the groundhog day project

Today's film is a little bit of a cheat like Highlander was. While I saw Stand By Me in the theater, it was not really a fixture in my movie life until I was a teenager and I bought my own copy on VHS. But, then this was a movie I would watch time and time again, only in my 20s. And, I even ripped it off a little bit--or paid homage to it, I suppose--in my second novel. Actually, I think that was more ripping off--or paying homage to-- It actually. There was even a battle between kids throwing kids at each other. The thing is, speaking of my writing, I often snagged bits of setup or stylistic things from Stephen King. For example, in my... I want to say fourth novel-- (None of these have been properly published, by the way. I had a few of my novels available self-published for a bit about a decade-and-a-half ago, but no longer. I recently did a re-edit of what's probably my best writing--a novel called Clubhouse Blues , which I'm sure I've mentioned in this b...

"If you ever hang out with 30-something pagans, you will quickly learn that The Craft (1996) was a lightbulb moment for many of them," begins a piece by Ginnis Tonik at Women Write about Comics . Maybe--flashback to yesterday --the film isn't quite feminist, but it make sense that it would have drawn a lot of young girls looking to express themselves, express their power, to witchcraft. To something other than the usual patriarchal religions that have ruled so much of the world and its history. I mean, it's no accident that the film makes so many clear and deliberate references to Christianity. From the snake presented to Sarah (Robin Tunney) early in the film to Nancy (Fairuza Balk) walking on water. Hell, I could easily get a good Cinematic Christ-Figuring going with this film and Sarah would score seriously high. But, I'm interested in the film on both a far more superficial level and on a deeper level than cheap (and rather ironic) Christian symbolism. Des...

Backtrack a few years. Give us the setup--sixteenth birthday, parents forgot about it--then a montage of high school scenes under the opening titles. Pretty basic. Samantha (Molly Ringwald) talking to herself is a bit too "voiceover" without being a voiceover. I'm not sure I approve.                   And then there were few words. But, I just gotta say, the chemistry between Ringwald and Michael Anthony Hall in the half car is awesome. And, Samantha is my kind of character... that is, a character like me. Obsesses about a crush that shouldn't amount to anything, practices what she's going to say to him ahead of time, then fails to say anything. Been there. The Geek (Hall), on the other hand, has a bizarre level of confidence for being a geek. Much more than Hall's character in The Breakfast Club . Much more than I ever had at that age. Hell, more than I've usually got to this day. But, getting back to performances, the scene wi...

It has been a good long while since I have connected a film to impromptu quotations... For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, the usual setup for the impromptu speaking event at our speech tournaments--I'm a coach, and we just had two tournaments in two days this weekend--is you get a quotation, and you use that as a prompt for a 5(-ish) minute speech after 2(-ish) minutes of prep. During phase one of this blog, when I was watching Groundhog Day every day, several times after a tournament weekend, I would take a sheet of the quotations we had and link them to the film because when I was a competitor and participated in that event I used Groundhog Day as an example in nearly every round. Anyway... I judged the final round of impromptu today and instead of quotations, per se, competitors were given a choice of three meme-ish images. So, I'm looking over them and on speaker two's sheet, I see this one: Now, it really is not that great a line. But, it...

Something interesting about yesterday's movie-- Can't Buy Me Love --and today's-- Lucas --that many people wouldn't notice is the opening shot. Can't Buy Me Love , you might remember, starts with Ronald on his riding mower, except not quite. It actually begins with a shot of cactus in the foreground, a little bit of sky above, then Ronald comes into view in that gap between the cacti. (There's a nice echo in that the movie also ends with Ronald on his mower, of course.) And, this movie begins with a closeup on a bug. The title character (Corey Haim) is fascinated by insects, of course. And, insects will be important at a couple points later in the film. But, also, these visuals make for some simple metaphors--Ronald (and his friends as well) is like cactus; other (more popular) people don't want to get close to him or be around him. Similarly, Lucas is an insect--most people just don't want to be around him. (Hell, his nickname is Leukoplakia, which ...

