the groundhog day project

1. The heroes are professionals. The interesting thing, taking A Bug's Life as taking its plot from Seven Samurai or the Magnificent Seven is that Flik (Dave Foley) is both the Old Man/Emma Cullen summoner role but he is also the Kambei/Chris/Sam leader role of what would be the titular group if this were called, say, Nine Circus Bugs . 3. The villains are very strong. The grasshoppers come, of course. Like the bandits in Seven Samurai or the original The Magnificent Seven , or Bogue and his hired guns in the remake. A Bug's Life borrows The Ant and the Grasshopper . Hopper (Kevin Spacey) doesn't kill anyone--this is a family-friendly version of the story--but he does threaten it. 4. The society is ineffective, incapable of defending itself. The best they can do is gather food all over again and send Flik on what they assume is a suicide mission, if he doesn't just give up right away. 7. The heroes form a group for the job. Taken out of order, here, of...

Bernardo (Charles Bronson) makes for an interesting sort of heart to the titular Magnificent Seven . Sure, Chico (Horst Buchholz) is the passionate one, but Bernardo seems to be the one who really feels what's going on. Interestingly, he almost doesn't take the job because he's used to better pay. The prospect of six men (later seven) versus thirty guns causes him to pause in his wood chopping (which he is doing to earn his breakfast when Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen) come for him). "I admire your notion of fair odds, mister," he tells Chris. Against bigger odds before he was paid $600, and $800 for another job. They tell him the offer is $20, then they start to walk away. "Right now, that's a lot," he tells them. And, he goes back to chopping wood. The thing is, he doesn't just need money. He needs something to do. Three village kids come to Bernardo at one point later and he tells them they could be hurt, they rightly point out t...

I never really wrote about the original The Magnificent Seven in this blog. (One of a few times that exhaustion at the end of a long day kept me from really putting in an effort here.) Also, it only just occurred to me, as the men from the Mexican town have come to Chris (Yul Brynner) for help, that aside from one detail--Flik being an outcast from his village rather than a stranger-- A Bug's Life is basically this film, or rather Seven Samurai . And, I'm wondering how I never got that before. It's so obvious. Now, I'm wondering what else I have missed in the movies I've seen, what references went over my head because of particular timing or a lack of familiarity? I have seen Seven Samurai but maybe only once all the way through. It's also the plot of many a D&D module. It's such a simple plot hook--a village is in trouble, and a bunch of men (usually men) have the skills to save it from its attackers. Bring your gunslinging, your knife-throwing...

How The Magnificent Seven is quintessentially American (even when it shares so much with stories from around the world and deliberately apes Japan's Seven Samurai ) is kind of simple. Think politically, socially, and consider these words from Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) in the church at the beginning of the film: This is what you love, what you'd die for. And what your children and your children's children will work on, suffer for, be consumed by. ... Now, I come here for gold. Gold. This country has long equated democracy with capitalism, capitalism with God. So, you're standing not only in the way of progress and capital. You're standing in the way of God! And for what? ... Land. This is no longer land. The moment I put a pin in the map, the day I descended into this godforsaken valley and cast my gaze upon it, it ceased to be land and became... Dust. ... This is your God? And, he pours the dirt onto the floor. First, some history. While Bogue is not entirely wro...

I wrote a bit about The Magnificent Seven a few days ago . Talking about character classes (a la Dungeons & Dragons ) and archetypes, how each character needs to have a different personality trait or skill that makes them distinct from the other characters. What The Encylopedia of Fantasy refers to as the "seven samurai" and TV Tropes calls "the magnificent seven samurai". A reminder: I'm watching the latest incarnation of The Magnificent Seven tonight, so the seven are: Denzel Washington as Sam Chisolm, the leader, a warrant officer Chris Pratt as Josh Faraday, a gambler Ethan Hawke as Goodnight Robicheaux, the veteran sharpshooter Vincent D'Onofrio as Jack Horne, the mountain man, who is also religious Byung-hun Lee as Billy Rocks, the knife thrower (and "a mysterious man of the Orient") Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Vasquez, an outlaw Martin Sensmeier as Red Harvest, a Comanche warrior Plus Haley Bennett as Emma Cullen, the woman who gets ...

