the groundhog day project

There's a bit of brilliance to figuring out the various toys' personalities, except within the text, it's quite limiting for who they get to be. They don't fully have free will, is what it is. Mr. Potato Head is for "Ages 3 and Up" so he's a bit pretentious, full of himself. He's too good for, well, Andy's sister; that's probably the only kid under 3 close by. (He's also both the most expressive and the most... incomplete because of his interchangeable parts.) Rex is not an older kid's dinosaur; he's made for toddlers so he's timid, not even remotely as scary as he wants to be. Slinky Dog can lengthen his body, so he is both literally and figuratively stretched thin by his position as Woody's de facto assistant. Ham is not even a toy; he's made for holding money, but that makes him stingy, selfish, a bit of a know it all because he's not like the rest of them. Mr. Spell is made for teaching so, of course, he arra...

(This month, I'm doing things a little differently; I will be watching 10 films--each recommended by someone else, each one for three days. A risk I took by taking recommendations was watching a movie that I have not seen--yes, there are movies I have not seen. In this case, I have never seen today's film all the way through. I've seen parts of it before, but never the entirety... so today's entry may be fairly brief as I will be paying, perhaps, more attention than usual.) Right up front, this film is clearly not American. I mean, aside from it being a production of British Lion . The writer gets his name over the title. That just doesn't happen here. If any name is offered ownership over the film via an apostrophe and an S, it's the director, or the author of an original source (like Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet ). I had to doublecheck because Anthony Shaffer is a playwright, but he didn't write a play of Wicker Man unti...

There's a moment in the third act of Westworld in which Peter finds a woman he thinks is injured after the robots have gone... wrong. He believes she's a guest who has been injured because, unlike so many others nearby she is semiconscious (and chained up). Then he gets her some water and she shorts out. Turns out she's a robot. The fact that the robots cannot be distinguished from the guests (except by their hands) is important. And, it makes me wonder if there isn't some greater similarity between the two. I'm reminded of the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded ... [The Oracle] stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. I'm reminded of The Purge , which if you haven't seen it a) isn't that great a movie as it ends up just being a rather straightforward home invasion story but b) is based on an imag...