the groundhog day project

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...

Sometimes Roger Ebert was just wrong. I still enjoy his reviews, and he is often worth citing, but that doesn't mean he is infallible. Regarding Footloose , he writes : "Footloose" is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict Ina. Town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. Also, Roger writes: I seriously doubt a town like this exists anywhere outside of standard movie clichés. The town of Henryetta, Oklahoma, has a law--dating back to 1979 but still on the books as of last year --restricting where public dances can happen, and apparently the law "watered down an earlier ruling that banned all public dancing regardless of location." The ordinance forbade "dance halls" from being located within 500 feet of any church or school. And, the film was supposedly inspired by Elmore City, also in Oklahoma...

I wrote about Footloose --my first film for 1984 in this childhood deconstruction--once before in this blog. I used it to begin my Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon -inspired month back in February 2016. And, speaking of tying things together--the title of that entry, taking its title from a line from the film, was " all of our lives are ties up with each other "--the film begins with random pairs of feet dancing to the titular Kenny Loggins tune. No characters, no faces. It's deliberately universalizing in its fun. Those feet could be anybody, any of us. And then, there's the preaching, and then high school girls being bad (and doing dangerous things; at least Ariel (Lori Singer) risk serious injury, anyway). I wrote before several attempts to link the characters to The Tempest through the name Ariel. I didn't write much about religion, but religion is all over this film. From Reverend Moore's (John Lithgow) opening sermon to the oppressive atmosphere all over the...

"Love on the Rocks" is an interesting case. Jess sings it like its his love that's on the rocks, like his life is so bad. But, he's the one putting his relationships in danger. He leaves his wife behind to go play with the Four Brothers (he does invite her to come along but it feels like something he always does knowing that she will never go, like they are already on the verge of some separation). He leaves his wife to go to California. And, later, he leaves his new wife to wander the country and grow a beard. Which is too bad, because "Love on the Rocks" is probably the only really good song he's got in The Jazz Singer . Not that I haven't known all these songs since I was a kid and we might watch the movie or listen the soundtrack regularly. Hell, I even knew well enough to sing along the lyrics to "Kol Nidre" (the thing Jess sings when he returns to the synagogue). I also knew "Hava Nagila" but we performed that in music cl...

Let's go back in time to when everything was okay. Surely, that's a time that exists. Movies call us back, make us remember the past in very specific ways, offer up rose-colored glasses and limited perspectives to make the past be just a smaller version of itself. If it can fit in a script, fit on a screen, then we don't have to remember how it really was, don't have to remember that life was always difficult. As kids, sure, we didn't know enough to know enough about what was wrong. Or maybe we grew up in a cult that told us the world was ending and all those Cold War news stories and movies were going to come true so we never really figured out how life was supposed to work, never imagined the far off future would really come. And, now it's here. And, I just want to watch this nice little movie set in the 1980s because sometimes it feels like this future I've found myself grown up in is too far outside my control to be any good. Don't get me wrong; s...