the groundhog day project

With action movies, it's easy. With courtroom dramas. Even with romances. If--and if they had, this movie would have probably been quite forgettable--they had gone ahead and filmed the scenes with Stephanie DeCastro , maybe it would have been easier. But, what makes Phil's situation so hard is there is not clear victory to be had, no simple solution. Chasing after Rita is not dictated by some Fairy Godmother or Magic Mirror. Phil's situation is both entirely his own doing and entirely not. It's simple. It's complex. It's unsolvable. And, eventually, it solves itself. Like life. If you're lucky. If the social and cultural and political and ethnic and racial rolls go in your favor and circumstance doesn't set you as an example for everybody else. The thing is, however silly bullshit American Dream lines feel all too often-- you can accomplish anything if you just put your mind to it , you can be anything you want to be and all the similar lies we tell...

Sticking your tongue where it probably shouldn't be. Fantasizing about how much your teacher likes you. Fantasizing about being the savior to everyone around you. Just another day in the life of an adolescent boy. Yesterday was serious. Today—not so much. Unless, of course, it is. A Christmas Story is a coming-of-age story for Ralphie Parker. As mentioned in the commentary track (and as should be obvious to anyone watching the movie) the one throughline of the film is Ralphie's pursuit of the Red Ryder BB Gun. I've written before about the " cowboy " as the "quintessential man's man" and that comes into play here again. Ralphie, on the brink of not being a child anymore fantasizes about being a cowboy (and also about being a spy, given the Little Orphan Annie decoding bit, but maybe that scene isn't to be taken so literally... more on that below). Ralphie seeks a phallic symbol he can use to demonstrate his manliness. There is not even much ...

No Bob Clark directing, no Jean Shepherd narrating, A Christmas Story 2 is not immediately horrible. Instead of the Red Ryder BB gun, there are cars and girls now because Ralphie is a teenager. His fantasies herein go from being just about one (the girl) to being about both in a matter of minutes. And we get bon mots like this from the Old Man: “Treat the gas like your wife and the clutch like your mother-in-law.” (Adding a punching motion to that last bit.) A little too much farce to this one, Ralphie and Schwartz and Flick like the Three Stooges. And, if this was actually based one stories from In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash , as it claims, the stories seem even more separate than in the original. And, the Old Man being cheap doesn’t seem to fit the character from the original. There is a nice twist in Mother’s stash of money being revealed just after she learns of Ralphie’s money problem, but then she does not end up helping him; instead she buys fish to save face for t...

From A Christmas Story From our apartment this morning. One of those truthful scenes in A Christmas Story that I was talking about yesterday is the Christmas morning unwrapping and the chaotic mess that remains afterward. I don’t much like such messes, even though as a kid, once I had my own bedroom, it was often a mess—the room was small enough that I didn’t need the floor anyway, so I would leave books and things all over the floor. Because I don’t like such messes I have made a habit since my first Christmas (2007, I believe) to take the discarded wrapping paper as it falls and ball it up, tuck it all away in a discarded box. Like the Anal Retentive Chef from Saturday Night Live , I clean up as it goes. But, really, you can’t keep up with all of it. Excitement delays attentiveness. Like Daryl Zero leaving that receipt behind in one of my favorite movies (which I do intend to watch for this blog at some point), Zero Effect . Emotion gets in the way of, well, the attachment to...

The character of Ralphie Parker has been in no less than six movies. Several were on PBS so they aren’t readily available. I found a couple online, may watch them in the next few days. There was also a sequel to A Christmas Story ... which has a 3.4 on IMDb . For the record: A Christmas Story (1983) currently has an 8.1, The Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976) has an 8.2, Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby is a Friend of Mine (1982) has a 6.9, The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (1982) has an 8.0, The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski (1985) has an 8.6, Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss (1988) has a 7.7, and It Runs in the Family / My Summer Story (1994) has a 5.7. The character was also apparently in American Playhouse’s Concealed Enemies: Part I: Suspicion , a “dramatized account of the actual events that led to the 1950 conviction of former U.S. State Department Alger Hiss of perjury before a federal grand jury...” There’s more to the description but I...

Stray observation: The title card for A Christmas Story is all caps (or pseudo-caps) except for the “h”—that is lowercase. Is that, perhaps, because that’s Jesus’ traditional middle initial? OR just an aesthetic choice? Speaking of tradition, there was an interesting note in the BoJack Horseman Christmas special (on Netflix this week). Todd (voiced by Aaron Paul) was promoting Christmas tradition and BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) told him just because something’s tradition doesn’t make it good. Todd’s response was something like, because something’s good it becomes tradition. In my philosophy of religion class a few years back, my teacher liked to talk about apotropaic practices. By definition, such practices have the ability to ward off evil, but more importantly (as she put it) the key to such practices surviving was that they took little energy and did nothing particularly negative. Nailing a bit of iron, perhaps a horseshoe, over one’s door, took little work, but provided peac...