Case in point: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales . I will keep this short--unlike the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, or any of its action sequences, that just kind of drone on well beyond reasonability. Seriously, each movie is basically the same--Jack, some varied background pirates (I think there are only 2 left from the original bunch), Barbossa, a young man and a young woman, quest for some magical MacGuffin, some supernaturally empowered villains tries to stop them, folks backstab and betray and turn on each other than back to each other, and, oh yeah, gotta throw in some British soldiers chasing after everyone, too. Make. Each action scene about twice as long as it needs to be, throw in some overwrought romance, some one-note characterizations and there's your Pirates of the Caribbean film in a nutshell. Overstuffed and overdone, and mostly just tedious. Maybe one genuinely funny moment. Jack offers Will--I mean, Henry--advice on courting a brunette. ...

"What a wondrous vision "Excalibur is! And what a mess." So begins Roger Ebert's review of Excalibur , and as usual, Roger says it pretty well. "This wildly ambitious retellings of the legend of King Arthur is a haunting and violent version of the Dark Ages and the heroic figures who (we dream) populated them," he continues. "But it's rough going for anyone determined to be sure what is happening from scene to scene." The problem with Excalibur , though, is not that it's particularly confusing. It is just so damn full of, well, pieces of every story about King Arthur that any of its audience are likely to know. There's a reason that The Sword in the Stone offers up next to nothing (though, admittedly, I might be remembering the better part of the film if not the larger part of it) about Arthur as an adult and spent time with that training. There's a reason that the recent King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was born out of a plan ...

Still 1981, but no James Bond today. Instead, we return to King Arthur. Excalibur . Now, I saw For Your Eyes Only in the theater, I'm fairly sure, and many times after on video. I do not actually remember the first time I watched Excalibur . I imagine it was on some Sunday afternoon on television, maybe a few years later. By the time I saw, it already knew about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Sometime in the mid to late eighties (I think I lost my old collection of theater programs in one move or another, so I cannot check the exact date) I also saw the musical Camelot on stage several times. I'd read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and, presumably, other books about Arthur. I'd seen The Sword in the Stone on video (or would soon). So much of my knowledge about Arthuriana comes from vague memories that blend together over a few decades. Movies are like that, too. I forget what some movies are sometimes, or imagine movies that never existed....

Roger Moore died today. Last night, a bunch of people died in Manchester. I'd rather think about the former than the latter. So, I'm watching For Your Eyes Only . I grew up on this movie. Roger Moore was my James Bond. This one, Octopussy , A View to a Kill --I've seen these movies far too many times considering I never made a deliberate effort to watch them repeatedly (as I obviously have with other films). For Your Eyes Only , especially. It was on one of those first VHS tapes my family had. It was one of the movies we watched regularly. It has been a while since I last watched it, though. This very 80s (or really, 70s) music as Bond goes after Blofeld (who I never really had much context for when I was a kid and we'd watch this; he was just some bald guy who randomly tried to kill Bond and then Bond murdered him, and that alone is also so very 80s. Then the music video opening credits with vaguely naked women dancing in silhouette. (Visuals that meant very differen...

Permit a sidetrack. Not that there's a clear throughline driving me this month. I wanted to revive this thing and I did, and I've mostly just been winging it. One day at a time. Life is good that way. Make plans, sure. But, it's each day that matters. Do the useful things, the productive things, but also find time for the fun things. Save Buster from choking and light a woman's cigarette... Not that I want to get into Groundhog Day references right now. King Arthur is today's film. And, what TV Tropes calls "Cast Calculus" (or more specifically, depending on how this goes, "The Five Man Band" or The Magnificent Seven Samurai"), and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy labels simply as "Seven Samurai." Specifically, because lately I think about way too much in terms of Dungeons and Dragons references (because D&D takes up far too much of my spare time), I noticed as I watched King Arthur last night that Arthur and his Knights p...

Structure matters, of course. Plot matters. Story matters. And, when we're stuck on origin stories--as with Big Hero 6 or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword , or 2004's King Arthur , which I've got playing now--you're going to get a lot of the same beats. Historical... Or pseudo-historical stuff like this, and you've got a cold open (with Lancelot as a child) that barely matters, you've got hordes of Roman soldiers and... I forget who they're fighting. Don't have time to get to know any just yet. Just a good battle to get the adrenalin pumping. After some opening text to place the story into some supposed historical context. The far more fantastical King Arthur: Legend of the Sword goes for that same kind of text. We're in the "dark ages" when the landscape of Britain is covered in smoke and/or fog pretty much always, and nothing is ever particularly well lit. Where Legend of the Sword has no real connection to the actual history of Ro...

