the groundhog day project

Waiter coded gay. Fritz a condescending ass pretending he's looking out for JC's interests. And that's where the sacrifice conversation begins. At the end of the film, JC insists she still doesn't want to make sacrifices, and yet she has already made most of the sacrifices that Fritz is talking about. She has a kid, has a house to look after, has a growing business. I don't remember if we see them, but she's got to have employees. Is she going to talk like Fritz later with her female employees? Steven doesn't like JC dreaming about a vacation home and sex with him takes seconds and he calls it incredible when she is clearly not at all satisfied. Feminism in the 80s still loves capitalism. JC's problem, Baby Boom would have us believe, is not her work ethic, even though 70-80 work hours a week will not fit with having a child. And JC is not satisfied with Vermont. Hughes rejects JC ostensibly because she has a child (but really because she bro...

"Crazy" Cora is introduced fighting off two men. Seems their boss has told them they could bring some "white tarts" back with them because they're sick of black women. Meanwhile the titular hero Quigley is on his way to their boss's land for a job he does not know the details of just yet. There is long-distance shooting involved--that's all he knows. Yet he went half way around the world to take the job. Until, of course, Marston tells him what the job actually is. A couple details that matter if you've not seen the film and need to know (rather than going and watching it post haste): 1) Marston has a fascination for the American West and Quigley is visually very much the cowboy of most Westerns, 2) Marston wants Quigley to shoot Aborigines. It's interesting now that the guy who carries the bucket off for Quigley's show-off shot after he arrives at Marston's is apparently called Whitey. It's a movie with a blatantly racist vi...

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...

It occurred to me today that I have never seen a production of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and I am not even sure what it's about. This thought came to me when I realized I am not entirely sure I can remember the plot to today's movie: The Secret of My Success . I knew it involved Michael J. Fox, and I think there's a boss lady who wants to sleep with him, but I was also conflating the film with For the Love of Money and was excited to see a young Gabrielle Anwar because I had the biggest crush on her for a few years there... after this movie was in theaters, after this movie was something we had on VHS and we watched it more than a few times-- (But, if you're paying attention, you should know that the current theme in this blog is movies that were "fixtures" in my "childhood" but I'm 11 now in 1987, and in retrospect, things keep blurring into my teenage years, my 20s, my 30s, and the present, but who want's to talk ...

Note: today’s entry was mostly written while sitting in the waiting room while my car was getting maintenance, so access to some resources was limited.) The Jerk begins outside a movie theater--where a "comedy thriller" is playing--and includes director Carl Reiner as himself, with a direct reference to his filmmaking. (His going cross eyed because of Navin's Opti-Grab leads to Reiner to yell 'cut' too late while filming, which leads to a car crashing, actors die, and Reiner leads the class-action lawsuit against Navin.) These Hollywood references matter in a film that deals so much in issues of class. Navin grows up poor (and black) in the south. Upon getting to the city, he gets a low class job as a gas station attendant. He works as a carnie. It is sheer luck that he succeeds at all in his life; while it is Navin's ingenuity that leads to him making the Opti-Grab, that is the only evidence of any cleverness on his part (plus, perhaps, his delay of ...

Seriously though, while there may be enough moments to suggest that Troll 2 is a giant metaphor for Joshua's burgeoning sexuality , really the metaphor is far more obvious--this is Rosella Drudi and Claudio Fragasso (writer and director, respectively (and also husband and wife), though there is one name--Drake Floyd--credited with both) warning us that the Cold War is not really over. The wall wasn't down yet--that would happen from mid 1990 into 1992--and production happened before the official opening of the wall, November 1989. But, the signs were there. The Cold War was coming to an end, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and all those zombie movies screaming at us about communism (and/or consumerism) were going to have no good metaphors anymore. (And, no, I won't be spending three days with every bad movie this month--I've gotten more than enough recommendations on Facebook to spread them out a bit more. But Troll 2 is one of those that needs more time. Plus, we...

How The Magnificent Seven is quintessentially American (even when it shares so much with stories from around the world and deliberately apes Japan's Seven Samurai ) is kind of simple. Think politically, socially, and consider these words from Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) in the church at the beginning of the film: This is what you love, what you'd die for. And what your children and your children's children will work on, suffer for, be consumed by. ... Now, I come here for gold. Gold. This country has long equated democracy with capitalism, capitalism with God. So, you're standing not only in the way of progress and capital. You're standing in the way of God! And for what? ... Land. This is no longer land. The moment I put a pin in the map, the day I descended into this godforsaken valley and cast my gaze upon it, it ceased to be land and became... Dust. ... This is your God? And, he pours the dirt onto the floor. First, some history. While Bogue is not entirely wro...

