the groundhog day project

The real stakes of High Road to China are not in the physical adventure, the flying (though that does make for a great metaphor), the fighting (though that, too, makes for a great metaphor), the exotic locales (though that...) The parantheticals are making my point ahead of me. The voyage here is not hat exciting--there are not great stakes and the at the end of the film our heroes have not actually succeeded at what they set out to do (though Evie's father does tell O'Malley that Evie will inherit all of his formulas and patents, if not his company, if he is declared dead, so it's not all bad). Instead, what we have is two people trapped in their own freedom, and they need something else. What I mean is, look at Evie and O'Malley at the start of this story. Evie, a flapper, dances and schmoozed with wild abandon. But she can only maintain this lifestyle because she has money, her father's money. Charlie tells her that she will lose it all if she cannot pr...

A couple things, and I'll keep this short today: 1) Sometimes I really like that the Internet is full of cynical assholes who hate everything; it makes some movies exceed my expectations after reading all the horrible reviews. 2) Sometimes the feminist story is not the one you expect. I saw Rough Night and Cars 3 today. The former is primarily about five women reuniting for a bachelorette weekend then accidentally killing a guy (and a whole lot more after that). The latter is--and I will include SPOILERS almost immediately--about an aging athlete learning to let go and allow someone new to take his place. That someone new is a younger woman. While Rough Night is basically a female-oriented update of Very Bad Things crossed with The Hangover , the most it does to raise up women is in its treatment, however brief, of the men they leave behind to go to Miami; the men are seen at a very sedate wine tasting, and talking about relationships, while the women are partying, doing drugs...