the groundhog day project

I made the mistake--and, in this case, it was a mistake [it made hating this thing even easier]--of reading Roger Ebert's review of The Natural before I pressed play on the film tonight. I remember this film as a weird sort of film noir that somehow involves a baseball player. And, it opens now with Robert Redford (who we will find out later is playing a character called Roy Hobbs) waiting for and then getting on a train, not useful dialogue, not characterization effort, just Redford. CUT TO: flashback montage, Roy as a boy learns to play baseball while his father says some lines that someone thought were philosophical when they wrote them... A storm. Montage of sports pennants in the flash of the lightning. Then the tree out back gets struck, Roy carves a bat out of its trunk and I get something Roger says. Roger explains: As for the baseball, the movie isn't even subtle. When a team is losing, it makes Little League errors. When it's winning, the hits are so accurat...

I saw A Wrinkle in Time today and it occurred to me while watching it that I don't remember ever being disappointed by a movie when I was a kid. Not that I didn't see bad movies back then. Just, I guess, I didn't care or didn't notice. The magic of whatever story it happened to be up there on the big screen (or later on the small screen as we rented a lot of movies on VHS) was bigger than my sense of narrative, maybe. Bigger than my need for great performances. An entertaining script was more important than a good script. Fantastic details or plot twists and turns could make up for faults in the production. When I run out of these on repeat childhood films I'm writing about through phase 4 of this blog, maybe I will hunt down movies I saw way back when that look, now, like they probably weren't any good. I'm looking at the top box office for 1984 right now and really only noticing one that might qualify: Ice Pirates . It's a good year for movies, a...

I don't imagine that I have much to say, if this were a review, about Ready Player One that would sway anyone either way. See it, don't see it. If you want to see it, you will likely enjoy at least some of what's up there on the screen. And, as I used to end my actual reviews on YouTube, if you don't want to see it, see something else; there's always something worth seeing out there . Also, if you don't want to see it, you should probably not let your friends drag you to see it, because it is long and your enjoyment will depend quite a lot on how much you buy into the gaming aspects or the nostalgia aspects of the film. The plot is so slight, you have to be there for, what one Twitter user called, quite aptly, "an overload of metaphorical nerd fantasy porn". I didn't read the book. I read a sample of it on my nook app and it didn't grab me. As I grew up in the 80s, have loved movies since before I knew what they were, and make a habit, her...

Let us start with the cynical take: love is a fantasy. But, that is exactly why the romance in Romancing the Stone works. The premise itself is Joan Wilder's life echoing her romance novels, fantastic adventure, treasure hunting, a mysterious stranger, relentless villains. If we buy into the premise, it is very easy to buy into the romance, because the one fantasy is nested quite comfortably within the other. Damon Suede, possibly a pseudonym, writing for Romance University , says: Romance authors love Romancing the Stone because it simultaneously ribs and respects the genre. [Screenwriter Diane] Thomas got romance at a visceral level, and for all the winking send ups of romantic cliché, she embraces them shamelessly... no small feat. It has remains a touchstone in Hollywood and within the Romance community for a simple reason: Romancing the Stone remains one of the only blockbuster hits in pure romance. Suede goes on to explain how classic romance films are generally melodr...

So, I'm watching Gringo at the the theater today, and it's not as bad as some reviews had me thinking, but it has some structural issues, too much going on, dragging a bit much for a comedy that in other scenes is quite energetic. And, it wants to be about something, with the pharmaceutical angle and the drug cartel, but it keeps not quite managing. But, the thing I wanted to say about it that is definitely not the case with Romancing the Stone is that Gringo lets characters disappear for too long at times. So, let's compare. Not that any of you have seen (or will see) Gringo , or that a lot of you have even seen Romancing the Stone (but you should see the latter because it's amazing). (Actually, it occurs to me that I just might hashtag Gringo in the tweet link to this entry so maybe some people interested in that film will happen by. Hello Gringo fans. I will probably not be talking about Gringo beyond the next few sentences; I actually had a planned topic ...

Joan Wilder's life isn't normally like her books. Great romance. Adventure. Life and death. Revenge. She lives alone with her cat (named Romeo), drinks alcohol from the little bottles you might have gotten on a plane back in '84. Romancing the Stone begins as she finishes writing her latest romance novel. And the premise of the film, in case you're some unfortunate millennial who has never heard of it, is simple--Joan's brother in law is murdered in Colombia, but not before getting a treasure map in the mail for Joan (Kathleen Turner). Then Elaine (Mary Ellen Trainor), Joan's sister is abducted and Joan heads for Colombia, hooks up with Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), who coincidentally resembles the shadowy Jesse from her novels--think cowboy with a modern twist. The film is basically Joan's fantasy coming true. And, for the audience, it's a nice adventure fantasy as well. And, I only just learned that this was screenwriter Diane Thomas' only fini...

