the groundhog day project

When I was looking up information on the USC Shoah Foundation yesterday , I happened upon an interview with Steven Spielberg from USA Today with a (mis?)quotation as its title-- 'This is what I was put on earth to do' - Steven Spielberg Maybe he said that to the interviewer, but the only line I can find in the actual text of the interview that is similar to that is this (with a little context): When young people come up to me and instead of saying they liked my last movie, they say, "My grandparents gave testimony [to the foundation] in 1995." Hearing that make me feel I was put on this earth to make a difference, not just in the lives of movies audiences. The testimonies help others hear stories that are not easy to tell or listen to. I'm not going to talk about the holocaust again today, or the whole poetry after Auschwitz thing. Let's leave Adorno behind, maybe even leave Everything Is Illuminated behind for the most part. Today is Day 729 of this ...

That Jonathan looks like his grandfather and (middle) namesake is not just a coincidence, or a cinematic convenience. That workers at the airport at the end of the film look like characters Jonathan has met on his rigid search is also not merely a coincidence, nor a cinematic joke. (I'm not even sure that it's a coincidence that both of Foer's novels involve an old Jewish man who was close to two young women when he was younger; when Lista says her mother thought Safran should marry Augustine because she was older, it reminded me very much of Anna and her sister in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close . Both of the primary plots are driven by objects, as well--the photograph in Everything Is Illuminated , the key in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , but I don't think I'm dealing in objects today.) These people look alike because this story is universalizing. It seems a part of the human condition that we want to know where we come from, and that's vital ...

Opening shot: close up on amber. Gradually, as the camera moves, we see that there's something in the amber. It's a cricket, or a grasshopper. This bit of amber, from a necklace Augustine wore (in the film version of the story) and presumably gave to Safran, was the first thing--or so it is implied--that Jonathan collected . He took it from the bedside table by his grandfather's deathbed. The thing about a bug in amber--and it's an ant in the book, not a cricket or grasshopper or whatever insect that is from the order Orthoptera--is that it is like time standing still, a remnant of the past. (And, if Hollywood (or Michael Crichton, anyway) can be believed, we can get dinosaurs out of them.) I assumed until I saw a couple people online calling is a cricket that the insect in amber in the movie was a grasshopper. Considering Grandfather's attention, a few times, to the moon, I appreciated the grasshopper's link to the wax and wane of the moon via Japanese tra...

It's strange that Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) is almost a cypher in his own story. He drives the plot, sure but he is not really changed by anything here... well, not very much. There is, arguably a change in that at the end of the film he not only makes a bag for someone else (Grandfather) but also empties his own bag of dirt from Trachimbrod onto his own grandfather's grave. (We don't actually see this happen, but the film cuts from the dirt in Jonathan's hand to dirt in Alex's hand at Grandfather's funeral, implying that Jonathan will let that dirt go.) He changes enough to give up an item from his collection to connect these two men. (To be fair, we have no particular reason other than presumption to think he has not given up an item before.) The emotional beats in the story belong to Alex (Eugene Hutz) and Grandfather (Boris Leskin) and Lista (Laryssa Lauret). (Considering one of the deleted scenes, in which it seems that Sammy Davis, Junior, Juni...

Where was I? Adorno, perhaps. This: "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Which isn't what he said. Not really. Brian Oard, in his Mindful Pleasures blog, points out that this quotation is "always taken out of context and rarely footnoted." Hell, I quoted it indirectly from a study guide that has no clear author and which did not identify the specific source for the quotation. Fortunately, Adorno is well enough known among those who know him--he's come up, for me, in my undergraduate history program and my graduate communication program--so a quick google search and I've found more specific reference. The line is from a 1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society." In a bit more context (from an English translation of the collection Prisms ): The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threa...

