we are not experiencing technical difficulties

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Started the day with Blumhouse's Truth or Dare, finishing it with The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, after a nice game night. Will probably return to Top Secret! tomorrow. In the meantime, thoughts....

Regarding Truth or Dare, the idea works, but the execution drags a bit. Oddly, I think it would work better in a longer form, let the events--and characters--breathe a bit. And, not bother with jump scares; it's not that kind of horror film but it insists on having a few anyway. In context of the Truth or Date game going on, jump scares can literally have no affect on the plot, and do have no affect on the plot. So, they feel cheap. I imagine a Netflix miniseries instead, but the characterization and depth I imagine really wouldn't be the thing that usually comes from Blumhouse.

Mating Habits, on the other hand, might end up being good. But, I am instead thinking that this week has been very strange here at the Groundhog Day Project. Jim & Andy got me headed in some strange directions--and I rather want to dial it back a. Bit now. This week, I swear, nothing but the childhood deconstruction movies, finishing off 1984, moving on to 1985...

Unless something else captures me and forces me to write about it for days on end, for thousands of words, and gets me stuck on a lot of outside research...

Like, for example, just last night I got my hands on a copy of the novels Annihilation and The Crystal World. Also, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and I got out my copy (that I already had) of Alison Bechdel's Are Your My Mother?... Which you'll see the connection of all that if I get back to--yes, back to--writing about Annihilation again.

In other news, I learned of a group of podcasts that are right up my alley--and right up the Groundhog Day Project's alley--called Movie a Minute podcasts. Basically, people watch movies, one minute at a time, and podcast it. And, one in particularly--Groundhog Minute--contacted me about being a guest, which is awesome. But also, talking about movies like this, a minute of screentime at a time (but talking for much longer), appeals to me. I've been trying to find something else to do. I liked doing my YouTube reviews, but wished I could do them a little differently, and the previous version of a movie podcast required another person (or preferably several persons) to be involved as well. This simpler version might be easier.

 

 

 

 

 

While I have often decried voiceover in this blog, Mating Habits is one example of where the voiceover matters, and needs to be here. The dialogue itself is, presumably deliberately, rather bad most of the time, and the voiceover is where the jokes are. Or rather where the humor is; David Hyde Pierce's deadpan alien narration about the central humans is the point. Also, the singular joke that might've made a fantastic short film but doesn't quite work for a feature. Anita Gates' New York Times review says it fairly well: "The film... Is largely idiotic, but hints of charm do occasionally rise to the surface."

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