the groundhog day project

It's time to cheat a little. Today I'm watching Highlander which was not really a fixture in my life until my teens, though I did see it in the theater when I had just turned 10 and I loved it. There are numerous movies, surely, that I've skipped because they weren't fixtures. Influence doesn't have to come from repetition. Trying to figure out what some of those movies might be, though, I noticed the first few I thought of were films I had already covered in some context other than this deconstruction of my childhood experience with film. Regarding Highlander , though. Saw the sequel in '91, was amused but did not like it--if you aren't familiar with the Highlander franchise, the second film not only contradicts the post-original reality but also retcons the backstory into a thing that doesn't make sense. And, it shoves it into a near-future dystopia for no particular reason. Third one in '94 was unnecessary but held up far better than the...

Case in point: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales . I will keep this short--unlike the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, or any of its action sequences, that just kind of drone on well beyond reasonability. Seriously, each movie is basically the same--Jack, some varied background pirates (I think there are only 2 left from the original bunch), Barbossa, a young man and a young woman, quest for some magical MacGuffin, some supernaturally empowered villains tries to stop them, folks backstab and betray and turn on each other than back to each other, and, oh yeah, gotta throw in some British soldiers chasing after everyone, too. Make. Each action scene about twice as long as it needs to be, throw in some overwrought romance, some one-note characterizations and there's your Pirates of the Caribbean film in a nutshell. Overstuffed and overdone, and mostly just tedious. Maybe one genuinely funny moment. Jack offers Will--I mean, Henry--advice on courting a brunette. ...

"What a wondrous vision "Excalibur is! And what a mess." So begins Roger Ebert's review of Excalibur , and as usual, Roger says it pretty well. "This wildly ambitious retellings of the legend of King Arthur is a haunting and violent version of the Dark Ages and the heroic figures who (we dream) populated them," he continues. "But it's rough going for anyone determined to be sure what is happening from scene to scene." The problem with Excalibur , though, is not that it's particularly confusing. It is just so damn full of, well, pieces of every story about King Arthur that any of its audience are likely to know. There's a reason that The Sword in the Stone offers up next to nothing (though, admittedly, I might be remembering the better part of the film if not the larger part of it) about Arthur as an adult and spent time with that training. There's a reason that the recent King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was born out of a plan ...