(Prior to writing this entry, I wrote an entry for my SE7ENTH ART movie blog on the new movie Whiplash —comparing it to a romantic comedy if you must know—and I just finished watching Bad Santa . Despite its blatant disregard for decency, that movie— Bad Santa —has a lot of... heart to it, the kind of thing you expect from a Christmas movie. And, oddly, I think it involves the actual holiday (I don’t mean the literal day, of course, even though Home Alone barely gets to it and Christmas Vacation never makes it there. I mean, the setting is less arbitrarily Christmas... Well, that’s unfair to Christmas Vacation , I suppose, what with its focus on the whole capitalism thing and the Christmas gifts, even if we don’t get the denouement of anyone actually receiving gifts— (Hell, maybe that’s my problem with Christmas Vacation —not to harp on that more as A Christmas Story gets started; it’s not about the giving of gifts, per se, or the receiving of gifts, either. It is somehow about t...

As National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation begins for the last time tonight, I want to enjoy it. I want to find the family interactions inside this package endearing and pleasant. There are moments that achieve this. Audrey’s support of her father when his lights fail, for example. Clark’s conversation with Ruby Sue, for another. Clark hugging everyone after the lights work comes close, but he (and the scene) overdoes it. The question is not, for now, what is the meaning of Christmas or what is the meaning of a Christmas movie. Rather, what do I want out of a Christmas movie? The problem in answering this one is that I am not the audience for Christmas movies. Most any year, if a Christmas movie comes out, I won’t go see it. Most of them are nice, wholesome, family-friendly comedies, stuff like Jingle All the Way (haven’t seen it), Home Alone (saw it in the theater, seen it many times since), Elf (watched it once on DVD, was entertained but not particularly moved), It’s a Wonderful...

There’s a formula John Hughes uses when it comes to making the despicable characters seem not so bad as the story goes—he provides somebody worse. In Dutch , for example, Dutch Dooley was a horrible guy, but at least he wasn’t as arbitrarily uncaring as Doyle’s father. Similarly, in Christmas Vacation , Clark’s (and the movie’s, really) reliance on money and capitalism in defining a good Christmas sits next to those yuppies next door. There’s nothing to like about Todd and Margo, right? The thing is, there’s nothing particularly horrible about them. The movie just assumes we won’t like them so all the bad things that happen to them because of Clark Griswold, deliberately or not, are justified. They’ve got money. They’re too good for Christmas trees. They’ve got fancy entertainment equipment (destroyed by the ice) and fancy workout clothes. And, worst of all, they like each other. No one should like these people. Clark, on the other hand, all around good guy, loving (and faithful) hu...

Saer is watching Christmas Vacation with me tonight. Her first comment/question: I don’t get why the intro is animated... It’s weird. As I have already compared the actions in this movie to a cartoon—Clark falling off the roof, the nuclear power plant gag, and so many others—I think the animated intro actually makes sense. It sets the audience up for what is essentially a live-action cartoon. Physics is not going to matter, if the joke works better without. For example, that chunk of ice in the rain gutter—there is absolutely no reason it should shoot out like it does, but it allows for one more assault on the yuppies next door. (More on the yuppies tomorrow, maybe.) Saer thinks the Griswolds, especially Clark and Audrey look very 80s. I told her this came out in 1989. She wasn’t surprised. Then, because I was looking at Audrey right then, I realized something—she’s wearing a beret and in European Vacation the whole family got berets (though Rusty’s was thrown off the Eiffel Tow...

(A small correction: Clark does wear the Santa hat and coat (open), but not the beard, when he goes a little crazy with the chainsaw and places the burnt gifts under the new tree.) Of course, Christmas Vacation and so many other Christmas movies should be about nostalgia. Our enjoyment of the holidays, really, is about nostalgia. Every holiday celebrates something in the past, and usually a slightly invented version of whatever that something is. But, before we even get into invented history and the celebration thereof, there’s Freud. Hutton (1988) tells us about the “lost self” which Freud believed was formed yet largely forgotten as a consequence of the psyche’s encounter with early life experience. One’s sense of identity is forged out of the behavioral patterns established through the psyche’s reckoning with particular experiences, especially those of childhood. (p. 123) Essentially, our experience of self in the present is built on our experience of self in the past. Ad...

