the groundhog day project

Marco Rubio just referred to Trump's strategy for Afghanistan, laid out in great detail in an amazing speech this evening as "good" strategy and an "excellent" speech. Which would be fine except I was lying about the great detail and the speech being amazing. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was a TelePrompTer speech so it had complete sentences and it made relative sense, but it was half Trump mansplaining the existence of ISIS, telling the same tired story about how Obama pulled out of Afghanistan too early and that's why ISIS exists, and then being really vague about what he's going to do about it. More troops. More war. No end. Last week it was nuclear war with North Korea, not a land war in Asia, next he's going to go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line. I kid because I'm tired and angry. This shit is distracting me from my movie tonight... Hell, it's making me want to draw direct comparisons. Hapless Americans pushing the...

It's the first half of Ishtar that is the problem. If you can just work your way through that, it gets better. The whole torture of that first hour, the awfulness of Rogers and Clarke's songs, their absolute lack of upward career trajectory--it even gets paid off when Clarke breaks down in the desert and asks, "What have I done with my life, Lyle?" And Ebert calls the desert sequence pointless. The desert sequence is the point. It's the answer to the question of the first half... Specifically, look at where the movie begins and ends. The same song in both places. Telling the truth can be dangerous business; Honest and popular don't go hand in hand. If you admit that you play the accordion, No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band. But we can sing our hearts out. And, if we're lucky, then no neighbors complain. Because life is the way we audition for God. Let us pray that we all get the job. It's trite. It's simplistic. But, it'...

The only time I saw Ishtar from beginning to end was on a plane. We were flying to England, I think [My sister tells me it was a trip to Hawaii.]. The movie felt longer than the flight. But, I have very little memory of the content from then. I've seen scattered moments from the film in the intervening years, but I have never sat down to watch the whole thing again. Supposedly, it's one of the worst films ever made; that's a superlative I should have sought out before now. Yet, here I am.           Twenty-two minutes before we get to the desert. I remembered none of that from seeing this before. And now, it feels like a different movie... And, I'm reminded of Spies Like Us , which also had a couple losers getting inadvertently involved in international affairs. Except, with better comedy, and, considering the timing ( Spies Likes Us came out in 1985, Ishtar in 1987), Spies Like Us made for a better twist on the tail end of the Cold War... Except I'm n...