the groundhog day project

There are more notes scribbled from yesterday's viewing of her . Like this line from the movie, in blue: Wha'ts it like to be alive in that room right now? And this below it in pink: Isn't this the longing of any relationship, at any distance? And, I think I'm going to ignore the rest of the scribbles because I'm in that moment as this month nears its end. Appropriately, I just finished watching the third season of 12 Monkeys . Time travel show, in case you don't know. Based on the film . Had a great line--one of the episodes of the show did--about women and what they mean: "The history I've seen is one of great women sung badly by clumsy men." Because, yeah, so much of history is told by men, smudging the details to make the men they want to be important seem more important than they actually are, or were. I mean, sure, we look at the present as having advanced the place of women, like suddenly they're more important. What we don't ...

(A note before this gets perhaps a little philosophical... Was it my sister Brooke who once commented in regards to an early Groundhog Day Project entry that I had a self-help book in me? I've toyed with writing a sort of self-helpy, memoiry book out of that first year of the blog. I even wrote a good chunk of what might have been the first chapter last fall. But, I don't know if I believe it anymore, myself--that there's a self-help book in me. Or maybe I don't want there to be... That wasn't the note. The note is this: I didn't really plan out this month of feminist and/or female-centric films. I immediately had an idea of a few movies I had to include-- Thelma & Louise , 9 to 5 , 10 Things I Hate about You --for a little obviousness and a little variety. And, I wasn't sure what movie should come last, like the coda to the rest. What movie would tie things together before I returned to Groundhog Day again for a day then moved onto some new month I ...

And she has every right to be.                                                   That everyone questions it. That Bianca questions it. That is just wrong. Like an old Jeff Foxworthy routine twisted just a bit: You might be a misogynist asshole if you think Kat Stratford is wrong for being a bitch. You might be a misogynist asshole if you think Kat isn't justified in getting mad at Patrick for hiding the fact that Joey's paying him. And You might be a misogynist asshole, or just fundamentally misunderstand feminism, if you can't accept that Kat can turn right around and forgive him because (whether it's just a teenage version, or cinematic teenage version, or something more real) she loves him. Plus, even if she’s compromising her beliefs, she’s doing it for Heath Ledger. Who wouldn’t do that?

Some of the great moments in 10 Things I Hate about You are the more subtle things. Not Kat's overt antisocial behavior or her feminism but Bianca's disinterest in most of what Joey does, even as she's sort of stuck around him when he's near. As my daughter put it today, Bianca cannot be herself around Joey. But--and this is me. again--there are those moments that she's bothered by her own interest. Like when she calls his headshot "pensive" and he says he was going for "thoughtful." In that moment, she's more like her sister, smarter than the girl whose opening line is that shallow bit about liking her Skechers and loving her Prada backpack. Or when he's doing his underwear and swimsuit poses and she's got no more clue than we do what the difference is. Of course, one of the subtle moments that isn't as good is Bianca's and Joey's reaction to her accidentally shooting Mr. Chapin with a bow and arrow. The subtle non-react...

And then there’s that moment that Patrick doesn’t kiss Kat. Ostensibly because she’s been drinking and might still not be entirely in control of her faculties, and he’s a better man than Joey will ever be. But, in that moment, that isn’t how Kat experiences it. Two things are going on. On the one hand, given her shorthand history , Kat expects a guy to take advantage (and when she's the one offering, it's not even taking advantage, so much... Except inasmuch as she has been drinking, but if that's true, she's hardly in a position to judge, and if she's sober enough to judge, then she's not drunk enough for it to be) or, on the other hand, she's in that moment feeling like a "normal" teenage girl and Patrick is rejecting her. Thing is, Kat can be both. A teenage girl who wants Patrick to kiss her and a self-avowed feminist who still might not like boys in general. (And, no smart person should like boys in general, because they're awful. W...

For example , Kat Stratford, 10 Things I Hate about You --she can’t just be enlightened because she noticed that the world is unfair, that girls are not given the things that boys are, the, you know the world sucks just because you’re a teenage girl; you don’t have to had sex and regretted it and he dumped her. She can’t just be a “shrew” because the world is an awful, unfair place. No, we’ve got to have something specific, something the males in the audience can understand. Because the males in the audience are either assholes who just won’t like Kat except as much as they think she’s hot, or idiots who will just be frightened by her. As Sage Young at Bustle , puts it, “The implication is that her shame and anger drove her into becoming interested in women's issues, possibly supporting the idiotic theory that female feminists are women who aren't loved up enough to accept second-class status.” Then Young counters with another interpetation, that “a trauma leads Kat to lear...

