the groundhog day project

I found a clip of Kevin Smith reacting to Brigsby Bear last night. He laughed, he cried. Exclaim called it "awkward as all hell". I thought it was beautiful. But, of course, the Internet is full of outspoken dicks and pickers of nits. Hell, I'm one of them. (By the way, on my original review of Swiss Army Man last year (which has since been transferred from one YouTube channel to another, so the comment is gone), the first comment was a guy pointing out that I looked like I was about to cry near the end of it. No overt criticism, but just pointing it out without extra commentary suggests judgment. Like how dare anyone have an emotional response to a film? Hell, when it comes to how I rate movies on IMDb, an emotional response, regardless of objective quality, usually means I'll at least rate a movie an 8 out of 10. I love an emotional response. I love a movie that makes me think, makes me feel.) I am watching Dave Made a Maze again as I think about this past...

I tend to like weird little movies. A couple of my favorites from last year were The Lobster and Swiss Army Man . A couple of my favorites from this year now would be Brigsby Bear and Dave Made a Maze . I'm gonna watch both of those again tonight because... Well, because I can. The year is coming to an end. It's Oscar season, the Golden Globes are just over a week away, and it's time to start putting it all together, some perspective on 2017 in movies—putting off the perspective of my childhood in movies for a few days from now (but I will get back to that)—and make some recommendations perhaps... First, there's this—when Dave Made a Maze art director Jeff White was asked by Tessa Morrison at Other Worlds , "Knowing everything you learned from this, what would you travel back in time and tell yourself on Day One of fabrication [of the cardboard sets]?": I'm not sure that there was anything I could tell myself at that point that I would have believed. ...

I would especially note the kitchen scene late in the film between Dave (Nick Thune) and Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani). It goes a little something like this... Keep in mind, Annie has bought into the maze (she is the one who hangs the towel over the exit to keep the Minotaur inside). The apartment has been taken over by the maze. They have just come up with the plan to create the chrysalis at the heart of the maze to give the whole a weak spot. Dave didn't make a weak spot originally because, "then someone could destroy it." Harry and Annie don't come right out and say it, exactly, but they frame failure (or the potential for it) as part of life. No matter how much Dave wanted this maze to last, it is supposed to have a weak spot, because everything has a weak spot. That is life itself. Success really matters because to get there you overcome the potential for failure. Dave says, of the maze, "This is the only thing I've ever started that's worth finishi...

One more time: Dave Made a Maze . Because repetition is the heart and soul of this blog, of my life, of life itself. Day in day out, what makes it all interesting and worth bothering are the little things, the moments that make one day unique and different from the next. Dave's incorrect use of "tertiary" for example--when friends of mine make silly mistakes with grammar (or, Phil forbid, I make one) I notice. I don't always correct them. But, I note it and if I had the memory capacity of, say, Santa Claus, I would have a list at the end of every year and I would let people know. Like, Hi Jared, you have made [this many] grammatical errors in public this year . Hi Shari, please repair the grammatical issues and try better next year . And, so on. Eventually ending with myself: Hi Robert, you have made thousands of grammatical errors, and far too many typos to ever be forgiven. You have to do better next year. Clear and civil communication is essential to a peaceful ...

Being the Groundhog Day enthusiast/obsessive/blogger that I am, it is interesting to me that out of all the characters in Dave Made a Maze , the one who never actually enters the maze is the hobo played by Rick Overton, aka Ralph from Groundhog Day . The one guy--who just might be Ralph all these years later--who has been around this kind of relentless, repetitive, lesson-making fantastical venture before, is the one who never participates now. (Not that he, you know, ever really necessarily knew what Phil was going through in that time loop. The closest he might have come to understanding it may only have been on that night that he and Gus were quite drunk. And, of course, they would not remember it the next day, anyway.) Also, in the opening credits, he gets a "with". The hobo is, of course, the person that, by choice or circumstance, exists outside the normal channels of everyday life. Everyone else is eventually caught up in the cardboard labyrinth in some way. Even t...

I saw All the Money in the World today but I have nothing really to say about it. Performances were fine, but it was a bit too plot-driven to really offer any insight into the characters. Solid but nothing special. So, the next movie on my "movie life" childhood deconstruction list is For Your Eyes Only . I watched that once before for this blog when Roger Moore died. I will likely get to it tomorrow. Instead, I am watching Dave Made a Maze . I will save you the jump over to IMDb--though why anyone wouldn't want an excuse to jump over to IMDb, I don't know--and say it is about Dave (Nick Thune), who builds a cardboard box fort in his living room that turns out to be bigger on the inside. His friends go in after him, along with a documentary crew.           Rick Overton (Ralph from Groundhog Day ) plays a hobo that Dave's friend Gordon (Adam Busch) brings in because he says he knows cardboard.           There's a Minotaur...

