the groundhog day project

Moonrise Kingdom , another Wes Anderson film, is playing right now. I was going to write about the deliberate artificiality again, how disconnecting the audience from what a film should be, and is expected to be, draws the audience in. But then I saw Detroit today, and I was inclined to get into a sociopolitical rant... But I've been trying to avoid that all month. I've even been toying with musical's or bad movies for next month, keeping it more enjoyable than triggering. And I find myself sitting here just watching Moonrise Kingdom ... I should be ranting. I should be raging. And people should see Detroit when it's in wider release next week and they should rage. We should all rage. We've got a president who asks what's going on in Chicago (with its high murder rate) and it seems like he really has no fucking clue why 1) poor people might exist, 2) why anyone would turn to gangs or violence to get by, 3) why systemic racism, and significant economic upheav...

I love the way The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou begins, and I really love the way Roger Ebert's review of it begins. The film begins with an announcer speaking Italian, with no subtitles. He introduces a documentary with Steve Zissou, a Jacques Cousteau-esque explorer and documentarian played by Bill Murray. The movie separates us from the action by putting this initial footage on a narrower screen framed by curtains. We see the audience watching the footage. Within the footage, we see the film crew, a camera, the boom mic. (Plus the undersea life is blatantly fake--part of the whimsy of the film, not the documentary within the film.) And this is a Wes Anderson film, inherently artificial, deliberately stylized, and explicitly distancing itself stylistically from the usual film. Roger's review begins like this: My rational mind informs me that this movie doesn't work. Yet I hear a subversive whisper: Since it does so many other things, does it have to work, too? Can...

Beatriz at Dinner is a deeply flawed film. It uses intense stares and long silences as if they are the height of characterization, offers up caricatures and simplistic dialogue instead of realistic conversation--which for a film with a heavy-handed Guess Who's Coming to Dinner vibe, is the greatest of cinematic sins. You build your film around dialogue, your dialogue better be amazing. You build your film around character interaction (as opposed to plot), then your characters should all feel real, should all be at least a little likable. Now, to be fair, I think the script (and the casting choices of Hayek and Lithgow) deliberately set up the titular Beatriz to be a bit... off, and Doug to be personable, accepting even of criticism (though mostly because experience would demonstrate that he is above it). This is a story about the 1% having dinner with a nobody, a Mexican-born masseuse and healer. Assume SPOILERS. Don't assume that this is purely a review. As I've said m...

I wanted to continue the "survey" today, throw out far too many questions-- (For example, under the banner of Action Films, I has broken the genre down into Adventure, Disaster, Superhero, and Heist movies, and there was a question about your preference between Cars or Parkour?) --but I don't want to. I also thought I'd be watching The Room again tonight, but I am unexpectedly cut down to just the one screen for the next couple hours, and I have time to write. I did see a movie today. Of course. Atomic Blonde . I liked it more than my friend Jared--with whom I saw it--did, but I thought it felt a little long and had that first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible problem of actively trying to be overcomplicated just for the sake of being overcomplicated. Still, I was entertained, and I rather liked the way most of the violence played out, more brutal and real than most action movies, as if the characters were really getting hurt. For a film that introduces its lead na...

In no particular order: 1. What matters more--plot or story? Do you want a plot-driven story like an action film or a mystery, or a fairly basic romance? Or does the story matter more? Does each character need to feel like they've got their own story going on? Better yet, how do you define the difference? 2. How important is dialogue in a movie? Do you prefer clever dialogue? Realistic dialogue? How important is the script? What do you think of voiceover? (Side question: does that bullshit-style of voiceover that only exists at the start and end of a film bug the crap out of you as much as it does me? Girls Trip uses that style and opens with flashback moments with the main characters in college and a series of shots of their reunions every few years, and it's all stuff we just don't need. Everything that the opening of the film--especially the voiceover--offers us is something that we'll figure out ourselves later unless we're idiots.) What do you think of char...

Less important than making my survey is the reasoning behind it. I've said before that I could write a memoir using movies to tell time, a la Fever Pitch . And, the "thesis" if you will for this whole blog (per Day 579 ) is: Our lives can be measured in movies and movies can be measured in our lives and profound and profane depths can be found in the intersection thereof. That is to say, if I can know your favorite movies, know what it is you look for in a movie, then I can know you. I tweeted (and then retweeted with my personal account over to Facebook) a few posts about what people's favorite movies are--their top five. But, it's more than that. For example, there's a huge difference between how I choose my favorite movies and how I might decide what are the best movies. Hell, I don't really even bother with the latter because movies are so subjective, the experience of watching a movie is subjective, and that version of a movie that is left in each ...

The Room isn't even playing yet. I saw Girls Trip today--it was pretty good and very funny. But, right now, I've actually got the Critical Role panel from Comicon playing on Twitch. But, Pages is open and I'm typing because, you know, who cares what order things happen anyway? The point is not that things are organized but that things are tragic. You find a woman and you stay together for seven years, live together, and she'll betray you with your best friend. You find a man and you stay together for seven years, he will bore the shit out of you even though he's fundamentally a good guy, and you will cheat on him and he will kill himself. No matter what you do, someone will betray someone, someone will die, life will suck... except for when it doesn't. It's those moments when it doesn't suck that matter. When he brings you a new dress, or she has already ordered the pizza. As I write this I hear some lyrics from the Groundhog Day musical in my head-...

