that's a joke; she's 13). She just asked if I wrote that she called him a "stripper." I just noticed that Chekhov's race car driving is accompanied by a poster for The Road Warrior . I think Gizmo has dreams of grandeur. Kieran recognized Pete (Corey Feldman) from Stand By Me an...