the groundhog day project

(636) (500) Days of Summer was the #9 film it's opening weekend. I saw it with my wife at Arclight Hollywood , I'm pretty sure. The #2 movie that weekend was a movie I would only see later (but also in the theater)--and I would not watch it every day, but Lawrence Dai would , and his blog would become part of the inspiration for this one. That movie was Julie & Julia . Also in theaters that weekend (that I would see in the theater at some point or another) was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , The Hangover , Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen , The Hurt Locker , Up , Star Trek , Bruno , Terminator: Salvation , Moon , Food, Inc. (actually, i might not have watched that one until DVD), The Cove , Monsters Vs. Aliens , Land of the Lost , Away We Go , X-Men Origins: Wolverine ... I suppose it was a busy year for movies. But, not really. That's just my life occasionally. You should see my movie lists for, like, December and January when I'm playing catch up o...

It's interesting that the CliffsNotes for The Notebook suggests a religious theme to the story. On the surface, I don't think there is one... at all. Sure, the swan could be taken for its Christian symbolism (though I am not at all sure where that association comes from; some versions of the Bible list the swan among unclean birds but otherwise, the swan is not in there), OR it could be taken for its symbolism in that swans supposedly mate for life. (Plus, the whole migration thing I already mentioned yesterday .) Taking the presence of swans together with the clothing at Allie's family dinner, we get an interesting thing, though. While Fin and Sara dress in white and blend right in with all the rich folk, Noah wears black, standing out like a black swan--which in science is an unpredictable outlier (or something like that). Let us assume that Noah is not an unexpected thing existing simply to disrupt Allie's life... but not go so far as the CliffsNotes author who ...

The opening shots of The Notebook evoke something peaceful, natural. Noah (though it might not actually be Noah in this instance) rowing in the early morning suggests something pastoral. Something timeless. In cinematic terms, it places the story within this film in the context of something bigger. There's a good reason, perhaps, that Noah has little more personality than crazy, borderline-stalkerish guy, who now 15 minutes in is seeming more free-spirited and maybe--just, maybe--a little less insane. He's the adolescent impulse to pursue the girl. That's it. Noah--his name even evoking something from long ago--is a guy who could be living in any time, any place, not just 1940s America. (Hell, after Allie leaves and he goes to war, his hair suggests someone who's a bit of an anachronism.) Gosling's character in Blue Valentine could be this same guy--and I don't mean to dismiss his acting ability; rather Noah Calhoun and Dean Pereira are like two ends of a spec...

Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams--two beautiful people cast to tell, well, a beautiful story I'm guessing. I've never seen The Notebook . I was busy its opening weekend seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 . That's the kind of thing I was watching then--not that romantic movies were every my thing , really. Also in theaters, though I didn't see any of these until video or cable: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (hilarious), The Terminal (a solid film), The Day After Tomorrow (a ridiculous little mess), The Chronicles of Riddick (not even close to being as good as its predecessor, Pitch Black , but it had its moments), Napoleon Dynamite (didn't care for it as much as some people, liked it more than others), Mean Girls (I remember liking it but barely remember much of the detail), Man on Fire (pretty solid action drama), Hellboy (a pretty good movie and a damn fine DVD), The Story of the Weeping Camel (I barely remember this one but I know I liked it), and The Punisher (no...

It's time, ladies and gentlemen, for the classic Groundhog Day Project exercise--the Christ-Figuring. I don't mean to spend too much time on it, though. I'm less interested in the score than in why a film like Speed Racer would need a Christ-Figure (assuming that it has one). (For anyone new, this is Kozlovic (2004) adjusted. You'll catch on.) First criterion: Racer X--no, I'm not Christ-Figuring the title character-- is tangible . 1/1 He is not central to the film. That is because he is definitely, and quite deliberately an outsider . 2/3 He is not divinely sourced , but he is sourced into the story from outside. I'm going to give him this one. 3/4 No bonus point for miraculous birth , but Racer X definitely has an alter ego and the special/normal division. 5/6 (For those of you new to this, the bonus points are not counted in the overall denominator, but do allow for additions to the numerator. It's just... a thing. Deal with it.) Racer X ...

