the groundhog day project

Ben wants a big answer. His story here begins with a dream that leads to the design of a new antenna the leads to the space bubble thing, which leads to the Thunder Road spaceship which leads to the alien vessel and Ben wants it all to mean something. Like, there's got to be a reason he and Wolfgang are bullied, when Trisha over at Charles M. Jones Junior High School is just as much a nerd... but maybe not as much of a geek. A reason why Steve Jackson and his friends are assholes. A reason why Darren's father is the way he is. Why Darren's mom died when he was young. Why movies like War of the Worlds and This Island Earth can lift Ben out of his mundane suburban life. Why he can't manage the confidence to talk to Lori Swenson. Ben is still a child. He's got a crush on Lori but when he gets the opportunity to hover outside her bedroom window, he isn't looking for her to be undressing--as Darren points out, it's too early in the evening for that--but is e...

Explorers opens with Ben asleep with his TV on ( War of the Worlds is on), dreaming about flying over a Tron -ish circuitboard reality. He wakes and frantically draws a piece of his dream. Then he calls up Wolfgang to talk about it. As you do. A good dream. A good movie. You gotta share with someone, gotta talk about it. Or at least I do. This blog is some of the obvious evidence. The Junior High the boys attend here is Charles M. Jones... That is, Chuck Jones, the cartoonist. Not the name of the High School where they filmed, but chosen deliberately. Because the cartoon reference matters. This is a movie about creativity and imagination and I just found out that Wolfgang's house is not far from where I'm writing right now, and I love that.           This Island Earth is the next movie we see, after some science fiction magazines and books. But, per the movie later, the island is not isolated. Like the immigrants in yesterday's An Am...

It's interesting watching Stand By Me these past few days things I notice that I didn't notice (or couldn't have noticed) before. When I watched this as a kid, I had no idea what card game they were playing in the treehouse. I've since played 31 a bunch of times, but only just a handful of years ago. Some background extras reflected in the glass behind Gordie right after he fires Chris' gun accidentally, walk the same bit of block twice--two different takes, I assume. But, also--and this one has an interesting meaning for me--the music that plays when Gordie goes into his brother Denny's bedroom to get his canteen (pretty sure it's just called "Denny's Theme" but I don't think the score was ever released properly, just the soundtrack with all the old songs) sounds a lot--to my untrained ear at least--like a part of the score for a far more recent film Never Look Away . But, then that connection has me thinking about Never Look Away and al...

I will be up front about this. I am watching Suburban Sasquatch again rather than get back to High Road to China . It's just so fun. Also, I saw Every Day today's--long time readers of this blog might recognize the name. I wrote about David Levithan's book back when it was still Groundhog Day every day. In particular, I quoted this bit: What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contains such enormity? I suddenly realize why people believe in deja by, why people they've lived past lives, because there is no way the years I've spent on this earth could possibly encapsulate what I'm feeling. The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations--all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secrets arrows were points here, ...

And then I skipped the scheduled film for a day because 1) I can and b) it will line up better with March 2nd being a Groundhog Day day. Instead of watching High Road to China again and try to justify its stakes, I am watching a horrible film that I have never seen in its entirety before. (I have seen parts of it online, particularly because Red Letter Media did an entire "Best of the Worst" episode about it. The film is Suburban Sasquatch . It starts with bad acting and lazy filming, and then the Sasquatch arrives and hilarity ensues. But, not on purpose. The hilarity is these two getting killed. Then insert a badly animated CGI hawk and a (supposedly) Native American woman, Talla (Sue Lynn Sanchez) who is going to do battle. The details are vague. Insert cops, Steve (Juan Fernandez) and John (Dave Bonavita, who also plays the Sasquatch). And a reporter, Rick (Bill Ushler). The cops mention nearby property development and we should know right away there is an environ...

I'm torn, on this final day with Halloween II ; I wanted to do some Christ-Figuring but I cannot decide if I want to do a serious sort of figuring focused on Loomis or a semi-serious one focused on Laurie, or a probably not serious at all one focused on Michael. The vital question, because I think we know what I got from a movie like this back when I was five years old, is can I manage all three. And, in the process make an even bigger farce of the Kozlovic-Black Scale of Christ-Figuring. Note, in case you are new: the scale is scored out of 25, but there are more than 25 items. 1 tangible and 2 central are easy here, but Michael and Loomis take the lead over Laurie with 3 outsider and Michael takes the lead with 4 divinely sourced (though I could make the argument for Loomis having that point, too). Michael: 4, Loomis: 3, Laurie: 2. No one gets the point for 4.5 miraculous birth but Laurie gets the point for 5 alter ego . I'm tempted to give that point to Michael as...