A few complaints before I move on from Thelma & Louise : The simple ones I mentioned in brief parenthetically yesterday . When Thelma and Louise need money, Louise needs Jimmy to get some to her. The talking through of their relationship that comes after her call to Jimmy is an interesting scene, and I'm not sure how the film would really play without it. Louise needs to realize both that she has that relationship waiting, that there is a chance for her in the regular world, and that--remember, when she can't tell him what's going on, Jimmy gets angry and breaks a lamp--even this relatively healthy relationship has an obvious problem: Jimmy is still a male, in a world where men can rage with jealousy and it's accepted. She keeps something from him and, generally speaking, we're supposed to see that as wrong. Here, she's actually protecting him from getting into legal trouble. But Jimmy is still of that man's world, and you don't keep information fro...

I'm looking at the trivia section for Thelma & Louise in IMDb and I notice that it says the trailer presented the movie as a comedy. So, I watch the trailer and two things are immediately necessary to point out: 1. Yes, the trailer presents the film absolutely as a fairly light comedy, two women up to some crazy shenanigans. Police get involved, sure, but we don't really see how much. The trailer even explicitly cuts around the gun that Thelma points at the cop in his car. Shows him getting out with his hands up, but avoids showing the gun. We see an explosion, but there's no context, just more happy screaming and laughter. Like this is just a fun romp. Far more Outrageous Fortune than Kalifornia . Since Stephen Tobolowsky is in this, they should have just thrown in a shot of Ned Ryerson saying "Bing!" (Except, that footage wouldn't exist yet, obviously.) 2. What else were they going to do? 9 to 5 only worked like it did because it was a comedy, and ...

Thelma & Louise is one of those obvious titles, when you try to come up with feminist films. I was actually surprised watching the film today after many years since I last watched it, just how much of the film is virtually unrelated to the feminist core. It's that incidental feminism, or whatever you want to call it. Like if the leads were male instead, the plot wouldn't be that different. It would still be a road picture, there could still be the incidental violent act that sends the leads on the run. And, I take a moment to think of a male-centric example of the same and the first film that came to mind is The Legend of Billie Jean , which is entirely a feminist film. I know Bonnie and Clyde makes for a good comparison but it's been a while since I've watched that one, too. My mind turns to Kalifornia or Wisdom , though that isn't really a "road picture." To Hell or High Water , Natural Born Killers ... So much crime, deliberate and incidental. Th...

Then again , who am I to tell anyone to shut up (not that what I did yesterday was that , exactly? And, who am I to preach about being creative when my only real creative outlet lately is this blog (with barely any audience) or Dungeons & Dragons , where my audience is a whole 6-9 players depending on the week? I had considered getting out a few of my unpublished manuscripts--the good ones--and re-editing them this summer to make available as ebooks, but then I got some summer classes to teach. Great news for the bank account but taking up a lot of my time for several weeks. Maybe I'll still get to the manuscripts. Knowing me, probably not. One little roadblock and I'll put it off, do something else. Story of my creative life. This blog--not strictly speaking an entirely creative exercise--is the one thing in recent years I have been able to stick with for a particularly long time. When I started actively trying to write fiction for the purpose of getting published--with ...

I gotta come back to David Fishkind's piece at HTMLGiant . " Frances Ha comes so close to being a movie I needed, my generation needed, this world needed," he writes. The time has never been riper than [now] to cut down any encouragement among our youth to pursue a creative lifestyle." And, I think I might just stop quoting him there, because, why would a movie--a piece of art, mind you, want to tell anyone to stop making art? Sure, a piece of art could do that, I'm sure many pieces of art do do that. But, isn't it so much more enjoyable when it doesn't? For that matter, what feels like a better solution to me is to do more art, be more creative, and get the fucking capitalist sell outs who can't be bothered to be creative to maybe pay for a theater ticket now and again to make themselves better cultured, as it were, and support the artists that are inspired to actually do something with their lives even as the momentum of the modern world presses ...

I don't know New York. Never been there, though I would love to sometime. But, Frances Ha feels like it is invoking a very specific time and place. This is when Frances is 27. This is New York City. And, the film offers establishing shots of existing locations and also specific addresses in the same typeface as the title of the film. Like chapter divisions in any other indie film that has chapter divisions. 682 VANDERBILT AVE Brooklyn, NY 11238 That's the first one. By this point, we've seen Frances and Sophie in their apartment. We saw it in the opening montage, but the address oops up as they get home from their night in Chinatown (for a party that may or may not have been near somewhere called Dumpling House). This is where the film settles into the apartment a little more. The inclusion of the zip code amuses me. This isn't just Frances' and Sophie's apartment. This is one particular apartment out of all the apartments, unique in this time and place,...

