the groundhog day project

I find it interesting that Space Ramblings calls Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark "a tough as nails equal to Indiana Jones" when her abduction and presumed death, and her need to be rescued (even if she almost manages to outdrink Belloq and escape) is central to that film. And, Matthew Rozsa at Salon calls Marion "a proactively adventurous female counterpart worthy of Indiana Jones" even though she was (offscreen, anyway) a child when she was involved with Indiana and is tied up more than once in the film--to be fair, Indy doesn't fare very well himself. Still, Marion feels like a more solid character than Willie Scott. That might be because Stephen Spielberg and Amy Irving's relationship wasn't the most solid (and he would end up getting together with Kate Capshaw, who plays Willie Scott, later) and George Lucas was going through a divorce (he admitted at one point, purportedly, that he was "not in a good mood" because of the di...

May 1984, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom comes to theaters with Mola Rom (Amrish Puri) pulling a guy's beating heart out of his chest. Also some guy's getting eaten by alligators, a guy getting crushed by a big stone wheel, the stewed monkey brains, but it's not like we see anyone's face melting. June 1984, Gremlins arrives in theaters with at least one Gremlin getting killed in a blender, one exploding in a microwave overnight, one getting shot at close range in the head, at least one melting/boiling into nothing. These two films are generally credited with the birth of the PG-13 rating. Director Stephen Spielberg helped birth the new rating--he told Vanity Fair in 2008, I had come under criticism, personal criticism, for both Temple of Doom [which he directed] and, you know, Gremlins [which he executive produced], in the same year. I remember calling Jack Valenti [then the president of the Motion Picture Association] and suggesting to him that we need a ra...

Distracted today. Aside from a game of a risk and a debate about the earth being flat tonight, I saw two new movies today. Watching The Post , I was reminded of other newspaper films, the recent Spotlight , All the President's Men (which, alas, I missed out on seeing on the big screen back when I was at USC because I was sick), and especially The Paper because that movie not only worked for me as a movie but made me want to be a journalist. This got me thinking about other movies that make me want... Like Sideways made we want to drink a lot of wine. Also to like pay attention to it and be like a connoisseur or whatever. But, also to drink a lot of wine. Into the Wild made me want to fuck off from society. Dead Poets Society made we want to write poetry (as did Paterson ), to speak up, speak out. And maybe subtly to be a teacher... Really, while I compare my teaching to Mr. Keating, I don't think he is the reason I became a teacher. Just too many years between the two--m...

Kasdan: Her father may have been his mentor... That's why they know each other... So they have a previous relationship through her father. From the transcript of a story conference between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan. Later... Lucas: We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond. Kasdan: I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don't have to build it. Lazy storytelling, but that's not the problem here. Lucs: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven. Kasdan: And he was forty-two. Lucas: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship. Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two. Lucas: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve... It would be...

There are some great shots in Raiders of the Lost Ark . I will inevitably get into a rant about how awful Indy is as a person (probably tomorrow), but importantly, the film never tells us that he is a good person. So, today, I will ignore Indy and look at Spielberg's work. From a great shot with mist and sunlight through the trees in the opening sequence to that warehouse matte painting in the final shot, Spielberg frames things nicely. But, even better--and this probably comes from screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan more than from anybody else--are a couple key moments of foreshadowing and... Whatever you call explaining something ahead so that when it happens we don't need useless dialogue. And, I don't mean the snake thing. That's basic stuff. Also, an odd detail I noticed yesterday (and maybe I'd seen it before, but it stood out yesterday): that bit where Sapito gets Indy to throw him the idol and then drops the whip--there are stone walls on either side of them, an...

Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and there is one subject that must be presented first, get it out of the way before I get to anything else. It's the "Raiders Minimization" problem. That label for it comes from, of course, The Big Bang Theory . Not the greatest show, and it often fetishizes nerditry rather than represent it well, but it has had its moments. And, Amy Farrah Fowler's (Mayim Bialik) pronouncement is spot on. If Indiana were not there for this primary plot of this film, everything that happens would still have happened, with only slight differences. I'll let Amy explain: Indiana Jones plays no role in the outcome of the story. If her weren't in the film, it would turn out exactly the same... ...if he weren't in the movie, the Nazis would have still found the ark, taken it to the island, opened it up and all died, just like they did. In fact, they would have found it sooner, because there would have been no shootout at The Raven, and Toht ...