the groundhog day project

A new angle for the next week (then I mean to get back to Charlie Kaufman to end out the month): the Oscars. I talk about them off and on anyway. And as I have seen most of the films nominated, I am inclined to express opinions about them. Plus, this past week I set up my own Oscars-specific page on Facebook. I intend to get into, and probably rant for many hundreds or thousands of words about, the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, but may not get that far today. So... the plan: One best picture nominee a day, starting with Mad Max Fury Road today. I've already seen each of the eight films and wrote in detail about a few of them in this blog already, but I might get so sidetracked by Oscars business and bigger Hollywood politics--and societal standards on race and gender for that matter--that I might say very little about the films themselves this week. Not one per entry anyway. Mad Max was headed toward the storm before I even started typing today. That might be the only specific ...

I don't want to talk about Son of Saul as a holocaust film. Not just because the director and star have been quoted in articles about how it isn't your usual holocaust film. They talk about the content. The content is good, sure. But, I'm more interested in the style, the format. In the same year that Tarantino, explicitly, and Inarritu, implicitly, (just to take two examples) are promoting filming out in the great wide open, with Son of Saul director Lazlo Nemes quite deliberately frames everything as small. We are forced by a narrow aspect ratio and a camera that never ventures far from our protagonist (until the end of the film, as it follows a child then leaves us alone in the woods). We look on the world of Son of Saul . From just behind or next to Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig). When we look away, it is Saul's POV we take. If it isn't obvious, this positions us in the audience firmly into the situation with Saul. There are no wide shots, no establishing shots...

Shaun the Sheep Movie , Boy & the World , and When Marnie Was There each depend on a strong sense of location, which seems strange for animated films, where location can be anywhere at any. time. In fact, Boy & the World takes advantage of the formation its early scenes, creating an environment out of mostly blank space. All three of these films take their protagonists (Shaun and his entourage of sheep, the unnamed boy, Anna) from their usual locations (farm, farm, city) and relocate them (to the city; to larger farms, factories, cities and beyond; to a rural village and the nearby. marshlands) to dramatic effect. Where these films differ most, and most obviously, is in their style. Shaun the Sheep Movie is claymation; Boy & the World is mostly line drawing, with increasing amounts of colour as it goes; and When Marnie Was There is more classic animation, specifically Japanese anime. (I've previously watched and written about Inside Out (for this blog and my r...

Right away in Cartel Land , the Oscar-nominated documentary I've got playing right now, in which a guy says in voiceover, "There's an imaginary line out there between right and wrong, good and evil. I believe what I'm doing is good. I believe what I'm going up against is evil." In the larger context, that's the idea to just about every film, every story. Not always good and evil but drama virtually requires some sort of binary for everything--with us or against us, in or out, right or wrong, black or white. The best drama, I think, is in the gray areas, the nuance. But, story structure ultimately loops back around to the binary. Even something like Tarantino's latest, The Hateful Eight , full of a lot of bad people with different reasons to be bad comes around to offering us reasons to care about a few of them, finding some to be less, well, hateful. Just before I turned on Cartel Land , though, I was watching another Oscar-nominated documentary-- ...

Long day. Oscar nominations at 5:30am. Some teacher stuff I had to do on the computer, while setting up an Oscars page on Facebook. Busy, busy, busy, as a Bokononist might say. Caught up on some TV in the afternoon, then Republican Debate. And that went overtime. Finally, just watched and livetweeted Galaxy Quest in honor of Alan Rickman, whose death was announced this morning. Great actor. Don't think I said enough about him when I blogged about Die Hard ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ) a year ago. I figure I'll get back to Charlie Kaufman soon, maybe tomorrow... or I might watch a few of the Oscar-nominated films I haven't seen yet first. Thoughtful today. But, not feeling too wordy. (Especially after tweeting through the debate and a movie. Go read my tweets if you like.)

I really wish that the opening line from Roger Ebert's memoir Life Itself were said out loud in the film Life Itself instead of just being text on the screen because I really want to use it as the title for this entry but tradition puts only lines of dialogue (or lyrics) as the title here at the Groundhog Day Project . (And, there should have probably been a comma in that sentence somewhere.) I was born inside the movie of my life. That's the line. I would figure that my life is a movie except, well, my life is not very exciting. If my life is a movie, it's some weirdly slow indie film. I'm trying to remember Julie & Julia . I saw the movie once when it was new, and I've read Julie's book (and a whole lot of Lawrence Dai's blog entries about the film), but I'm barely remembering how Julie's story works as a visual narrative. I remember some shots of Amy Adams failing at cooking, something with lobsters, but it's the Julia Child sequen...

Got Life Itself playing again right now. Also watched 45 Years today--not a film for people who don't like it slow, but I loved it until it didn't seem to really end, it was just... not on anymore. #NoClosure Sorry for the hashtag, but I just spent a couple hours watching and livetweeting # JurassicWorld on the Groundhog Day Project 's Twitter (after livetweeting (though I didn't actually tweet much for this one) the State of the Union with my personal Twitter ) and hashtags were getting thrown around a lot. I considered just copying and pasting the tweets here as today's blog entry, but I realized I have not gotten to something I really wanted to get to when I watched Life Itself the first time . I used Roger's line about movies being a machine that generates empathy as my title and never really got to the empathy thing. Plus, the tweets are probably best enjoyed in the format in which they were posted. Click the link above and check them out. Blasco an...