the groundhog day project

Leia is awesome. It should go without saying. Especially after so many years. Many people have written about her (and about Carrie Fisher) over the years. And, Fisher herself has had plenty to say. For example, in Rolling Stone , 21 July 1983, she says, "There are a lot of people who don't like my character in these movies; they think I'm some kind of space bitch." She follows that up with: She has no friends, no family; her planet was blown up in seconds--along with her hairdresser--so all she has is a cause. From the first film... she was just a soldier, front line and center. The only way they knew to make the character strong was to make her angry. But, that isn't really true. 1) she may have friends. Star Wars Rebels has shown us recently that Leia was involved with the rebellion for a while before the events seen at the end of Rogue One and the opening of Star Wars , but even as a rebel, she could have friends. At home an Alderaan, maybe. Or she goes ou...

I was always a bigger fan of Luke than of Han. Probably because I was so young when I first came to them, or they first came to me. Luke made for the more interesting fantasy. So, I'm looking up articles about this, Hand versus Luke, and I really wish there were a serious study, but I might be the only person who would think studying that would be worth it for the sake of, say, a film program, a communication studies program, a psychology program. Glenn Geher, PhD, writing for Psychology Today , 5 March 2013, talks about a class discussion in a graduate course in social psychology... The conversation touched on several themes relevant to evolutionary psychology--mate choice, optimal features of long-term mates, optimal features of short-term mates, morphological features of sexually attractive mates, the handicap principle applied to high levels of testosterone, inbreeding depression, and so forth... Let's unpack a bit of that before moving on. Evolutionary psychology is sp...

I am, legitimately, an expert on the movie Groundhog Day . Or at least I was a few years ago. I don't 100% have the script memorized anymore, I don't think about the film every day. But, during the first year of this blog (and a few times since) I have been contacted by strangers with questions about the movie. (I also, while IMDb still had its message board, actively joined multiple conversation threads about the film, effectively positioning myself as someone who knows the film). Similarly, I should be considered an expert on Star Wars , or an ex-expert. When I was a kid, I watched the trilogy often. There was no box set then so each film was on a different VHS tape. (If memory serves, Star Wars was on the same tape as Adventures of the Wilderness Family , The Empire Strikes Back was on a tape with The Natural and The Last Starfighter , and Return of the Jedi was on a tape with Silverado .*) * I don't just trust my memory. My sister recently sent me pictures of our...

To paraphrase Trent and Mike from Swingers , "VHS baby!" That's right, I've got Star Wars on tonight, finally. And I will be refusing for the purposes of this blog to ever refer to it as "A New Hope" because however much that episode title might have been part of the opening crawl, that is not what we called it back in the day... Did I just say "back in the day"? I should apologize. As I would tell my Public Speaking students, that phrase is vague. What I meant to say was that between the first time I saw Star Wars circa it's time in the theater (maybe when I was just a few months old but I'm guessing months later or the next year in some rerelease; all I know is that when The Empire Strikes Back came out, I knew Star Wars even though I was only four. I dont' actually remember seeing Star Wars for the first time. (Some of the first movies I specifically remember seeing in the theater are Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the ...

The thing about Murder by Death is that 1) it offers up a group of intelligent characters, capable of Sherlock Holmes-style deductions out of nowhere-- (For the record, even though I know better, when Dick Charleston asks about Marcel recovering from his accident, I assume he's talking about Marcel getting hit by the gargoyle that was pushed off the roof not ten screen minutes before. But, no, he's talking about some previous injury, and references the sound of Marcel's artificial hip, which WE CANNOT HEAR. Considering the Charlestons were also attacked with a gargoyle, it should be even more obvious that Marcel was injured. But, no, it's a previous "accident" with a car.) --but also just dumb (if that's the word) enough to be so wrong about their guesses about the larger situation, particularly those at the end of the film, after Twain has essentially tried to kill them all in their rooms. 2) They, Sam Diamond especially, are capable of being sexist ...

Except , Murder by Death isn't even really a mystery. I mean, it's not like it offers up clues for the audience to solve anything, nor does it even show the detective's discovering useful information for their final solutions (plus all of their final solutions are so far out of left field, and wrong (especially Sam Diamond's (Peter Falk) theory that negates him being himself, which is funny, but ridiculous)). At best, the only things in this film that the audience might be able to figure out along the way, or more importantly, that we see the detectives figuring out, is that there are two dining rooms. Everything else is arbitrary. Which, I suppose is the point. I actually wish I had (back when I was a kid, but also now) more experience with the genre this movie is picking apart. Lionel Twain's (Truman Capote) big speech at the end of the film does however take me in a slightly different direction. But first, here's his rant: You've all been so clever fo...

