the groundhog day project

Taxi guy gets sees a woman hit by a car, takes the time to set down his stuff before he casually checks on her. Jogging Lady says they should call the police but makes no effort to do so. Taxi guy casually steals hit-and-run victim's purse and walks away. New guy drives up and, when it seems like he isn't needed, hits on Jogging Lady as the camera drifts down the street, eventually happening upon the driver who just hit that woman, his mother, as he arrives home and goes inside to light some candles at an altar of some sort and then (possibly even more evil than running down his own mother with a car or performing satanic rituals) cuts photos out of a book. He arbitrarily sets a filmstrip to running as the police arrive and we're left wondering, what are we watching? And, is that filmstrip of his mother pushing him in his toy car? Is this poetry? Is that image supposed to rhyme with him hitting her with his car? But then we wander off with a passerby, whose on his way to d...

Right away, in Slacker , the theme and structure is laid out by none other than director Linklater himself, talking to a taxi driver. Alternate realities, each choice you make fracturing reality so that every direction exists. This movie is about to drift off on tangents from each scene-- (I wrote in this blog before--I don't remember when but I think it was fairly recently--about having a story idea that follows one character for a while then switches to another, then later to another, then another and another, etcetera. For the record, I have never seen Slacker until tonight. But, Slacker seems to be doing just that sort of thing.) --with no overarching plot to tie them together, just a lot of fringe-of-society type characters going about their business. (I imagine you could operate a story like this on different levels of reality as well, like Mr. Show with Bob and David used to link its sketches or how Cloud Atlas ties its stories together. One character watches a TV sh...

Drifting away from the horror film itself for the moment. Room 237 is on instead of a second day with The Shining because I think it's important to understand why we do this. Why I do this. Why you read this, for that matter. These movies--they're just movies. We don't really need all the subtext to enjoy them. I would never argue that there is no subtext; in fact, I think there is always subtext. For example, maybe it's about the Tang cans or the Golden Rey boxes over the Calumet cans. Picking one detail out of many says more about you (me) than it does about the film. Day 113 , I wrote: Why am I doing this? Because someone needed to. Because every piece of art deserves to be studied and broken down. Every piece of fiction deserves to be dissected until we know not just what it means but what it can mean. Chuck Klosterman, reviewing Room 237 for Grantland , says, "It introduces a new way to experience and consider movies." I'm trying to rememb...

In Groundhog Day , two males and one female go from the big city to a tiny hamlet in western Pennsylvania. In The Shining , two males and one female go from living in the big city to a hotel in the mountains of Colorado. In Groundhog Day , the black guy works at the bar. In The Shining , the black guy works in the kitchen. In both films, there's a blizzard, a nice old lady, a bathtub, a bar, and a holiday party. Plus, Phil gets stopped in the hallway by the Chubby Man, who is certainly large enough to contain those twin dead girls. Coincidences? Maybe. Or maybe, just like the crazy folks behind Room 237 think The Shining is Stanley Kubrick's way of admitting that he secretly created the moon landing footage, Groundhog Day was Harold Ramis' way of admitting that he secretly created The Shining . Think about it. Ramis is not known for making adaptations. Nor is he known for making horror films. So, if he were to make one from a beloved Stephen King novel, it would ma...