the groundhog day project

Current Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox has a connection to Top Gun ; she was the inspiration for Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood. At the time, she had been dispatched to TOPGUN as a civilian employee of the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). Her call sign was "Legs." Like her big screen counterpart, Legs does frequent the Officer's Club. Unlike her big screen counterpart, she does not get involved with aviators. Commander Harry Hunter, who worked in the same office she did, is quoted, "She's so professional that her looks don't become a point of interest. When she walks in you say 'wow,' but 30 seconds later you're talking business" (Richman, 1985). When she goes to the Officer's Club and has a conversation with an aviator, it's generally about business. Lieutenant Linda Speed, an administrative officer at TOPGUN at the time, theorizes, "These guys compartmentalize their lives... Flying is in one box...

On March 3, 1969 the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to insure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world. They succeeded. Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call it: Top Gun Well, first let’s nitpick. They actually call it Topgun . And, if the problem was too many pilots dying—as they mention in this film, shouldn’t you be putting, you know, every pilot through this schooling? It’s like some anti-Marxist, Protestant work ethic, pro-capitalist conspiracy—take the best, make ‘em even better. Kinda sums up a great deal of the 1980s in America, actually. Look at Wall Street (or Wall Street ), for example—a small bunch of guys trading all the money and getting rich off of everyone else. Greed is good and all that. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer while we’ve got our Navy boys patrolling the Indian O...

Let's talk about war. Let's talk about America. As if those were two different topics. I don't know if Rambo had an effect on military recruitment, but Top Gun definitely did. Enlistment spiked after Top Gun was released--BLANK estimates BLAH BLAH--and recruitment tables were even set up outside movie theaters to answer inquiries from young men who had just seen a feature-length, blockbuster commercial for the Navy. The Washington Post reports: During production, the Pentagon worked hand-in-hand with the filmmakers, reportedly charging Paramount Pictures just $1.8 million for the use of its warplanes and aircraft carriers. But that taxpayer-subsidized discount came at a price--the filmmakers were required to submit their script to Pentagon brass for meticulous line edits aimed at casing the military in the most positive light. (Sirota, 2011, August 26) Salon --same author, actually--quotes "public relations expert" Nancy Snow: "Propaganda is most ef...

I don't know how accurate this is, but my Media Theory teacher told us last week (a fellow grad student talked about this movie for his presentation) that Top Gun was the first movie to really play entire songs like this opening bit with "Danger Zone" and the aircraft carrier montage. Seems not quite right, since the song trails off just like many a movie song. They do keep coming back to it, though. Yes, to cap off the 80s action movie month, I'm going to enjoy me some Top Gun . Simpson and Bruckheimer before they got too big. It's day one, so I'll let the movie just play for a bit. Haven't watched this movie in a long time. One immediate response: it's remarkable how little the film is explaining about what's going on. We're just there in the air with these pilots with their lingo (though the film, apparently, misuses "bogey") and their call signs. Since it's day one, I'm also looking at the box office, figuring out w...

Watching Rambo: First Blood Part II for the last time--I like to toy with the idea that after watching any of these movies for multiple days I will retire them from my viewing repertoire--it strikes me that I haven't had much that was actually negative to say about this film. Sure, it represents an attempt to rebuild American hegemony symbolically, and a manipulation to reconstruct the myth of Vietnam, but it's just so damn fun. So, I figured I'd end this week of Rambo by looking backward, see where Rambo came from. I've mentioned David Morrell, author of the novel First Blood . I've even talked here and there about differences between book Rambo and movie Rambo. But, why does Rambo even exist? Wilder (1990) presents us with a story--I'll just provide the beginning of it: A young boy is raised in a patriotic Christian culture to love god and country; to believe "Thou shalt not kill." At the age of 18, not yet old enough to drink or vote, he is giv...

Winding down on Rambo --I gotta wonder if there isn't some (probably unconscious) juxtaposition between the prison at the beginning of the film, working the rock quarry, and the traveling POW camp group, working those prisoners harvesting crops. An enslaved group working the fields--no, that couldn't be worth exploring. There are always topics left behind when limited to a week. Hell, I've still got things to say about Groundhog Day and I've watched that somewhere around 400 times (and will be watching it again a week from tomorrow). There is an implicit homoeroticism in how the camera loves Rambo's body (or John Matrix's body last week, John McClane's the week before, Martin Riggs' the week before that), but I've left that topic as maybe an occasional aside. I haven't written about how rude Rambo is to Ericson (Martin Kove), who seems genuinely excited to meet him. Lifer, on the other hand, is a bit of a dick. There's some room for a discu...

