the groundhog day project

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 ...

Adventures of the Wilderness Family is an interesting case, potentially. Watched it a lot as a kid. And, I mean a lot . My sister Bobbie recently informed me that this was the only movie our parents would let us watch on Saturday mornings; that was the sabbath for us. (And, that I grew up attending church regularly and going to a church-owned private school will become important below.) I remember hating it, or at least really disliking it. I guess, if I hated it, I probably would not have sat there and watched it every time. (I also remember associating the opening shot of this film--showing the Bonaventure Hotel being in downtown Los Angeles under construction--with the sitcom It's a Living , which was set in a restaurant at its top, but that's just an arbitrary link, however permanently fixed it is in my head.) Officially, I thought it was boring. But, I can't have been completely against it to have watched it so often, and to have sat through its sequels more ...

I'm only on the third film of this "month" of deconstructing my childhood interactions with film. This month might last a few months. I suggested at the end of yesterday's entry that Young Frankenstein might have influenced my ability (and sometimes, it feels like a need) to appreciate the monster. That is, my ability to pull for the underdog, for the rebel, for those outside the mainstream, the eccentric and bizarre. Throw in Star Wars , for example, which I'll get to later this "month" and it's like 70s cinema was trying to create within its audience an urge toward rebellion... An echo of the real rebellions in the decade before, perhaps. Which, of course, I studied intensively when I went to college (the second time) as an adult. Pop culture of the time idealized outcasts, outlaws, rebels. The Godfather and its sequel. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . Taxi Driver . A Clockwork Orange , perhaps the most extreme example. Or just plain ol wo...