Early in France's Ha , France's quotes Sincerity and Authenticity by Lionel Trilling (1972): "To praise a work of literature by calling it sincere is now, at best, a way of saying that although it need be given no aesthetic or intellectual admiration..." and the sequence of France's and Sophie moves on to another interaction, part of a series that establishes a) their sisterly closeness--Frances compares them to a lesbian couple that no longer has sex--and b) their lack, of a sort, of real maturity. That line from Trilling continues: "it was at least conceived in innocent of heart." And, I think, sincerely, that the choice of this quotation by Baumbach was deliberate. See, in context (of Trilling, not the film, though I'll get to that), Trilling has gone over the origin (latin sincerus meaning "clean, or sound, or pure" and really meaning that whatever is being modified has "not been tampered with." He has covered a sort of his...

France's Ha is not feminist. It just happens to be centered around a woman, France's (Greta Gerwig). A woman of 27 who isn't quite managing to, in the modern parlance, adult.           And, I've never seen it before (though I have liked other Baumbach films, I never got around to this one), and I think I'm rather enjoying it. Its description on Netflix is odd: Determined to make it as a modern dancer in New York, a young woman pursues her unlikely goal with more enthusiasm than natural talent. Now, to be fair, the film is not quite over as I'm writing this. But, 1) France's definitely does not do anything with notable enthusiasm. She explicitly has trouble leaving places, getting up, getting out of her apartment. She wants to be a dancer, sure, and hell, maybe she's got more enthusiasm than talent there, but 2) the film is just not about that. That's just one tiny aspect of Frances' life. More of the film deals with her increasingly d...

A couple things, and I'll keep this short today: 1) Sometimes I really like that the Internet is full of cynical assholes who hate everything; it makes some movies exceed my expectations after reading all the horrible reviews. 2) Sometimes the feminist story is not the one you expect. I saw Rough Night and Cars 3 today. The former is primarily about five women reuniting for a bachelorette weekend then accidentally killing a guy (and a whole lot more after that). The latter is--and I will include SPOILERS almost immediately--about an aging athlete learning to let go and allow someone new to take his place. That someone new is a younger woman. While Rough Night is basically a female-oriented update of Very Bad Things crossed with The Hangover , the most it does to raise up women is in its treatment, however brief, of the men they leave behind to go to Miami; the men are seen at a very sedate wine tasting, and talking about relationships, while the women are partying, doing drugs...

Before I move on from Working Girl , there is something I need to say. I'm pretty sure Katharine is the wronged party in this film. She explains the existence of her note to Jack (which she never actually sends, by the way, which means at worst she only intends to steal Tess' idea, she doesn't ever do it until-- Well, I'll get to that.) as Jack being hesitant to look at a plan from her secretary, which makes sense. Sure, when Tess asks him if he would look at a colleague's idea, he says he would, but a) he doesn't know what she's talking about and might be distracted by the deal about to actually go down, and b) he might have been hesitant before to help Katharine because he just never liked her as much as he likes Tess, so Katharine would actually be telling the truth as she understands it, even if she would turn out to be wrong. Consider how the film plays the initial interactions between Katharine and Tess. Especially in context of the supposed ethical...

Tess' McGill's obvious sins in Working Girl are being ambitious and knowing more than the men around her. In the 80s business environment, that is just not how it's supposed to be. Recently, Pamela Falk at CBS News reported that when Wonder Woman was named an honorary UN ambassador for women's issues, "some complain[ed] about her sexualized appearance." On CBS This Morning , Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins "addressed the criticism by some that a supposed feminist icon like Wonder Woman can't also wear a sexy, skimpy outfit." She said: I think that that's sexist. I think it's sexist to say you can't have both. I have to ask myself what I would apply to any other superhero. This is fantasy and it's not for anyone other than the person having the fantasy. I, as a little girl, like took a huge amount of delight in the idea that for my power and my ability to stop that bullion that playground, I could also look like Lynda Cart...

The plot of Working Girl is nothing that special. But, as with Wonder Woman , that is not the point. Or was not the point when this film came out in 1988. I was only 12, almost 13, when I saw this movie, plus, well, I was a boy. So, I was not really invested in Tess' upward trajectory as a woman. But, for one example (and my go-to reviewer), Roger Ebert said of the film: The plot of "Working Girl" is put together like clockwork. It carries you along while you're watching it, but reconstruct it later and you'll see the craftsmanship. Kevin Wade's screenplay is sort of underhanded in the way it diverts yes with laughs, and with a melodramatic subplot involving [Melanie] Griffith's former boyfriend, while all the time it's winding up for the suspenseful climax. Thing is, I don't find the climax to be all that suspenseful. It seems rather predictable to me. To earn, say, a more tragic ending--a failure--for Tess, the entire film would have had to...