the groundhog day project

Skip past "Girl" and jump into "Hold Me Tight" and you wouldn't necessarily take Jude as the lead character here. That song juxtaposes not really Lucy and Jude but Lucy and Molly (Jude's girlfriend in Liverpool). Plus, the American Bandstand style of Lucy's high school dance and the club scene (with Beatles stand-ins) in Liverpool. The film starts us with these two worlds clashing not because the film will necessarily be about that , but because the film is about various cultures colliding, breaking, and exploding. Hell, just now as I typed that, an army truck full of soldiers drove past the football game where we meet Prudence. The nice wholesome high school scene--about to be interrupted for us by the introduction of homosexuality--is first interrupted by that army truck. And that interruption is a pleasant one. The army guys whistle at the cheerleaders, the cheerleaders and football players cheer on the army guys. The movie does not play for us the ...

Today's title is, at once, total bullshit, and profoundly true. I quoted a line from bell hooks regarding "love" tonight in my presentation on queer theory. Love, she says, involves "care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication" (1999, p. 5). Key to the profound truth above is all of these things. Love, the romantic, shallow stuff we see in most films--that isn't so interesting. But, if there's recognition and respect, you've got something. If there's commitment and trust, you could keep it. Or leave it behind and move on because maybe nonmonogamy is the way you want to go. Just looking for... And, I don't want to suggest that it can't be love and be temporary, that it can't be love and be left behind in the short term. Mother Culture tells us to seek out the long term, but research-- No, screw research for the moment. As they start singing "With a Little Help from My F...

Moulin Rouge! is a movie. I don't mean that the obvious way because, well, that's obvious. I mean that the movie is almost constantly separating itself from the usual emersion and suspension of disbelief. It throws its contents in your face and then takes everything overboard so you cannot help but keep looking even as you recognize every falsity. The opening shot, for example, is a theater proscenium and the orchestra conductor conducts the Fox logo after the curtain opens. This framing device is deliberately artificial. But, that one's obvious. Less obvious is Toulouse's role as pseudo-narrator. The opening lines are his, and yet the rest of the movie tells us that it is Christian telling us this story. This means that Toulouse is telling us the story of Christian telling the story of, well, all the events we see. And, Toulouse is within that proscenium. Get into "Spectacular Spectacular" and you're several story levels deep. And, Christian is effect...

First of all, I really wanted to listen to a commentary track tonight, but I cannot get a subtitle track to turn on, and I don't like doing commentary without subtitles... it's not like I've got this movie memorized just yet. Groundhog Day , sure--it'd be like bring on the commentary track because I know every word... and I've heard the commentary track like three times. But, Moulin Rouge! --I do not have it all memorized yet. The songs, maybe. But, not all the dialogue. Anyway, outside the world of this blog, it is Oscar day. Awards ended about an hour ago, as I am starting this entry. Since it is Oscar day, I thought it worth mentioning that Moulin Rouge! was nominated for best picture, for lead actress and for cinematography and editing and makeup and sound, and it won for costume design and art direction. Kidman won the Golden Globe for actress in a comedy or musical, and Craig Armstrong's score won--which is surprising; I know there are percentage standar...

I was saying something about Satine's introduction, performing for the crowd of mostly men in the Moulin Rouge. I think I might skip past the rest of Lacan for now and move on to the feminist critique... Vladimir Propp (1968) lists among the basic dramatis personae the princess . Serving as the princess in Moulin Rouge! , Satine is "a sought for person" and she "cannot be exactly delineated" from her father (p. 79). As I have already said above-- If you haven't been reading this blog the last few days, you should know that much of what I've been writing about Moulin Rouge! I am deliberately repurposing for a paper for my media theory class... or vice versa. Hence, this "above" which actually refers to something I said yesterday or the day before, or maybe both. Just bear with me. --Zidler is just one male figure in this film standing in for the patriarchal order over Satine and her body. Quite specifically, he serves as her father, ...

Freud will have to continue a little bit for a couple reasons: 1) there is bit more to say about Freud before I inject some Lacan and 2) I realized that Mulvey doesn't include Jung, so in terms of my paper not being a research paper but an analytical piece based around the supplied readings, I shall leave Jung out of it... even if there may be useful things to say; for instance, much of what Mulvey is trying to argue about how Freudian psychoanalysis connects with common cinematic representation fits with the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious . Effectively, however much a filmmaker intends to put psychoanalytic concepts into a film, they go in anyway. And, even divergent concepts, arguably, exist within film not necessarily because a filmmaker may deliberately be trying to diverge from the norm but unconsciously. But anyway, Freud... Another Freudian idea central to our experience of film, according to Mulvey, is scopophilia , looking as a source of pleasure. The voyeu...

From a psychoanalytic point of view, we can find Freudian, Lacanian and even Jungian imagery and narrative elements in Moulin Rouge! . That's an okay topic sentence, but I think I need an introduction. Most of the following entry will be part of my upcoming media theory paper if it goes well, so I've got to worry about structure and formal content a little more than usual. Still, I will interrupt if I need to, and just cut these parts later. Anyway... Figuring on maybe looking at Moulin Rouge! in terms of psychoanalysis (which I will work on during this viewing), as a populist film and... probably queer theory, since I;m working on a presentation on queer theory for performance studies, or as an auteur film (except we're not expected to do research outside the readings we had for class, so that one might not be so doable. Our class defines musical as a genre even if I do not, so I could go with that. Whatever I end up using, the following should be a bit of what I'l...