the groundhog day project

A thought occurred to me while watching Bloodsport last night. (It's on again right now, but it has only just started, with the random bits of violence against objects and that one white guy fighting that one black guy and shots of people setting up the competition space.) I'm not sure why my parents enjoyed this movie. I mean, I know the movie is somewhat enjoyable on its face. American's love action films, generally. But, 1) I swear we saw this movie more than once at the second-run Academy Theater and 2) other action films make more sense for, you know, religious folks. I mean, Rambo fights evil Communists, John Matrix fights, um, that guy who's raising his own army for... reasons I don't remember. John McClane fights "terrorists". Etcetera. Frank Dux is just fighting other fighters for... well, for sport, I guess. But, it' snot like my family were fans of wrestling or boxing. They watched baseball, and fairly exclusively baseball. No bas...

(We interrupt the planned programming here at The Groundhog Day Project --because my VHS set of Star Wars films didn't arrive and I don't feel like skipping ahead--to bring you a brief bit about mother! --because I saw it again today, and however much it is horrifying some people, I liked it even more the second time than I did the first time.) Honestly, you probably won't like mother! . I mean, statistically, most people won't like it. Maybe, taking into account the limited scope of this blog and the side of the Venn diagram of film aficionados who might come to my blog regularly, you're one of the few who will not only like it but love it. An Aronofsky fan, perhaps. A fan of divisive, provocative, polarizing cinema, maybe. Let's get some stuff out of the way right off. You know, SPOILERS. You're gonna get overloaded with imagery of violence, of gratuitous religiosity, of Jennifer Lawrence's breasts, of a newborn baby's half eaten corpse, and ...

Still 1975. (Still not born yet.) Disney again. Except I was actually thinking about how different these childhood films are from the ones I watch now. Yesterday, for example, I watched mother! in the theater and I watched Adventures of the Wilderness Family at home. Today in the theater I watched Beach Rats and I'm watching The Apple Dumpling Gang now at home. Very different movies today. Very different movies today. I mean, you've got a big metaphor for human interaction with the universe, for religion, for male-female relations, for the cult of personality, sacrifice and self-sacrifice, and you've got a family running off to live in the wilderness and finding that some animals are nice and some are vicious... Which, really, taken simplistically, the themes could be much the same. But, Adventures of the Wilderness Family is just so innocent about everything. While mother! includes sex and violence and apocalyptic destruction as well as cannibalism. Meanwhile, Beach ...

“You can’t poop in this town without everyone knowing what color it is.” – Lou ( Doc Hollywood ) I find myself coming back to Groundhog Day tonight. I just watched Ringu and now The Ring is on and it occurs to me that both of these films (one being a remake of the other, there should be no surprise there) and Groundhog Day involve a sort of romanticization of the small town, or at least the rural, as opposed to the larger urban environment. I had to throw in that “sort of” because the romanticization in Ringu and The Ring (and to a lesser extent in The Ring Two ) is actually a bit negative, a hint of the invasion of the city, the crowding leading to a dangerous environment. It’s interesting that I cited Gerbner et al (1986) yesterday because I’m reminded of Gerbner’s mean world syndrome in which our viewing of (the violence in) television (and movies) leads us to conceive the world around us as more dangerous than it actually is. The cursed tape in Ringu and The Ring cou...