the groundhog day project

You gotta wonder, actually, how detailed the script for Adventures of the Wilderness Family even was. Aside from a few scenes, there isn't much dialogue, the story turns arbitrarily--hey, look, a cougar; hey, look, a bear; hey, look, another bear; hey, look, a random mountain man; hey, look, arbitrary use of slow motion; hey, look, Jenny's sick despite our rather basic attempt to save her from urban pollution--and there isn't really much of a plot, not a formally structured one anyway. This is 1975, but as I've said before cinematic decades bleed into one another. This is more a tail-end 60s film, a family-friendly extension of the counterculture. Skip Robinson is like a shoulda-been hippie who turned establishment, maybe because he got Pat pregnant and he needed work, because that's how the man says it's supposed to be. Skip tells the pilot of the plane that drops them off, "We thought a lot more than twice" about bringing the family out there. Th...

From the Los Angeles Times , April 9, 1967: "Hippies... many officials see them as a serious threat to today's young people." In 1963, counsellors and campers at were run off from a summer camp outside Rosman, North Carolina after "'Hate literature was distributed around [the nearby] town saying some very untrue things about the camp--that we were sex perverts, Communists and God knows what else,' [camp counselor Bruce] Grund said" (NYT, 1963). In 1964, Reverend Frederick C. Wood, Jr. stirred up controversy when he suggested that sex was a "good." "Premarital intercourse need not be 'bad' or 'dirty,' he said. 'Indeed, it can be very beautiful.' (NYT, 1964). In 1959, Leo F. Koch, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Illinois was dismissed from his position after purportedly condoning premarital sex. Koch wrote a letter to the school paper, which included this: With modern contraceptives and medi...

Seriously though, while there may be enough moments to suggest that Troll 2 is a giant metaphor for Joshua's burgeoning sexuality , really the metaphor is far more obvious--this is Rosella Drudi and Claudio Fragasso (writer and director, respectively (and also husband and wife), though there is one name--Drake Floyd--credited with both) warning us that the Cold War is not really over. The wall wasn't down yet--that would happen from mid 1990 into 1992--and production happened before the official opening of the wall, November 1989. But, the signs were there. The Cold War was coming to an end, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and all those zombie movies screaming at us about communism (and/or consumerism) were going to have no good metaphors anymore. (And, no, I won't be spending three days with every bad movie this month--I've gotten more than enough recommendations on Facebook to spread them out a bit more. But Troll 2 is one of those that needs more time. Plus, we...

The Omen again. That whole parenting thing--leave that to the side for the moment. But, not too far to the side. The changeling child idea--central to the premise of the film-- does tie back into the parenting. But it also suggests a larger notion of fear of the unknown, specifically fear of foreign unknowns, of foreign influence. I mean, this film puts us in the realm of international politics at the start. Robert Thorn is made the American ambassador to the UK not long after he and his wife get Damien in their lives. Father Brennan points Thorn and Jennings to Italy and then Israel to find, far from the modern trappings of the Thorns' life in England. Seriously, compare the excess of Damien's fifth birthday party to the ruins seen in Israel later in the film. But, the real danger here is in the child influenced by... maybe it's foreign powers, maybe just belief systems to which we do not subscribe ourselves. I was wondering why certain religious themes were promine...

At least this movie is not all about sex. Unlike, say, Porky's or Fast Times at Ridgemont High . In the shooting script (1985, July 24), Ferris, Cameron and Sloane do go to a strip club, however--a "garrish, nearly deserted strip joint." I won't paste the entire scene but basically, Sloane isn't impressed--"I'm losing respect for you by the bucket," she tells Ferris early in the scene--and Cameron is amazed (but has very little to do in the scene). Some highlights: Ferris: "You don't think it's amazing that we got in? Sloane: Who wants to get in? ... Sloane: I'm not interested in watching someone jiggle their mammary glands. Ferris: Point well taken. But consider why she does it. Why she does it and you don't. Sloane: I'm not a tramp. Maybe not the best angle for Sloane, but at least it offers a little more depth to her character than the movie really does. Ferris: Maybe her life fell apart. Maybe she lost somebo...