the groundhog day project

It's the little thing, really... And not the obvious stuff like one of the clocks has Harold Lloyd hanging from it like Doc will later. I mean, stuff like the broken clock under the table when the dog food spills. The rundown movie theater is a church. The other movie theater is showing Orgy American Style . On the main square there's a sex shop, a pawn shop, a loan shark, a travel office, a psychic, a seedy motel, a couple closed down businesses, and Mayor Goldie Wilson's reelection campaign headquarters. And how weird is it that the diner became a workout gym and then turns back into a diner by 2015? (If that ain't America in a nutshell...) Marty checks out two woman in leotards and Jennifer barely seems to care--but she does notice. She deserves better than this flighty musician. Graffiti on the school says DANGEROUS BOB and I imagined some crew member was referencing the director with that one. But, really, 'Dangerous' Bob Widin was the as...

Headline from HuffPo : Did Back to the Future Originally End With 'To be Continued'? They say no. I say, fuck HuffPo , fuck whatever Mandela Effect reality you all are from, it was there on the big screen in my head, and was not some thing they added for VHS. I mean, sure we must've rented the movie to watch again at home once it was on video, and I'm sure the copy we dubbed off cable (Or maybe off the rental tape, not that I will admit that we ever did that, you know, with the bit of tape over that little indent on the one side so the machine can make a copy... Or was it breaking the tab in the indent and hoping the rental place didn't notice? I can't actually remember that bit because I have recorded things from one tape to another, entirely legally, so many times that I forgot how to do it illegally. Not that I am admitting that I ever knew how to do it illegally.) included the TO BE CONTINUED and I saw the VHS copy more than I ever saw the movie i...

The context for a given film is interesting. I mean, going back to movies I watched time and time again in my childhood is interesting because I can imagine what I thought of the movie on first blush. I mean, had I even seen any time travel movies before Back to the Future was in theaters? Time After Time came out in 1979 but it's not like I saw that in the theater. I had watched every episode of Voyagers! , but cinematically, I'm not sure. Maybe some crap low budget thing available on VHS for rental, but I can't think of what movie it might be. But, what I really wanted to talk about, looping back around to Back to the Future after drifting away from it last time, is this discussion of late I've seen online about how Marty's parents not recognizing him--looking, as he does, just like that guy Calvin who helped get them together 30 years ago--as a plot hole. (Remember, I don't like the use of that term plot hole in the first place.) A) This is not a...

I see a lot of movies by myself. Hell, I see most movies that I see by myself. There is often overlap with my ex-wife's viewing habits where we can have conversations about certain movies, but mostly, it's me, and, well... You           An audience that cannot--at least in any particularly meaningful fashion--talk back. So, it's just me and the screen, usually my iPad, that has been a fixture of this blog since before I even had a smartphone or a fire stick or a moviepass. Sometimes, rare times, I want more. Like after I saw I Feel Pretty a few days ago, or after Infinity War just this afternoon. I want to walk out of the theater talking about what we just saw, start digesting it at least in a shallow way as it settles. I had a few ideas recently about new ways of doing all this, reacting to, responding to, conversing with all the various movies I put into my head. I've even made some steps toward one of them, and I had this feeling like that lead-up...

I never really got around to talking about destiny yesterday . Probably because I really didn't want to. There is a bit of a deterministic streak to Back to the Future , and I've written about stuff like that before in this blog. How what we call "free will" is just a long series of tiny events leading to all the inevitable decisions you will make and actions you will take. It's both entirely plausible and entirely pointless at the same time. At the moment, I'm more interested in a couple details from the end of the film that have little to do with time travel. 1) who parked Marty's truck in the garage at that weird angle? It's impractical, and actually would have been fairly difficult. But, it shows off the truck real nice, so I guess it's good for the product placement. 2) And this is interesting because I have got to wonder if the placement is deliberate. So, the Libyans drive a blue and white VW bus. When Marty gets away in the DeLorean, ...

I like to find in-universe reasons for things even if practical behind-the-scenes reasons explain stuff. That's a given. One that caught my attention watching Back to the Future yesterday was Doc Brown's photos of scientists. In 1955, he has four of them on his mantel--Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein. So, it took the second viewing in as many days to notice that in the opening tracking shot, there are just three of these photos hanging by Doc's bed in his 1985 abode--the garage of his old house (which burned down and then he sold off the property-- and which exists (the filming location anyway) next to a Burger King that is still there--and I forgot about heading there after work to get a photo... His 1955 house exterior--the Gamble House--still exists not too far from here as well, but I didn't get over there either. I would love it if I had time to get to every nearby location--and living in LA, there are a lot, for many a film--b...

The opening shot of Back to the Future is almost perfect. All those clocks, the slow pan. That one clock that foreshadows the climax of the film. All of Doc Brown's morning routine--the radio and the clock, really?--and the automated machinery. Plus The plutonium is set up and gets a mini-pay off already with the end of that tracking shot. The opening scene, if you move into the next bit, with the giant amp and Marty's particular style of "rock and roll", also sets up both a defining characteristic of Marty McFly--he tends toward too much --and a particular problem in what is often considered to be a flawless film. Seriously, people study this screenplay as an ideal example of screenwriting. (Nevermind, of course, the multiple drafts it took to get to the final product.) And it is fantastic in terms of structure, in terms of setup and payoff. Every scene serves a purpose. Characters and events all interact just so. But--and I've written a bit about this, for ...

Movies blend together sometimes. That's the life of a person like me, watching movies all the time for decades. Marty talks about how great that 4x4 is and wants to take it up to the lake, and I'm thinking of the 4x4 from the opening sequence of The Goonies and the lake trips from The Last Starfighter .           And, I realize there might be very little to actually say about Back to the Future . I almost watched the trilogy a few years ago in time for the 30th anniversary, but opted not to because of this very problem. One thing, though: when Doc first drives the DeLorean out of his truck and gets out, there's smoke inside of both. And, some weird tube thing attached to Doc's hand-- --and I think we can assume Doc has been sitting in that truck smoking something special (like the band later in the movie) while he waits for Marty's arrival and his own potential demise. It ain't just head injuries that put DeLorean time machines in your mind.   ...

“Everybody dies sooner or later. Don’t worry about your death. Worry about your life. Take charge of your life for as long as it lasts.” – Littlefinger, Games of Thrones Inevitably, a) yes, everyone’s going to die and b) even scoundrels like Littlefinger get something right. There was, at least once, a day in which “saying that ‘ Groundhog Day demonstrates the wonder of living each moment as a totally new event’ seem[ed] both trite and tired.” There was a day once when Groundhog Day was a brand new thing for me, sitting in a dark movie theater. I knew Bill Murray from the likes of Meatballs and Stripes and Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II and Caddyshack and Scrooged and Little Shop of Horrors and What About Bob? — (That last one, for example, I watched at the house of a girl I had a thing for in high school. She was two years older than and one year ahead of me. We’d gone out once, saw Scent of a Woman . Then, she invited me over to her house and we watched What About B...