The nerd and the cheerleader--a classic 80s setup. So many love stories cross class (and clique) divides; it's a variation on the Cinderella plot, of course. One party gets prettied up to be with the other. In Can't Buy Me Love , Ronald (Patrick Dempsey) pays for the makeover, and a month of pretend with Cindy (Amanda Peterson). Roger Ebert makes a point in his quite negative review about how these two are "materialistic twits" or at least make teenagers look like as much. But, as I bring up his review to see what he has to say, this exchange happens (as Ronald washes Cindy's car and she sits and watches): CINDY You know, when I offered you a ride home, it wasn't to get you to wash my car. RONALD I don't mind. Actually, I kind of like it. CINDY You're a hard worker. Work's not really my thing. RONALD Cheerleading's hard work. You do it well. CINDY I guess. But, what I mean is that I don't do much else... except for shop and hangout. ...

A subversive eye-candy explosion of Clueless, Heathers and Carrie gleefully detonated by sex bomb Rose McGowan. That is Crackle 's description for Jawbreaker . If you don't know the movie, imagine if the spiritual successor to Heathers had seen The Craft a few too many times but didn't like witchcraft, and just couldn't be bothered to be audience friendly enough to make Mean Girls . The Heathers, the Plastics, the Debbies (bonus points if you get that reference)--here, the Flawless Four. We begin with a little voiceover--gotta have some voiceover because the audience needs things spelled out--then it's the morning of the birthday of the nice one of the Flawless Four--Liz (Charlotte Roldan). The other three, disguised with masks and hoodies staged a kidnapping to surprise her. The titular piece of candy in her mouth and some duct tape over it and when they go to open the trunk of the car (oh, they also tied her up and stashed her in the trunk), turns out she;s...

The Heathers evolved into the "Plastics" and, I've only seen this movie one time. Cady (Lindsay Lohan) is like Roger Ebert ( yesterday ) going into a high school movie. Her inability to fit in and her lack of knowledge about how the school works means the movie starts on a reset. It can accept whatever high school movie tropes it wants to accept and reject whichever it wants to reject. It's a good position from which to deconstruct the genre. (To be fair, since I've only see the movie once, I cannot recall just how much it is going to do this.) "Pretending that nothing was wrong turned out to be surprisingly easy." That's an interesting line given the subject of teenagers. All performance and face, rarely the reality. You are who you pretend to be in high school (especially, movie high school). Cady's problem, here, in fact, is that if she hangs out with the Plastics enough, she might actually understand them, even like them. (Sidenote: th...

Take Heathers as a metaphor instead of a dark comedy (or rather both) for the moment. In context, the deaths are real, but the point is not about life or death, not literally. Think in adolescent/teeanger terms, instead. This is about that life or death. Veronica used to be friends with Betty, still sort of is, but now she's with the Heathers, and that limits access. High school cliques, when they are clearly drawn--i.e. especially the cinematic incarnations of high school cliques--don't mix well. Watch that bit in... it's either 10 Things I Hate about You or The Faculty --or maybe both--where the cliques are spelled out in front of the school, and each one has its own space apart from the others, and it's all neat and discrete. The population of the school seems a little small, of course, with a singular popular girl clique, or a singular jock clique, or a singular stoner clique, but if movies dealt with public school student numbers realistically, there would not b...

Feel like drifting. No school. No teachers. Just an old movie that might not even be any good. The   Legend of Billie Jean . I remember enjoying it years ago, but I'm watching it because right after I mentioned it a few days ago I happened to see the DVD for sale cheap. Can't pass up coincidence. I was just reading about how in the commentary track (to which I have not listened), Helen Slater and Yeardley Smith didn't remember how the movie ended as they were watching it years later. I, too, do not really remember where this movie is going. I know something's gonna happen to Billie Jean (Helen Slater, no relation to...) and her brother Binx (...Christian Slater) kills someone-- Which is happening now as I type about not remembering the details. So, Hubie (Barry Tubb) stole Binx' scooter and Pyatt, Hubie's father (Richard Bradford) just tried to rape Billie Jean, sort of, rather than pay the money she demanded for the damage done to the scooter. Now, they'...

You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up? - Hard Harry Hard-On Pump Up the Volume is not about the stuff that's wrong with the whole country, or society as a whole. There are hints of bigger stuff (especially in Mark's final speech) but mostly, Hard Harry's broadcasts keep spiraling around Hubert H. Humphrey High School, where Principal Cresswood (Annie Ross) is following in Joe Clark's footsteps (a la Lean on Me ), weeding out the bad students rather than making them (or at least helping them make themselves) better. (Plus Murdock (Andy Romano), the Vice Principal does his own locker searches without anyone around and eventually gets into a fight with a student.) Meanwhile, the lives of many of the teenagers at the school... welll, they suck. They live in Paradise Hills, Arizona, suburb of Phoenix. (And presumably the equivalent to Paradise Valley, that includes eight resorts; it's a tourist town.) And, they're living in ...

"Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up." - Hard Harry Hard-On No teachers today, again , except as antagonists... Well, I suppose my take was that Joe Clark was the antagonist of the larger story if not the throughline of Lean on Me . And, for so many high schoolers, plenty of teachers are the antagonists. Not just teachers--parents, other adults; like they're all the phonies Holden Caulfield saw them as. The perspective here: this movie puts us on the side of the teenagers. Hard Harry Hard-On (Christian Slater) starts us out with the radio show we will learn is an unlicensed broadcast--that's the basic setup for Pump Up the Volume . Hard Harry Hard-On, of course, is also Mark Hunter, a fairly shy (meek may be a better descriptor) high schooler. Mark's parents grew up in the sixties but have turned establishment--his father is the "youngest school commissioner" in Arizona's history...

Taking a break from seriousness with Summer School . Not that this movie doesn't demonstrate one of the points I've been trying to make--students have reasons beyond their attitudes that get in the way of schoolwork. Or, the usual Hollywood take on teaching, as Shoop (Mark Harmon) just said, "Inside every so-called bad kid is a good kid just waiting for someone to reach on down through the sleaze and the slime, pick him up and hose him off." It's a nice thought, but a teacher's gotta have a really powerful and long reach to get past the personal obstacles--like Rhonda's (Shawnee Smith) pregnancy--economic issues--like Larry's (Ken Olandt) night job--or other outstanding hinderances that have nothing to do with the kid's attitude or, necessarily, the teacher's ability. But, I said this was a break from seriousness. You know what amuses me about this movie lately? I read Roger Ebert's review of the film today and he hated this film. He ca...

It might not seem like the obvious link to connect Groundhog Day to those teen movies from the 1980s (or any decade) that I watched over the past month (or ever). But, there's a reason I refer to Phil's "adolescent" period when talking (or blogging) about this movie. First of all, that's how Harold Ramis refers to it on the commentary track, if I remember rightly. But, also, it just makes sense. Phil Connors, realizing the freedom inherent in the time loop, is like an adolescent sowing his wild oats. Pre-loop Phil is also like a teenager in that he thinks he knows everything, thinks he's better than everyone else and he is entirely self-centered and self ish . But, mostly, I don't want to talk explicitly about Groundhog Day tonight. I will note that the movie is going by unimaginably fast, like I'm so familiar with it, it almost isn't registering. I'd be tempted to stop typing and just focus on the movie, but who's got the time for that?...

Let's work backward. Start with another 30th anniversary screening tonight--made it to the sold out 7:30 show this time and it was nice watching this movie with a crowd. Run back through the past week of viewings, seven times in seven days, keep going back three decades, a viewing now and then, not as many times as I've seen some movies but more than others. Back to 1985, February 15--the day The Breakfast Club was released into theaters. Keep on going to March 24, 1984, the Saturday on which Andrew Clark, Claire Standish, John Bender, Allison Reynolds and Brian Johnson sat down as strangers in Shermer High School's library and left as friends... perhaps to become strangers all over again come Monday. Go back further to... Actually, the screenplay draft I found has no date on it. It's not the shooting script. It still has Robin Robertson in it-- (March 25, 2015, Karen Leigh Hopkins tells The Hollywood Reporter about how she was cast as a gym teacher (character, ...

Pale Rider (which I may watch in my upcoming month of westerns) in its opening weekend is #1. Cocoon in its 2nd weekend is #2. Rambo: First Blood Part II (which I already covered back in January in this blog) in its 6th weekend is #3. And, Andie MacDowell--Rita Hanson herself--is in this movie... Oh, I'm not watching The Breakfast Club just yet. Started the blog a little early. I'm watching St. Elmo's Fire first. Wanted to explore the whole "brat pack" thing a little bit before my week with The Breakfast Club is through. St. Elmo's Fire --which stars (among others) Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez as college graduates the very same year they starred as high school students in The Breakfast Club --is #4. Goonies in its 4th weekend is #5. Fletch in its 5th weekend is #6... and then you get into movies I didn't see in the theater. Lifeforce at #7. Prizzi's Honor at #8... actually, I may have seen that in the theater and just didn...