Time for some Christ-Figuring. (If you're new, check Days 93 and 94 ) regarding Phil Connors or the inaugural Kozlovic-Black Scale--when I Christ-Figured Rambo . You're welcome.) Now, I can barely imagine Tommy Wiseau being clever enough to deliberately make Johnny a Christ-Figure, but so much of it is deliberate that it had to at least be a subconscious thing... Or rather, sacrificial characters, betrayed within their circle of friends is such a trope that it's the sheer amount of fitting details that separate our the wheat from the chaff, as it were. As I've said before, the scale is scored out of 25 but there are more than 25 items on the list. It's a thing. 1 tangible This is always the easy one. (1/1) 2 central Tommy Wiseau makes himself (or rather, his character) central to everything he makes, so yeah. (2/2) In fact , Johnny is so central here, and his and Lisa's apartment such the hub of activity for their circle of friends, he fails to get the...

Honestly, though, we need more people to just go ahead and make movies regardless of how good they are. I mean, sure, movies with scripts that are good are better, and movies with budgets for sets with doors that stayed closed when you close them. are better, and movies that can actually afford to film on real rooftops are better. But, The Room is entertaining, is amusing, and is strangely captivating. Some bad movies are boring, or offensively bad. This one just works. It certainly doesn't work, you know, well. But, it's dealing with serious topics. Love, loyalty, the patriarchy, suicide. Plus, Johnny has the best take on life: "You can love someone deep inside your heart, and there is nothing wrong with it.. If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place to live." I've been avoiding turning to politics this month, but if you want to solve the problems of partisan politics, you just gotta listen to Johnny... (There's also Peter'...

I've written before about The Room --Days 609 610 611 --but I wanted the movie version of comfort food tonight. I considered a bad horror film, but the one I picked just happens to be about the only movie unavailable on my various means of watching movies. Anyway, The Room starts out nicely enough, establishing shots of San Francisco (bought on the cheap, I'm sure) and it feels like a good indie drama. But then Tommy Wiseau has to get the first line of dialogue--"Hi, babe"--and the bad acting gets going. Then, the various "actors" compete to see who can be the worst. And, something I always liked when I was watching Groundhog Day day after day was when a new detail would jump out. Tonight, watching The Room , I got stuck on a line from the song during the first sex scene, you know the one that comes in the first five minutes of the film when we've barely had any way to get to know these characters and certainly have no reason to care about them or...

1. I saw Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets today, and while it had some awesome visuals, the overall plot was fairly standard fantasy fare. Entertaining, sure. But, nowhere as original or as memorable as, say, The Fifth Element . 2. While I have ended my obsessive, extended time with Sing Street , I don't plan to return to the dystopian films to finish out the month. Instead, I think I'm just going to go with whatever comes up. My summer classes are over and I've got time. 3. Despite that image. I'm not sure I want to write about Valerian , really. In fact, the links to Rogue One yesterday got me to thinking more generally about films. Like, what do I want from them> What do I expect from them? Why do I embrace them such that I could, in Fever Pitch -style, outline my life according to the movies I saw at certain times-- Cliffhanger on our senior trip to Maui; Say Anything (not the first time I'd seen it) in a motel in Los Angeles with my then-...

My friend Shari mentioned that one of her problems with Rogue One was that lack of character arcs. And, then I went out to see Dunkirk . And, while I'm all for characters getting arcs and getting their own little stories--and I think I've made the point more than a few times in this blog that I can appreciate the arcs of characters beyond what the finite limits of a particular film allow--but sometimes, 1) I think that a certain kind of story doesn't necessarily need characters to really change as such and 2) you really shouldn't look to Star Wars movies for serious character arcs, anyway. (Sure, characters have their plot arcs, but their changes are shallow, more plot-driven than personality-driven.) And, Dunkirk makes fantastic use of its actors, and offers up characters that are easy to follow, relatively easy to care about, and situations that are both simple enough to follow and surprisingly complicated at times, with sequences cut together out of order just as...

It's in one of those melancholic scenes I was talking about yesterday that Brendan says today's title. He and Conor are sitting on the stairs watching their mother out on the porch. Seems she rushes home from work every day to sit in the sun and read her papers, and she has a drink. Then the sun goes behind a nearby tall tree and she goes inside. Brendan says she wants to vacation in Spain but their father won't take her. And, he wonders what she thinks about. Earlier in the film, Conor spelled out a similar notion, except it's not about the wondering, it's about imagining, deciding for the version of another person inside your head. He tells Eamon, When you don't know someone, they're more interesting. They can be anything you want them to be. But, when you know them, there's limits to them. Eamon says that doesn't make sense, and in some handwritten notes I scribbled sometime last week, I said of Eamon's response, "Clearly, he's n...

Sing Street --and, I think I'm about done with this film, I swear--begins with Conor playing guitar and making up lyrics on the spot, mostly basing them on the phrases he can hear his parents Robert and Penny yelling from downstairs. Then you get a news report about poor folks from Ireland migrating to England to look for something better. Then, Robert and Penny gather their three kids together to announce that they're having money troubles and Conor has to transfer schools. He was going to a Jesuit school but now he's headed to the Christian Brothers (Catholic) school, Synge Street. In passing, we also learn that Brendan has dropped out of college. In the first three minutes, we know so much about what's to come. It's a great example of how to set up the status quo quickly. Conor is a musician. His parents' marriage is coming apart. Brendan is a slacker. And, Conor is headed to a new school. The plot is in motion. That opening bit with the singing and parents ...