One thing about Big Hero 6 --the reason the film works well despite whatever flaws it might have--is that its structure is basically textbook feature film. You've got your small catalyst at 10* minutes in--Hiro meets Tadashi. Dyer (2010) specifies that the small catalyst be something that "happens to the protagonist, and not... an action that the protagonist takes. We've already got the setup of the status quo. Now, we're moving into what will change it. Notably, it was not getting arrested that turns Hiro around. It was seeing that there were better things that he could do with his intelligence (just as his brother suggested). Dyer also suggests that a character should state the theme of the film early on, and there are important lines the clearly set up the plot, all from Tadashi. He asks Hiro, "When are you going to do something with that big brain of yours?" He asks Hiro, "What would mom and dad say?" And, after offering Hiro a ride, he tel...

We interrupt your regularly scheduled social justice warrior vs Big Hero 6 blog post for an interlude. See, today I saw Alien: Covenant in the theater and I feel the need to defend it. I also felt the need to defend King Arthur: Legend of the Sword last week but never quite got to it because my intention to watch 2004's King Arthur to stay on topic got a little sidetracked by obituaries and slinkies and The Fifth Element and Big Hero 6 . And the latter got a little... heavy? A little full of itself--my discussion of it, I mean. Not that such an approach is something new for me. As I told my students today (specifically regarding fairy tales and our breakdown of the meaning of "Little Red Riding Hood" but it can be cross applied quite readily to breaking down film), finding the flaws in something doesn't make it bad. Sometimes it can even make it more enjoyable. I mean, look where you're reading this-- The Groundhog Day Project . Watched that one over 400 time...

Today, I came to appreciate the sound design of Big Hero 6 while thinking of the next step in reifying my social justice warrior interactions with film. See, I had the movie on in the kitchen while making dinner, had my wireless earphones in, and while I could see the screen if I turned my head, mostly I was just hearing it. The sound in the opening bot fight, for example, was amazing. And, for the record, I like this movie. A lot. I gave it a 9 on IMDb. (You should know how my IMDb scoring works, I suppose, to be sure what that means. For example, while The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction get 10s from me, so does La La Land , which I think is a fundamentally flawed film, and Toy Story and The Big Lebowski and Zootopia and Sling Blade , Jaws and Deadpool . Now, as much as there was talk last year about Deadpool being nominated for Best Picture, I don't think it should have even been considered for that. Best Picture is a different sort of ideal. While Get Out earn...

Speaking of different cultures and different viewpoints, according to Brian Ashcraft at Kotaku , before Big Hero 6 even came out, some South Koreans were upset over "alleged Rising Sun imagery" in the film. One movie, one story, many interpretations and interpolations. For example, Sharon H Chang, whose blog I cited yesterday, goes beyond just the racial makeup of Hiro and Tadashi (and the Japanese imagery throughout San Fransokyo). She writes: The film also plays sardonically with racial stereotypes in a manner much appreciated. Of course Hiro is Asian and super smart, but he's also hip, trendy and the hero . Fred, the not so sharp science groupie who just hangs around turns out to be extraordinarily and inexplicably rich; hilarious fun-poking at unearned white privilege/wealth. Meanwhile, Wasabi, cautious, smart and orderly, is thankfully far from typical depictions of large Black men as 'dangerous' and 'threatening.' (Admittedly the female characte...

I was reading recently about folklorists having a problem with Joseph Campbell and his whole monomyth The Hero with a Thousand Faces thing. The hero's journey and all that generic crap that gets recycled again and again in modern stories, especially film, especially action or fantasy. Sara Cleto argues, in the above linked article: Campbell's approach tends to direct the read [sic] back to themselves and their own culture. By saying, "hey, it's really just the same story over and over, we are all basically the same, and it [sic] great!" He ends up erasing the differences, and it has a flattening effect on the stories. Nevermind my own contention that all movies are all other movies, and every story is the same story, let's side with the folklorists for the moment. Besides, my arguments regarding identity and the self suggest that the differences are what matter anyway. Sure, there may be a backbone, or several different backbones, on which all stories ...