the groundhog day project

Campus Man is rather immediately an 80s film. Guitar riff, camera comes down on a college campus. Titles are in a far too colorful font. Then there's a couple really brief bits with our lead and his business teacher because something something business business entrepreneur. But nevermind all that-- Titles continue over diving footage. A bit male gaze-y on the closeups except for one obvious thing: the bodies being ogled are male. Not to distract from somehow our lead--I should figure out his name--Todd is supposedly advanced with business but he's also bad with money? On the one hand, that is stupid. On the other hand, that does feel very late 80s. He is the purveyor of calendars of campus women, but is in money trouble because "the scholarships didn't work and... the loan is a problem" which is vague bullshit terms for he needs to make money fast, get on with the plot. The plot triggers when Todd's girlfriend compares diving to dancing and Todd jus...

Day 1400 and I have just a couple things to say: 1) The messaging of The Secret of My Success is that a lone white male from bumfuck flyover Kansas is going to make it to big city and be such a hard worker because he grew up on a farm and is Grade-A middle American prime that he's not only going to kick the ass of his mailroom job but he will also successfully work a second (fake) job as an executive because bureaucracy is so stupid and complicated that he can game the system to invent a second name for himself, even though he's already called Brantley as if he was born and raised on Martha's Vineyard and not Foster Farms, and be better at all of this business stuff--and we will definitely, specifically, explicitly be shown this in a montage that let's us hear none of the dialogue and plays some crappy 80s song or another over it all and then the movie is going to take too fucking long to show how this one white kid is better than everybody else even though the fuck...

Opening music: "Hoochie Coochie Man" by Muddy Waters. Minus a point right off the bat. Mark spent the previous night drinking, and wakes in bed with a woman he does not remember. Not a race problem, but still an immediate negative. This guy should not be going to Harvard. (That woman in his bed is Missy from Bill & Ted and Kim from Summer School . Amy Stoch as girl who doesn't even get a name here.) He also has a bucket of tennis balls to turn off two separate alarms (set for noon). He's a Ferris Bueller-wannabe asshole, is what he is. Minor thing in Mark's favor later: as a lawyer he may be able to sue his father over spending money from what his father specifically calls his "tuition account" on a timeshare in a condo in Barbados. Calling it a "tuition account" sounds like at the least an oral agreement, and based on how banks deal with things like that today, the account itself might have been labeled per its purpose and prob...

I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch and write about Highlander another time. I felt I had little to say that wouldn't take me past some breaking point where I might have to obsess, you know, build a blog or a movies-by-minutes podcast around it, dig into each and every detail. I wanted to write more about White Nights the other day, but a) I got to that movie on the 1st of the month and on the 2nd I return to Groundhog Day , 2) it would be awkward (at least in my head) to write about White Nights , step away from it, and then come right back to it after a day away, and d) what I wanted to say about it had to do with the present; I mean, White Nights is okay, but it ain't a great film, but there was something about the dancing, especially some of the stuff Baryshnikov was doing in that cold open, serious strength moves that I was a little envious of because I'm sitting here by my couch, overweight, drinking an adult beverage and lamenting that I can't do th...