It's interesting that, as a kid, the big mystery films I watched a lot were Murder by Death (watching it now) and The Private Eyes (watching it sometime in the coming weeks, months, years? Who knows how long this "month" will take). Comedies that parody and/or satirize older detective films and stories that I had less access to. My views of detective stories in film would forever be tainted by these movies.           And, I sit here watching (and being distracted by cats and people, but mostly just watching). And thinking about genres, about how we experience them based on past experience. The same way we experience every film, of course, in context of your history with every other film we've seen. And, with genre, we learn the tropes, the conventions, we learn the character archetypes, the usual plots beats and settings. And, after a while, the details become so common and well known (even outside the films (or stories) themselves) that even if you hav...

To be fair, I wasn't really there in the 70s. I mean, I was, but I was an infant, a toddler, I wasn't making movie-watching decisions just yet... Well, not really. But, I certainly didn't know why certain movies were the ones making money at the time. My experience with all of these movies so far this month came later mostly. Get to the 80s and I was plenty aware then (and in retrospect as well) why things were the way they were in popular cinema. But, I'm not above speculation, obviously. Plus, I am capable of research. For example, disaster films were big--the Airport series, The Poseidon Adventure , Earthquake , The Towering Inferno , Meteor . James Bond films were in full swing with Connery and Moore. Crime was big-- The French Connection , Dirty Harry , The Godfather and its Part II , Death Wish , Serpico , plus the wilderness movies, of course. JT Esterkamp at Medium , says "The films [of the 1970s] would be a reflection of the anti-hero as a protagonist....

Let's get a couple things out of the way: 1) the gambling at the end of Across the Great Divide , unless we are supposed to assume Zachariah is cheating, is bullshit. It's cheap and convenient stacking of cards so both have good cars and Zachariah wins. It's the kind of thing a lot of movies do, actually. Nevermind the way poker actually works, the way players actually bet, the way you're not going to be betting horses after like one hand; 2) the song that plays as the men try to kill Zachariah at the beginning of the film is awful; so are many of the obviously-written-for-the-film songs that play and; 3) even worse, there is a moment when they've been at the native camp for a bit where the kids run in slow motion with some cougars and that same stupid running-with-animals music from Adventures of the Wilderness Family plays and for a moment, it's like one movie is the other, and not in a good way, because I think this movie is actually better. Some moments a...

(So... Altering the plan a bit. This "month" is going to take far longer than a calendar month anyway, so I looked back at the longer list of films I had made before narrowing it down for this exercise in deconstruction, because, my Star Wars VHS tapes still didn't arrive. Options were, skip past it, jump ahead to Heaven Can Wait , or... I looked at the larger list and found Across the Great Divide for 1976. Fits the pattern and I might start adding some other movies from the longer list back into this. This could take a while. But anyway, today... to night , actually; it's a late start because my Thursdays are busy anyway and I was hoping the mail would make Star Wars possible tonight. In fact, as I'm typing this little paranthetical, I'm still watching Critical Role . Their episodes end when their episodes end. So, it's near 11pm and I don't know when the movie will begin.           11:16--that's when.) The weird thing about watching ...

(We interrupt the planned programming here at The Groundhog Day Project --because my VHS set of Star Wars films didn't arrive and I don't feel like skipping ahead--to bring you a brief bit about mother! --because I saw it again today, and however much it is horrifying some people, I liked it even more the second time than I did the first time.) Honestly, you probably won't like mother! . I mean, statistically, most people won't like it. Maybe, taking into account the limited scope of this blog and the side of the Venn diagram of film aficionados who might come to my blog regularly, you're one of the few who will not only like it but love it. An Aronofsky fan, perhaps. A fan of divisive, provocative, polarizing cinema, maybe. Let's get some stuff out of the way right off. You know, SPOILERS. You're gonna get overloaded with imagery of violence, of gratuitous religiosity, of Jennifer Lawrence's breasts, of a newborn baby's half eaten corpse, and ...

I can relate to Amos and Theodore right now because sometimes plans go awry. I was supposed to be watching the original Star Wars today. But, 1) I don't own a copy of that film anymore, 2) it costs $17.99 to buy it on Amazon Prime (and apparently isn't available for rental), 3) I actually bought the original trilogy on video on eBay a few days ago hoping it would be here in time, so I didn't really want to spend money on it anyway (and that VHS trilogy did not arrive in time; let's hope it gets her tomorrow), but then this led to a dilemma earlier, 4) I had no movie to watch today. So, I was looking up--trying to keep things chronological--movies that also came out in 1975 or that came out in 1976 that fit the bill for this month, that is, I watched them a lot as a kid. There were some good movies in those years-- Carrie , Rocky , The Godfather Part II , Jaws , One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Taxi Driver , and two films I've actually watched for this blog be...