The thing about Police Academy --in particular, but also several of the other films from my childhood that preached irreverence through most of the story--is that that, in the end, the status quo is held up. At the beginning, these new recruits are jokes. By the end of the film, they have all bought in to the police academy, even Mahoney, who was forced into it, and Jones, who happened into it because of Mahoney. The film reifies law and order, promotes conformity, and reinforces heteronormativity. Regarding the latter, the film starts in on masculinity at least right away. The second segment is Mahoney at work and he shames a guy for having a wig. Losing your hair is an easy mark for a measure of one's manhood. McCann, Plummer, and Minichiello (2010) explains: Humour's role as an 'othering' technique has two functions: first, it marks out what is to be taken seriously such as stoic, heterosexual masculinity, and what can be devalued by being laugh at. (p. 519) Fla...

Opening crawl*: On March 4th of this year... ...newly elected Mayor Mary Sue Beal announced that she was changing the hiring practices of this city's police force. No longer would height, weight, sex, education, or physically strength be used to keep new recruits out of the Metropolitan Police Academy. Hundreds of people who never dreams of becoming police officers signed up immediately. Naturally, the police completely freaked. * it doesn't really crawl but that's the whole reading bit to open the movie and set up information (and, in this case, a nice punchline) we will learn later anyway. Plus, here, this text appears over a background of the cityscape, drenched in pouring rain. I also think naming the mayor Mary Sue is deliberate--and only just learned that the use of Mary Sue to suggest a wish fulfillment character in fan fiction dated back to 1973. I thought it was more recent. In this case, though, the Mary Sue is ironic. Like, the liberals want everyone to g...

Writing for The Atlantic , Christopher Orr sides with the more positive take on Wes Anderson's choice of a Japanese setting and having (mostly) Japanese-speaking humans in his latest film, Isle of Dogs . Yet, in passing mention of the other side, Orr makes an interesting error that both clarifies the positive take and suggests a whole other version of the problem... Let me backtrack. Orr writes (parenthetically): Unlike the dogs, the Japanese characters--which is to say all of the human beings save one--do not have their words rendered into English, except when explicitly restated by a translator voices by France's McDormand. I leave to individual viewers to decide whether this is a way of center-staging the hounds--my view--or sidelining the Asian protagonists. First, a small point: Orr's initial phrasing suggests that the dogs are not Japanese, which is either a mislabeling because they are obviously just as much from Japan as the human characters, or it is a cute sor...

My impulse for today was to write about the so-called manic pixie dream girl . Madison in Splash is perhaps an early prototype for a such-labeled character. But, then I was looking up pieces about those stereotypical cinematic women who, according the the TV Tropes definition, exist to "come along and open [the] heart [of a "soulful, brooding male hero"] to the great, wondrous adventure of life" and I realized something interesting... And not entirely unbelievable given the patriarchy's ability to self-perpetuate: the term coined by Nathan Rabin at AV Club that implied a weakness in "the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors" turned into a way to put down female characters instead of their creators. As Zoe Kazan, who starred as an all too easily labeled manic pixie dream girl who quite literally sprung from the fevered imagination of a sensitive writer in Ruby Sparks (but that character actually came from Kazan's own imagination, a...

Freddie (John Candy) is a pervert, even as a child. Allen (Tom Hanks) is more of a romantic, even as a child. As a kid, Freddie drops change on the floor to look up ladies' skirts. Allen jumps off a ferry to swim, briefly, with a mermaid girl. As adults, Allen runs Bauer Produce, Freddie... Well, Freddie is proud to have gotten a letter in Penthouse magazine. Broad strokes quickly painted, and we know these characters pretty well inside the first ten minutes of Splash . If you're unfamiliar, think The Shape of Water with the genders swapped, a less dangerous (and less stereotypical) antagonist, and... Dare I say it? More believable romance. Don't get me wrong; I liked The Shape of Water a lot. I had a problem with one particular aspect of its conclusion, but I didn't mind how it seemed to spend more time on heist details than fleshing out its central romance. Guillermo Del Toro's film has a couple clear advantages over Ron Howard's film. The obvious one is...

Sometimes Roger Ebert was just wrong. I still enjoy his reviews, and he is often worth citing, but that doesn't mean he is infallible. Regarding Footloose , he writes : "Footloose" is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict Ina. Town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. Also, Roger writes: I seriously doubt a town like this exists anywhere outside of standard movie clichés. The town of Henryetta, Oklahoma, has a law--dating back to 1979 but still on the books as of last year --restricting where public dances can happen, and apparently the law "watered down an earlier ruling that banned all public dancing regardless of location." The ordinance forbade "dance halls" from being located within 500 feet of any church or school. And, the film was supposedly inspired by Elmore City, also in Oklahoma...