Once Escape from New York 's plot actually gets moving, there isn't that much that actually happens. Snake (Kurt Russell) meets Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), Cabbie takes Snake to Brain (Harry Dean Stanton). Duke (Isaac Hayes) shows up. Snake, Cabbie, Brain, and Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau) flee, get to Duke's and find the president (Donald Pleasance) but Snake is captured and forced to fight Slag (Ox Baker). They all make a run for Snake's glider on top of the World Trade Center, then head for the Queensboro Bridge to get off the island. People die, Snake and the president get away. The end. Basically. There isn't much to say about the plot as it is. There's room for strange interpretations of meaning, but with John Carpenter behind the film, it feels like it would be me inventing meaning where he put none. As far as implicit meaning, Escape from New York feels like a response to gang violence in New York in the 1970s, an outlandish extension of the reality, people ...

One more time: Dave Made a Maze . Because repetition is the heart and soul of this blog, of my life, of life itself. Day in day out, what makes it all interesting and worth bothering are the little things, the moments that make one day unique and different from the next. Dave's incorrect use of "tertiary" for example--when friends of mine make silly mistakes with grammar (or, Phil forbid, I make one) I notice. I don't always correct them. But, I note it and if I had the memory capacity of, say, Santa Claus, I would have a list at the end of every year and I would let people know. Like, Hi Jared, you have made [this many] grammatical errors in public this year . Hi Shari, please repair the grammatical issues and try better next year . And, so on. Eventually ending with myself: Hi Robert, you have made thousands of grammatical errors, and far too many typos to ever be forgiven. You have to do better next year. Clear and civil communication is essential to a peaceful ...

Being the Groundhog Day enthusiast/obsessive/blogger that I am, it is interesting to me that out of all the characters in Dave Made a Maze , the one who never actually enters the maze is the hobo played by Rick Overton, aka Ralph from Groundhog Day . The one guy--who just might be Ralph all these years later--who has been around this kind of relentless, repetitive, lesson-making fantastical venture before, is the one who never participates now. (Not that he, you know, ever really necessarily knew what Phil was going through in that time loop. The closest he might have come to understanding it may only have been on that night that he and Gus were quite drunk. And, of course, they would not remember it the next day, anyway.) Also, in the opening credits, he gets a "with". The hobo is, of course, the person that, by choice or circumstance, exists outside the normal channels of everyday life. Everyone else is eventually caught up in the cardboard labyrinth in some way. Even t...

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...

Note: today’s entry was mostly written while sitting in the waiting room while my car was getting maintenance, so access to some resources was limited.) The Jerk begins outside a movie theater--where a "comedy thriller" is playing--and includes director Carl Reiner as himself, with a direct reference to his filmmaking. (His going cross eyed because of Navin's Opti-Grab leads to Reiner to yell 'cut' too late while filming, which leads to a car crashing, actors die, and Reiner leads the class-action lawsuit against Navin.) These Hollywood references matter in a film that deals so much in issues of class. Navin grows up poor (and black) in the south. Upon getting to the city, he gets a low class job as a gas station attendant. He works as a carnie. It is sheer luck that he succeeds at all in his life; while it is Navin's ingenuity that leads to him making the Opti-Grab, that is the only evidence of any cleverness on his part (plus, perhaps, his delay of ...

The working title for this movie was simply Summer Camp . Jim McLarty, who plays the Camp Mohawk camper Horse, told his family he was in a movie called Summer Camp . So, a movie called Summer Camp opens at a drive-in in Burlington, Ontario, where he lives. His brother and sister go to see it and, well, it's a softcore porn film. "McLarty tells Vanity Fair , And it had a character named Horse! This really confused them. I'd told them my character in the movie was named Horse, so they're watching this flick and a guy called Horse shows up and he's clearly not me. They were really peeved at me. As for the final title, in that same Vanity Fair piece, producer Daniel Goldberg explains: We were going with the name Summer Camp for a long time. I don't remember when we changed it to Meatballs , or why. I know there's a scene where Fink called Spaz a meatball, but that's not why we changed the title. This is just this past summer, 2017. But, director ...

I don't really want to talk about Heaven Can Wait again. If it taught me anything when I was a kid, it was bad things--that one guy can change the world with a few words, that love is magical and comes upon you out of nowhere, and it can conquer all. The film's take on reincarnation and the soul didn't fit with what church and bible class in school were teaching me, and neither take was particularly positive given I was being told regularly that the world was going to end . I mean, who cares if you go to heaven when you die, if your "soul" sits wound waiting for Christ to return and then you get to spend forever in the presence of God, or if you get a brand new body (maybe) after you die, when in a few short years this body you have right now is going to burn in a nuclear holocaust, or if by some slim chance it survives, you're going to die slowly from radiation poisoning, starvation, or some sort of post-apocalyptic factional violence? What points is romanti...