the groundhog day project

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...

1. Today is the third anniversary of Roger Ebert's death, so I thought I'd share his thoughts on today's film--repeating Slam . 2. Today was the final day of AFA Nationals, it's already after midnight local time, and we're heading for the airport in the morning... Since it is (was) the last day of AFA and the final round I watched was, like yesterday, poetry--an amazing round, six brilliant performances, five of those six on issues about black Americans, so that's why I'm repeating Slam . 3. I'd like to get into some serious political stuff related to, primarily, the argument between Ray (Saul Williams) and Lauren (Sonja Sohn) that comes (oddly) late in the film. (Oddly, because the structure of this film seems a bit off. The jail sequence just goes on a little too long, and structurally comes too early to be the second act, and goes too late to be confined just to the second act. Also, the jail sequence is not split appropriately to be both acts on...

Let's just start with a frank, honest truth. Roger Murtaugh is not black. And, I don't mean to be a smartass about the color versus the race, that "black" people are generally shades of what we'd call brown or whatever. I mean that, in Shane Black's script, race is not mentioned. Except for the title of today's entry (and one other instance I'll get to in a moment). Alfred says that to Murtaugh. And, the line may resonate a little more in the script because Murtaugh is not said to be black. He's just... Murtaugh. In fact, race is not an issue at all in the course of this film. Murtaugh just happens to have been cast black. Burke--the guy who tells Murtaugh he's breaking in a new partner--is only described in the script as "Rail-thin, nose like a beak." The actor cast as Burke just happens to be black. Okay, maybe not "just happens to be." Maybe the casting director, Marion Dougherty, deliberately chose to cast black actors...