the groundhog day project

Writing about Ran at Akira Kurosawa Info , Vili Maunula makes an interesting point about a specific moment in that film: [W]hen told about Ayabe's advance against Jiro's troops, Saburo's General, sitting next to his master's dead body, asks lamenting... "How can this be? Of all things, at this moment, why did Master Saburo have to die? Why did Lord Hidetora have to go?" It does not take much insight to realise that the straightforward answer to the general's question--why did they have to die at this moment--is that the structure of the tragedy mandates these events, as they are the driving force of the story's final catharsis. Noteworthy is also the manner in which these lines are delivered, not facing the other soldiers or the fool, but rather by hesitantly gazing towards the direction of the camera. I've mentioned before how one of the screenplays I wrote years ago ends with the main character stripping off her shirt to bare her scars to th...

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The title for today's entry is how Roger Ebert describes film in Life Itself , the documentary about his life. (It's also the title of his memoir. The quotation that starts this entry, on the other hand, is the closing line of The Great Gatsby , a line mentioned in Life Itself .) I had considered a couple other titles for today's entry. I started my day watching People, Places, Things , a nice indie film starring Jemaine Clement that touched on some old wounds for me; it's about a couple breaking up and than having some conflicts over their kids, their lives, etc., but really it's about Jemaine Clement's character trying to get on with his life. And, the first title I wrote down today was a line of his: Happiness is not really a sustainable condition. Thoughts of a rant about depression--or Depression; I've made that distinction before--here in this blog. But--a...

So... the twist. Let us just get this out of the way on this Day Two with Stories We Tell . SPOILERS ahead, of course. Not that you would normally think of a documentary as having SPOILERS even be a possible thing. So, Stories We Tell is built of multiple interviews about Diane Polley, director Sarah Polley's mother, and a whole lot of amateur footage of her--Michael Polley explains early on that he bought a camera around the time they met and took to filming much of their lives. Before we get to the big SPOILER, I offer this critique of the film's overall structure from Harry Gulkin, who it turns out is Sarah Polley's biological father--that is not the twist, but it is a notable turn in the course of the story here. Asked what he thinks of giving equal weight to everyone's version of the story, he replies: I don't like it. I think that it takes us into... into a very wooly... You can't ever touch bottom with anything then. We're all over the place. I ...