the groundhog day project

Where to begin? With a measure of madness, perhaps. How do we define madness ? Why is the line between insanity and an awakened mind--especially in the face of amateur psychologists all over the Internet--such a thin one? With my final--probably final, anyway--critique of Jim & Andy , my final critique of presenting this content (not to mention various clips I've found myself watching on YouTube this week) as, sometimes without any debate, either an awakening or signs of insanity? For example, this comment from "Bill A" regarding a clip of Jim at New York Fashion Week (NYFW) 2017: "...things happening, and there ware clusters of tetrahedrons..." [says Jim.] well folks thats [sic] some kind of psychadelics [sic] talking right there like acid, DMT, or mescaline. We shouldn't be judging the guy anyway, let him go on his psychadelic [sic] journey and enjoy it. Some context: Jim's former girlfriend Cathriona White died September 2015 (2 years befor...

I forget to begin as The Fifth Element involves the ancient from 1914 Egypt. We'll jump the the future soon. First, some adorable aliens? cyborgs? robots? (They're not German.) Tiny little heads, giant bodies, and they waddle like penguins. And the madness of The Fifth Element begins. It should be no surprise that so much of this film was in the director's head when he was young. This is like every kid's crazy version of science fiction and fantasy writ large. You've got absolute evil. You've got monsters. You've got a brave hero, a beautiful heroine, comic relief. You've got fantastic visuals and profound concepts shoved into tiny, easy-to-understand boxes. You've got black goo that come out of folk's foreheads when the big evil... thing approaches. Hell, you've even got (briefly) Luke Perry. Okay, maybe Luke Perry is not a part of the quintessential science fiction fantasy world of every (pre-)adolescent.... (Pardon the sexism, but I...

I think the point to Better Off Dead... is obvious. That thing we call love drives us crazy, for better or for worse. We do stupid, crazy stuff like ski dangerous mountains or fix cars. We step outside our comfort zones to do some weird shit we would never do. Savage Steve Holland, who wrote and directed this movie supposedly really tried to hang himself from a pipe in his garage, but the pipe broke and his mother was mad at him for breaking the pipe. And, when it's gone, life is like Mr. Kerber's math class--it just doesn't make any sense at all. Everyone else is perfectly happy; they all get it. But, you've got a mangled paper in your pocket with gum stuck in it, and all it says is DO HOMEWORK instead of, you know, having any actual answers on it... metaphorically. And, everybody else has books full of answers, printouts, file folders, and an eagerness to participate that seems impossible... again, metaphorically (on those books and printouts, anyway). Better Off...

Roger Ebert called The Fisher King a "disorganized, rambling and eccentric movie that contains some moments of truth, some moments of humor, and many moments of digression." That sounds like he meant it as a bad thing. But, really, that's just life. Just because we like our movies to be more straightforward, more organized , less rambling, more focused, doesn't mean they have to be. More from Ebert: "The Fisher King" is so charming it's hard to say when we notice it has no clothes. Individual sequences are bittersweet and moving, some [only some?] of [Robin] William's inventions are funny, there is no denying the originality and force of the [Mercedes] Ruehl performance [which won her an Oscar]--and yet there comes a time when we cannot sustain one more manic outburst, one more flight of fancy, one more arbitrary twist of plot, one more revelation that the movie tricked us into caring about subjects it eventually throws away. Where to start? ...