the groundhog day project

I don't know why The Great Outdoors starts with "Yakety Yak", but it does. And it reminds me of my recent watching of Stand By Me . A far better film, but they are so different that it's hardly worth comparing. But, comparisons are inevitable when movies come and movies go time and time again. Like, John Candy was was in--what?--two of these childhood fixture movies of mine: Vacation and Splash . He was also in Planes, Trains & Automobiles , which I spent a week on in this blog back in November 2014, except that movies was not a fixture with my family. I'm not even sure we saw it on the big screen. If any Thanksgiving movie made the list, it would be Dutch , which came out in '91 so might be early enough to qualify, or Home for the Holidays , but that didn't come out until '95, far too late for the list, thought we did watch it probably every year for a while there. ( Dutch and Home for the Holidays also each got a week in that November of T...

John Hughes is involved, you know it’s going to be good on some level. Still, my obligatory ruining... or rather a quick quote from Hal Hinson, Washington Post , 27 June 1988: The gags that spring out of this situation were dreamed up by John Hughes, who wrote the script and acts as the film's executive producer, and they're all lame variations on the theme of nightmare vacations. It's hard to imagine how this theme could have been executed with less invention. Really, the main weakness of the film is not the gags--they're basic but executed well--but the disconnected structure. The raccoons, really. It feels like something tacked on when the script was too short. And then there's teen romance that never matters to the rest of the film; it just is. It's cute, but it's separate. Anyway, unlike my usual habit of writing this blog during the film, the film is over as I write now around a few scattered notes. Like this early conversation that is...