The thing about Everything Is Illuminated is it suggests--at the same time, mind you--that it's never too late to get over your past and your past will always catch up to you. If The Grey was purgatory , this is somehow both heaven and hell... or maybe just another form of purgatory... or maybe just life. The movie returns us to the idea that life is just stories , the what we choose to remember-- how we choose to remember it--matters more than the reality. Stories change over time. So do memories. Each return of a memory is affected by the previous one--that was a detail in the latest Pixar movie, Inside Out that I rather liked, in fact; positive memories turn negative, joy turns sad... and vice versa, I suppose. Bittersweet is introduced. Everything Is Illuminated is based on Jonathan Safran Foer's first published novel. It is, of course, about a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer going to the Ukraine in search of family history, specifically, the woman in a photo...

The weekend that Everything Is Illuminated was released was apparently in the midst of a dry spell for movie viewing for me. Serenity would be out two weeks later, Good Night, and Good Luck the week after that. The Constant Gardener was two weeks earlier. Everything Is Illuminated was #45 at the box office its opening weekend but, to be fair, it was only on 6 screens. And, I didn't even see it in the theater. I watched it on DVD months later. The 40-Year-Old-Virgin was #4 in its 5th weekend. I would see it on DVD. The Constant Gardener was #7. I had seen it a couple weekends earlier. Red Eye was #8. Saw that one its opening weekend, four weeks earlier. Wedding Crashers was #9. I would see that on DVD. Same with March of the Penguins at #10, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at #16, The Skeleton Key at #18 (hated that movie), and Broken Flowers at #19. Batman Begins was #25 in its 14th weekend. Saw that one opening weekend. More that I wouldn't see until DVD: Fant...

I was reading a thing about The Grey and depression and was thinking of writing about that... Hell, yesterday , I implied that I felt worthless, though really I was referring to the possibility of feeling like that again. Today, this day, I don't feel worthless. But, I have. And, I don't want to feel that way ever again. But... I get to this bit about retrieving the wallets, "so they will not be forgotten. It is commonly said that men carry their whole lives in their wallets, but it's literal in this case; a man's whole identity and life in their pants pocket which is a sad, but realistically true." And, I think about my wallet when I should be thinking about my final thoughts on The Grey . It's brown leather. It's texture is a little weird because this past Sunday it got rather wet when we went to Knott's Berry Farm and it poured down rain on us. We even went on the log ride in the rain. We were soaked. But, still, we stopped at an ice cream...

That ^ is a line Phil Connors could appreciate. It’s a line that invokes both timelessness and the temporality of life. You are born. You live. You die. The rest is details. I made the mistake of a google search just now. I was on my phone just to check if anyone had a screencap of the IV drip from the end of The Grey —no one seemed to. If I remember, I will get the image after the movie is over by sticking the DVD in the computer... Voila! (If there’s just a big white box or a blank space with a red X or whatever, that means I was too tired at the end of the movie to remember. Sorry.) (If there’s a photo, that is because I am committed to doing this right and, damn the tiredness, I will have the image I want.) I will explain the mistake in a moment. First, this: I had been leaning the other way the last few days, wanting to continue this blog past this month, coming up with a way to free up what I’m doing but still have... something here every day, a movie every day. Then...

Ottway's father's poem is so simple as to not quite ring true, though it's understandable that a man's man like John Ottway would appreciate it. It's like the epitome of some simplistic, stereotypical version of masculinity... Once more into the fray... Into the last good fight I'll ever know. Live and die on this day... Live and die on this day... In the commentary track, director Carnahan keeps coming back to masculinity, how Hollywood's sense of what it is to be a man has gone wrong. He's never particularly specific, though. Does he think that these men, who are (eventually) able to talk about their feelings and their fears and their love--of course, Ottway never talks about his wife with these men, only his father--are real men? Is he suggesting that the usual macho men of action movies are the wrong version? What kind of men are these men? In an interview with Screen Rant , Liam Neeson talks about men and emotions. He says: I don't think ...