For a Christmas movie, Gremlins starts with some seriously shady goings on. With the voiceover from the Rand Peltzer (Hoyt Axton)--which I had totally forgotten was a thing--it's like some film noir detective story, except with a whole lot of red thrown into the color scheme. Then he pulls out his "bathroom buddy" invention and things get silly. Then the Mogwai shows up, with some adorable singing, and we drift into some white privilege territory with Rand thinking he can just automatically buy anything he wants to buy just... because. Kidding. I mean, yeah, I'm totally right about that, and it may mean that the entire Gremlins incident may just be a warning about what happens when we do not check our privilege. But, I was specifically looking to not get into politics or social commentary today... Which, when I think about it now, is pretty stupid. As I have argued many times about movies in this blog, every movie can tell us a lot about the time and place where...

Seriously, though , fuck the rules. I could probably spread out discussion of Fight Club over several days. I don't know that I need to, however. I would like to begin the discussion with my usual go to -- Roger Ebert . His review ranges from insightful--"eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights"--to the... well, not quite getting it, I think--"the movie stops being smart and savage and witty, and turns to some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed." Regarding the first quotation there, I get it. It's like the homoeroticism that sat right under the surface of so many manly 80s movies grew up to become this. Damn the women--except Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), but we'll get to her later--you don't need to include every gender to explore every gender... or to explore gender at all. I know, I've said numerous times in this blog that every film offers commentary on (or at least insight into) ...

The whole point to movies like Pump Up the Volume or The Legend of Billie Jean (watching again today), is that not only is the system broken but the measures to fix it are broken as well. That Mark's father, the school commissioner, does his job only as his rebellious son is being arrested and Lieutenant Ringwald only tries to do his job after its too late here... and manages to do the right thing in the end by specifically by not doing his job when Billie Jean confronts Pyatt--this is a measure that things are not really working. There's no legitimate oversight... Of course, that brings up an interesting point about Pump Up the Volume --imagine if, instead of broadcasting that letter about Cheryl Biggs under the guise of Hard Harry Hard-On, Mark had pointed out the problem to his father. He wouldn't have garnered the interest of Nora, of course, would have remained the quiet nerdy guy. But, he might have save the school without some of the trouble--Paige blowing up he...

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more... That's Lord Byron, from "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." Those lines start the film Into the Wild . With those lines, that last one, especially, we get a clear picture of how Jon Krakauer, who wrote the book, (or Sean Penn, who directed the film), if not Chris McCandless himself, saw things with this story--McCandless wasn't necessarily turning away from people--from society maybe, but that's a separate thing. He was turning toward nature. And, I get that. I live in the city, have lived around Los Angeles virtually my entire life. But, I like getting out of here when I can. The recent roadtrip involved far too much time in the car, not enough time outside, but there were still some nice moments, at Willow Canyon, at Meteor Crater, at Acoma... (I shared...

The Grand Seduction , like any movie—seriously, read back through this blog and you’ll see it time and time again—tells us something about gender, gender roles, gender expectations; and it also tells us something about living in a conservative, capitalist world. These two things twist together in the subplot involving Brendan Gleason’s Murray and his wife. We learn right away he is not only cashing his own welfare check, he is also cashing the check of a dead friend—he insists that as long as that friend remains on the government books, he has an moral duty to keep cashing those checks (and he has “power of attorney” paperwork, though it’s not clear how legal that paperwork is). Still, he wants to work. That’s the world in which Tickle Head exists, a world in which everybody (even the characters who seem much too old for factory work) would rather have a job—even an oil company job—than welfare. We’re presented Murray and his wife as a sort of counter to the flashback to Murray’s chi...

There’s a formula John Hughes uses when it comes to making the despicable characters seem not so bad as the story goes—he provides somebody worse. In Dutch , for example, Dutch Dooley was a horrible guy, but at least he wasn’t as arbitrarily uncaring as Doyle’s father. Similarly, in Christmas Vacation , Clark’s (and the movie’s, really) reliance on money and capitalism in defining a good Christmas sits next to those yuppies next door. There’s nothing to like about Todd and Margo, right? The thing is, there’s nothing particularly horrible about them. The movie just assumes we won’t like them so all the bad things that happen to them because of Clark Griswold, deliberately or not, are justified. They’ve got money. They’re too good for Christmas trees. They’ve got fancy entertainment equipment (destroyed by the ice) and fancy workout clothes. And, worst of all, they like each other. No one should like these people. Clark, on the other hand, all around good guy, loving (and faithful) hu...