The thing is: he didn’t. Let me back up. The final line in Christmas Vacation is Clark saying, “I did it.” But, really, he didn’t do much of anything. He went to get the tree, forgot a saw, got the tree home, put part of it inside and broke a couple windows. He wanted to prove Santa was real to his niece but even if she thought that plastic Santa flying through the air was the real thing, he didn’t do that. He put up those 25,000 bulbs but without his wife flipping that switch there never would have been any light to them. He only got his Christmas bonus because Eddie kidnapped his boss. Clark accomplishes pretty much nothing in this movie. Even his freak out results not in him getting violent (like in the original) but Eddie. Hell, he breaks a hole through the “floor” of the attic yet doesn’t climb down through it to get out. Instead, he sits in the attic and reminisces about old times that don’t really exist. That last bit is kinda the point, though. Christmas here, is just a...

Weird trivia found on IMDb : there were only two Christmas-themed movies released in theaters in 1989, this one and Prancer (and Johnny Galecki was in both); and there were three movies with animated openers that year— Honey, I Shrunk the Kids , Troop Beverly Hills and this one. The animated opening is odd. On the one hand, it gets us in the mood for a little irreverent and cartoonish humor. But, on the other hand, it, in my opinion, distances the film from Santa by injuring him and sending him flying away in a hurry. But, maybe that’s a) accidental (or at least incidental) or b) entirely on purpose to give National Lampoon some breathing room. After all, Santa doesn’t really appear in this movie except a little plastic version that Clark kicks in the face. This movie leaves Santa to the side—except for Clark’s conversation with Ruby Sue and the flight of Santa and his reindeer at the end of the movie—for something... else. Strangely, this movie does not deal as much in family dis...

Considering Clark Griswold was supposed to be a little more forceful at Wally World and hijack the plane home in the original film (before details were changed), his aggressiveness on the road at the start of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation fits the character. It’s not in any way a realistic take on a human being but for Clark Griswold it makes sense. He’s more of a cartoon character. But, I don’t want to start my week of Christmas Vacation getting into Clark’s character, though I may get into that later; I want to talk about Christmas movies. About Christmas. About meaning. Home Alone is a modern classic among Christmas movies, but it’s barely about Christmas; it just happens to occur around the holiday. Even more so, Black Christmas . The question then is what is Christmas about and, more importantly, what should a Christmas movie be about? Let us jump past the obvious Christian aspects and the obvious pagan aspects to deal with something I think is bigger: capitalism...

A babysitter receives a phone call. The man on the line asks about the children she’s babysitting. After several calls, she calls the police and they trace the next call—it’s coming from a second line inside the house. The version of this story that I know best comes not from someone telling the story around a campfire or wherever but from When a Stranger Calls . Interpretation of this story can go a lot of directions. The babysitter not doing her job thoroughly may stem from fear of such in an age when young women were claiming more independence and, like Jess in Black Christmas rejecting motherhood and other “womanly” ideals. Like the notion (somewhat via Clover (1992)) that female sexuality is being punished in the slasher film, the urban legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs deals in feminine independence (not necessarily or exclusively sexuality) being punished by a man positioned literally and figuratively above her. It’s arguably about patriarchy, paternalism, the punis...

It’s not just feminism that birthed the slasher film. I’m reminded of CNTV 393 at USC, particularly September 27, 1994. Jess’ announcement—“I’m pregnant”—we only hear from outside the window. We are only in the room in time for Peter’s reaction. Essentially, we are with him , not with her. Not right then. That day in class we watched Ten North Frederick , starring Gary Cooper. I barely remember the movie and only generally recall the notion of “male melodrama.” But, fret not, because I still have my notes. Not the quality of notes I might have from more recent forays in the college classroom, but there’s some useful information. For instance, Professor Casper defined the male melodrama as a movie that “traces a series of adventures, professional labors, and sexual episodes of a male protagonist through which the male comes to some understanding about the meaning of life, usually involving spiritual values.” The movie is, on the surface, not about Peter, yet we are with him again—...

Silent Night, Deadly Night is awesome and it amuses me that the main character is named Billy considering how the killer in Black Christmas calls himself Billy*. Silent Night, Deadly Night falls right in the middle of a big wave of slasher films and is full of blood and breasts and stuff actually happens... unlike Black Christmas . While Nowell’s (2010) argument that Black Christmas was a pioneer film for what would become the slasher genre it almost is not a horror film at all. Instead it’s something more of a drama, with hints of melodrama and interruptions of horror. It’s strange amalgamated structure is on purpose, of course. As Nowell describes it, “It was Canadian and it was the product of a complex network of transnational indutrial shifts that had been unfolding in the late 1960s and early 1970s involving the Canadian government, the Hollywood majors, America’s theater-going youths, and independent filmmakers from around the world” (p. 61). Nowell argues that Black Christma...