I can't help it. It's time for a little Kozlovic (2004), but an amended scale. You'll see what I mean, as this gets going. Start simple: 1. tangible Rambo is definitely this. 2. central Rambo is definitely this. In Cameron's version, he would have had a sidekick of sorts, here he gets Co Bao but not for long. Rambo is definitely the main character here. Complicate things a bit: 3. outsider Rambo is an outsider in this second film but is even more an outsider in the first (being the hippie-looking drifter), the third (being the white guy among all those Afghan fighters) and the fourth (white guy among Burmese, this time). But, more importantly, John Rambo actually represents an entire class of outsiders, Vietnam vets who came back from war to find the public turned against them. 4. divinely sourced Rambo is merely responding to circumstance in First Blood but here in the second film, he is definitely sourced by someone above him. Kozlovic does not demand the sou...

Reported in 1987 (so, in regards to Rambo III ) in Forbes : Stallone was so shocked by the negative critical and listless box office reception for his latest movie, Over the Top, that he is rewriting the next Rambo to be more philosophical, in the vein of Oscar winner Platoon. Such talk elicits quick denials from Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar, the industry veterans who own 87% of Carolco. They insist that Stallone cannot turn the movie into a talky-thinky film punctuated with a little machine gun fire. "Rambo is an action/adventure film, so if you take out the action," says Vajna, "you don't have a film." (p. 88) Reading this now, I find it actually more interesting than when I referenced this passage in one of my Rambo speeches back in 2009. See, now I've seen some of James Cameron's comments on the script for the second film. I haven't seen the draft [edit: just as I was about to post this entry, I found Cameron's draft online, so I will re...

(There's a whole lot to be said about Rambo and masculinity and hegemony and everything I talked about yesterday , but I want to cover something else before I get back to that... for two reasons: 1) to not be too repetitive and 2) to give myself a little time to look over a whole lot of new research in between some bits of homework I've got to do tomorrow. For tonight, this may come mostly from me, but beware: in addition to several things found in new research earlier tonight, I've got a stack of sources from 2009 when I did two speeches on Rambo, so the entries for the rest of this week may be dense. Then, a fifth movie this month, but only for 6 days, so that I can watch Groundhog Day on Groundhog Day. Now, on with Rambo .) Right from the start, this movie tells us a couple things. The opening shot: an explosion, not fiery but still an explosion. We're in for something big. Then we get to see our location a little better: a prison. Most of the prisoners: black. ...

(Before I get to Rambo tonight, there's this: earlier tonight in Media Theory and Criticism class, I got to talk about Groundhog Day . Went down a list of what our instructor calls Classic Hollywood Cinema criteria, matched up Groundhog Day to each one. Then, there were some followup questions--is it a Marxist film? is it a feminist film? something about Freudian psychoanalysis, something about class... and a few others--and the answers were easy. I told my instructor about this blog (or the first year of it, anyway) after class. He wants to read some entries. I'll have to figure out some good ones. Anyway, that's one more class I've included Groundhog Day in.) In Rambo and the Dalai Lama , Gordon Fellman (1998) calls Rambo "the personalization of war, the reduction of it to its pure elements of men facing each other in all their anger, toughness, power, confusion, and fear" (p. 108). Fellman, in writing about First Blood , details the scene in which Ram...

Context: it's still 1985, but we're a few months earlier than we were yesterday. The ex-special ops guy is John Rambo rather than John Matrix. And, he doesn't start in a mountain cabin but in prison. (I wonder, offhand, who the other two men whose names came up for this mission were? James Braddock? John Matrix? Martin Riggs? All of these movies take place in the same reality, right?) So, it's 1985, I'm 9. Beverly Hills Cop has been doing well at the box office for a few months, now. Amadeus as well. I've already seen Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment and Witness and Code of Silence . There's a few other movies in theaters I wouldn't see until they show up on cable: Gotcha! , Mask , Desperately Seeking Susan , Just One of the Guys , Ladyhawke (though, I remember really wanting to see that one when it came out in theaters). New movies this weekend are A View to a Kill , the latest Roger Moore James Bond movie. Gotta see that opening weeken...

I really wanted to have some fun and write about the homoerotic subtext in Commando for Day 7, but as I was readying to start the movie, I turned on that Siskel and Ebert special I mentioned the other day . (You can watch it in four parts on YouTube starting here .) And, I was reminded of my research for my Rambo speeches a few years back... (fall 2010, I think). One of the things I watched while putting together my two speeches on Rambo was an episode or two of Rambo: The Force of Freedom , Rambo's cartoon that aired in 1986--between Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III . I'll get into Rambo more in the next week (i.e. I'm watching Rambo next for this month of 80s action movies), so I won't get into too much detail there (yet). But, as I'm looking into some information about this special--I do scholarly writing so I like to know the specific citation for my sources (even if, for this blog at least, I sometimes let a hyperlink suffice)--and I find reference ...