Commentary track--director Joe Carnahan with editors Roger Barton and Jason Hellmann. They're drinking scotch--"watching The Grey the way it should be." Me too. Referencing Anne Openshaw who plays Ottway's wife (and who only says three words in the film), Carnahan says it's a lesson for filmmakers, tell your actors to shut the fuck up. Because with only three words she has a big presence in the story. First wolf, the one Ottway shoots on the job, is CGI first then a practical effect, with a bellows for its lungs, with a guy blowing into a tube up its ass. Carnahan likes his swear words about as much as the characters in the film. Joe Anderson, who plays Flannery, thought that Carnahan hated him and would fire him after his first day. Carnahan says Anderson is not the actor that he hated. The not so subtle implication being that he did hate one of the actors. Obvious stuff, but worth mentioning: they like James Badge Dale for what he gave the film with such ...

Honestly, though I'm a vegetarian or whatever, I don't much care, as PETA did, that the cast ate wolf stew to get into the mood for the film. Now, I don't know the status of wolves in Alaska currently, endangered or what have you. There was a bit of a controversy at the time, though. Liam Neeson, unlike his fellow cast members, went back for seconds. PETA complained: "Neeson's stance on kindness to animals is sorely out of step with the rest of the world." Out of step with PETA maybe. The rest of the world? Not so much. The rest of the world seems to be just fine with torturing animals to get some meat to eat. A couple notes: the film was shot in Smithers, British Columbia. It is legal to trap and kill wolves in British Columbia (or was at the time; maybe that's changed. I don't know). Wolf stew (or the use of wolf carcasses in the film) was not illegal. I was going to point out that Liam Neeson also is not an American citizen (while PETA is an Ameri...

I was going to talk about wolf stew today. That will wait; I'll save it for later in the week when I've run out of things to say about The Grey . Instead religion... (There is a thing about wolf stew in relation to this film, by the way, a behind-the-scenes controversy. But...) Religion... (First, I spent today at Knott's Berry Farm. It started raining while we were there, and we still managed another couple rides. Point being, it has been a long day. But, I'm not particularly tired--it's well after 10pm as The Grey begins. Rather, I'm a little energized from treading old ground on Facebook . See, I used to debate politics on there all the time, long drawn out arguments with people I knew wouldn't be changed by what I said. But, I did it anyway. I like the idea of speaking up when you think something right. I don't do it enough these days... at least, on Facebook . I link to articles without comment, I offer brief posts about topics that matter fa...

Not everyone goes to Alaska to be free. Ottway (Liam Neeson) does go there to escape a painful life, though, which isn’t that much different from Chris McCandless. Not everyone goes to a movie to escape. I go to movies sometimes to identify with characters or plotlines, to feel great joy or great sadness when real life is offering the opposite or is offering nothing. The Grey movie puts me in time and place. Two of them, actually. Well, same place, two times. Though this movie came out just before my wife and I separated, I didn’t see it until a few weeks later. Winter quarter is a busy time in forensics and there were speech tournaments almost every weekend for a while there. Hell, the day after I was out of the house, my birthday in fact, I was at a speech tournament. My dark mood made one of my interpretive pieces go very well, and my other stuff not so much. The death of Lewenden (James Badge Dale) lets you know early on that this will be a painful film to watch. Death isn’t...

The day before (or was it the day of? I know it's the first bookmark in my Into the Wild folder on Chrome) I was going to start watching this movie for this blog, someone linked to an article on RobGreenfield.TV called "How to Travel America For Free (without mooching)." He left his home in San Diego with $2000 cash and gave away his last $421 on August 12--this act he calls "a leap of faith in humanity." The article was published September 26. Greenfield (2014) summarizes the experience: This experience is about much more than just not spending money. It's about showing that you and I can be contributing members to society whether we have money or not, It's about showing that there are much more rewarding ways to live than just throwing money at every situation. It's about living a life that is truly beneficial to the earth, my community, and myself. It's about being more involved in our communities and treating each other with respect. And i...