So anyway, last night I was so tired that I'm surprised I made it through the entirety of Speed Racer ; aside from a couple musicals, it's the longest movie I've watched for this blog. Though I did not fall asleep--unlike, say, when I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street --it played like a weird dream... which is appropriate since the Wachowski's constructed the film visually like a technicolor dream of sorts, a live action cartoon. It's not just the color, either. Though the palette of the film is far broader and brighter than many a movie of late--seriously, just today, I saw a video in which someone brightened up Man of Steel because, well, Superman should not be dark, but that's the way of movies lately, most everything's a little dark and dreary, and far too many movies have that teal and orange thing going on. This movie plays like something not only outside our normal reality but very much outside the movie reality. For example, Royalton and Speed ...

(This month is a little different than usual. Instead of four movies for a week each, I've got 10 movies recommended by other people--family, friends, regular readers--three days each.) This movie is like a live action cartoon. Which makes sense, considering it's a live action film based on a cartoon. By the way, it's Speed Racer . And, I have seen so many episodes of the show--not that the individual episodes were all that unique; the closeups and the blurred lines for a background--that is very much my memory of the show. I didn't see this movie in the theater. It was #3 its opening weekend. #1 was Iron Man starting its second week. I saw that one opening weekend. I'm trying to remember what I was doing spring 2008 that I wasn't seen a lot of movies. Seriously, out of the top 20 movies that weekend, I only saw 3 of them in the theater (the aforementioned Iron Man , The Visitor and Dr. Seuss' Horton Hear's a Who . I'd eventually watch on cable ...

I forgot to mention yesterday that I was writing from the plane. It was a very long travel day, a couple hundred miles by car, a couple thousand or so by plane. I had intended to look over the blog entry before I posted it but by the time I was home, I was far too tired. I can barely remember what I wrote, some rambling about Murray and his wife, Murray and Paul, Paul and his fiancee, Paul and the postmistress. I think I might have said that these men of Tickle Head wanting to bring the oil company to their town just to have a good paying job was a bad thing. Well, maybe I didn't say it, but I feel like I implied it. I do sort of side with the postmistress--her name is Kathleen, by the by. She rejects the idea of the factory coming to Tickle Head specifically because it's the oil company. Sure, it's a "petrochemical repurposing plant"--essentially a recycling plant, but just a PR thing the oil company is doing--but it's still "the oil company", sho...

The Grand Seduction , like any movie—seriously, read back through this blog and you’ll see it time and time again—tells us something about gender, gender roles, gender expectations; and it also tells us something about living in a conservative, capitalist world. These two things twist together in the subplot involving Brendan Gleason’s Murray and his wife. We learn right away he is not only cashing his own welfare check, he is also cashing the check of a dead friend—he insists that as long as that friend remains on the government books, he has an moral duty to keep cashing those checks (and he has “power of attorney” paperwork, though it’s not clear how legal that paperwork is). Still, he wants to work. That’s the world in which Tickle Head exists, a world in which everybody (even the characters who seem much too old for factory work) would rather have a job—even an oil company job—than welfare. We’re presented Murray and his wife as a sort of counter to the flashback to Murray’s chi...

Take a bit of Waking Ned Devine , some Doc Hollywood , a dash of Funny Farm , some themes left over from the likes of Brassed Off and The Full Monty and Billy Elliott (with those last two, I do not mean the dancing or the stripping) and you've got The Grand Seduction , an English-language remake of the French-Canadian Seducing Doctor Lewis . It's the simple story of a small town... village... "harbour" lying to an out-of-town doctor to convince him to settle there so an oil company factory will also settle there and the locals will all have jobs again. The film begins and ends with nice down-home narration about the importance of hard work--and the sex to be had at night when your tired, which, with at least one local woman, has amounted to a few too many kids. (Anyone who has seen the film might note a mistake there. Since the past seven years in town have been mostly everyone collecting welfare checks because their fishing industry dried up, that woman has not ...