...or was it the way of movies. The way of westerns. The way of American action stories. How the briefest of training montages can set you up to defeat a despot and save a president. Also, as long as you're the good guy, kill whoever looks like one of the bad guys. Five-year-old me certainly didn't care that Amy Stryker gets forgotten in the third act of the movie. He didn't care that Tonto forgets how to speak for that same act. He just saw western action, explosions, and a nobody turning into a superhero... Mostly. He also didn't notice the really bad framing and editing on the stagecoach ride early on--which I only just noticed. (They make a point of the seat on the left side of the screen being the one facing forward, but for several cuts in a row, the stagecoach is traveling to the left when seen from outside, which doesn't match the interior... A few shots later, when the sunglasses guy gets to talking, the interior is reversed making the seat on the right ...

Klinton Spilsbury is not actually that bad; the adult version of his character barely has to emote for the story as presented to work. And, the dubbing over of his voice was done quite well; even knowing it was dubbed, I could only really tell in a few spots. Michael Horse is fine, though his characters role is both expanding upon older versions and reducing it, so it is hard to gauge just how much he matters to the plot, if not the legend. Christopher Lloyd is good as Cavendish. Jason Robards is fantastic as Grant (though I'll get back to Grant below). Everyone else is so minimally affective to the story that their performances don't matter much as measure of the film. The structure is fine as long as you don't have expectations of Lone Ranger action. An origin story, if it is going to be an origin story, should take some time, set up its pieces. The stuntwork is awesome, especially for 1981. As is the pyrotechnics. Merle Haggard's "balladeer" narration i...

Got an old VHS playing tonight. The Legend of the Lone Ranger . Cheap opening, but not an uncommon thing. Assume the audience will care about a family getting slaughtered, a kid crying. Then, off to the Comanche village. And the spoken-word song narration gets going over a montage. Seems far too early for a montage. As a kid, of course, I did not care one bit whether there should be a montage already. Natives throwing spears... Ugh, then, big brother Dan shows up and the lead is crying again. I don't think we even know his name yet. And we get lots of quick cuts but it's not really another montage, exactly. I see the name of the star and I swear that's not anyone's real name. Klinton Spilsbury. And, apparently, all of his lines were dubbed over by James Keach. So, I guess he wasn't very good. CUT TO: I guess this is our lead as an adult--that whole opening could have been skipped or showed up as a flashback later--on a stagecoach ride. The spoken-word theme...

Distracted today. Aside from a game of a risk and a debate about the earth being flat tonight, I saw two new movies today. Watching The Post , I was reminded of other newspaper films, the recent Spotlight , All the President's Men (which, alas, I missed out on seeing on the big screen back when I was at USC because I was sick), and especially The Paper because that movie not only worked for me as a movie but made me want to be a journalist. This got me thinking about other movies that make me want... Like Sideways made we want to drink a lot of wine. Also to like pay attention to it and be like a connoisseur or whatever. But, also to drink a lot of wine. Into the Wild made me want to fuck off from society. Dead Poets Society made we want to write poetry (as did Paterson ), to speak up, speak out. And maybe subtly to be a teacher... Really, while I compare my teaching to Mr. Keating, I don't think he is the reason I became a teacher. Just too many years between the two--m...

Kasdan: Her father may have been his mentor... That's why they know each other... So they have a previous relationship through her father. From the transcript of a story conference between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan. Later... Lucas: We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond. Kasdan: I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don't have to build it. Lazy storytelling, but that's not the problem here. Lucs: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven. Kasdan: And he was forty-two. Lucas: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship. Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two. Lucas: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve... It would be...

There are some great shots in Raiders of the Lost Ark . I will inevitably get into a rant about how awful Indy is as a person (probably tomorrow), but importantly, the film never tells us that he is a good person. So, today, I will ignore Indy and look at Spielberg's work. From a great shot with mist and sunlight through the trees in the opening sequence to that warehouse matte painting in the final shot, Spielberg frames things nicely. But, even better--and this probably comes from screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan more than from anybody else--are a couple key moments of foreshadowing and... Whatever you call explaining something ahead so that when it happens we don't need useless dialogue. And, I don't mean the snake thing. That's basic stuff. Also, an odd detail I noticed yesterday (and maybe I'd seen it before, but it stood out yesterday): that bit where Sapito gets Indy to throw him the idol and then drops the whip--there are stone walls on either side of them, an...

Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and there is one subject that must be presented first, get it out of the way before I get to anything else. It's the "Raiders Minimization" problem. That label for it comes from, of course, The Big Bang Theory . Not the greatest show, and it often fetishizes nerditry rather than represent it well, but it has had its moments. And, Amy Farrah Fowler's (Mayim Bialik) pronouncement is spot on. If Indiana were not there for this primary plot of this film, everything that happens would still have happened, with only slight differences. I'll let Amy explain: Indiana Jones plays no role in the outcome of the story. If her weren't in the film, it would turn out exactly the same... ...if he weren't in the movie, the Nazis would have still found the ark, taken it to the island, opened it up and all died, just like they did. In fact, they would have found it sooner, because there would have been no shootout at The Raven, and Toht ...