Though it is day three with After the Dark (AKA The Philosophers ), I don't think I have much to say about the film as a film . It's shot well enough, the acting is good for such large cast, some with only a few lines to work with. A warning going in: if you don't like Sophie Lowe's whispering in the opening scene, you should know that she continues to talk like that. Though she tells him to be quiet, ostensibly because someone is in the house with them--he assures her that they know she's there--she is not actually whispering to be quiet; that's just her voice. She will continue to talk like that and will not have many facial expressions either. Somehow, it kind of works for her character. A big problem this film has, generally, with its cast is some of the lesser (meaning, less screen time) characters have more personality than the leads--Petra, Mr. Zimit (James D'Arcy) and James (Rhys Wakefield). Freddie Stroma's Jack, for example, is more expressive...

Parts of After the Dark work, but the whole is lacking... something. One problem: the bunker scenario that drives the film doesn't feel like a last day of senior philosophy class exercise, especially at this international school in Jakarta where, Petra tells us, all the students are overachievers. It feels like a day one exercise. Seriously, I think I used the life raft exercise on either the first or second day of my middle school debate class, and the premise is the same. Given a group of characters with particular occupations (and in our exercise, each with a particular piece of equipment from which he or she could not be separated), we had to limit the pool to as many as the raft could carry. This is not a complex philosophical exercise. It's about as basic as the three examples given early in the film--the trolley problem, the ignorant bliss problem (I wasn't familiar with that one but it seems pretty basic), and the infinite monkey theory... which really, that last...

I don't particularly know where this film is going. But, it's opening scene intrigues me. We open on two young people, naked in bed, kissing. But the film doesn't really show us their bodies. So, we know this film won't shy away from human feeling, from sensuality, but we also know this film is probably aiming for a PG-13. Second scene (not counting the guy from the previous scene waking up late and running to get to what turns out to be school) is a philosophy class. Hard to know if this film will succeed in being thoughtful but it certainly wants to be. The movie, by he way, is After the Dark . This philosophy class--it's the last day of the schoolyear--gets underway first by discussing the usefulness of philosophy then covers a few basic philosophical exercises--the infinite monkey idea, the trolley problem, some other one I hadn't heard of involving trying to get your friends to save your life--then they move on to a bigger idea (which I think is going t...

In these dangerous times, where it seems the world is ripping apart at the seams, we can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day and [we] should reach out to each other and bond as a community, rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium. First of all, I'd change that ending to, well, ever; just cut it off at "the terrors of life." Forget the millennium ; live this every day. Reach out to people, connect. Second of all, those were some of the final words written by Jonathan Larson, found on his computer after his death. For those of you not paying attention, Jonathan Larson wrote the stage version of Rent . In his analysis of Rent , Scott Miller says quite succinctly (and obviously), " Rent is so many things to so many people." As it should be. As any movie should be. As any story should be. In Rent , we've got eight principal characters--Mark, Roger, Mimi, Maureen, Joanne, Angel, Col...

(Before I get into Rent for today, a note: Once again, I am writing a blog entry on a plane--on the way to Ohio for a speech tournament--and it still amazes me that I can do this. I know my thesis I'm working on--and after this week in Ohio I'm planning on getting into the work part of it finally, going back through the more than 600 entries now and coding them for content--is ostensibly about the presentation of self, the re-creation of self through writing... through blogging, but there's something to be said for the practical part of it as well. I started this blog in a one room apartment, writing on a desktop computer while Groundhog Day ran on my tablet next to the desktop monitor. I was stuck in one place if I wanted to save time and write while the movie was one--and I did want to do that. An hour and forty-one minutes a day for that movie was a lot of time as things kept going. Writing during the film (most of the time) made things a lot easier. I graduated for ...