the groundhog day project

Watching Midnight Special in the theater today, yesterday 's theme came back to me. First of all, great movie, takes a potentially huge narrative and squeezes it into a very small scale; writer/director Jeff Nichols set out specifically to explore the strength of a father/son relationship, what it means to be a parent. And, I'm watching this movie and thinking, there it is again ; we're embedded with Roy (Michael Shannon) so we understand that he loves his son (Jaeden Lieberher), so when he pulls a gun on a cop, or his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) shoots that cop, we are sympathizing already even before we understand what's going on with the boy, and where this story is going. Watching Mrs. Doubtfire one more time, I gotta reiterate, the whole birthday party scenario plays the way it does so we sympathize with Daniel (Robin Williams). Miranda (Sally Field) tells him, "Don't make me out to be the monster, here," but the movie has already done that. In mo...

"Can we get back to politics?" - Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton If we do take Mrs. Doubtfire seriously, it stops being cute. Sure, it's still got, as Saer put it yesterday, watching the movie for the first time, "the feelz" but just because Daniel (Robin Williams) is hurting doesn't mean he should get what he wants. In fact, we're shown the troubling version of Daniel in the opening scene. He's doing voices for a cartoon and he's too concerned with "I've got to do what I've got to do" to realize that what he's got to do is his damn job so he can, you know, make money, and help Miranda (Sally Field) out with their kids. That's the real world. Instead, Daniel lives in a world where he feels just fine quitting that job (and note Lydia's (Lisa Jakub) familiarity with the idea of him getting fired) then spending however many hundreds of dollars it costs to rent a mobile petting zoo for his son's birthday party (which ...

"One person is not just one person." -Father Lantom, Daredevil * Right away, in Mrs. Doubtfire , it's pretty clear that this movie wants to tell us something. Daniel (Robin Williams) is a voice actor and he adds lines to comment the presence of smoking in the cartoon he's working on, then walks out when his producer(?) gets mad at him. It's been a long time since I've seen this film and I get the impression from Daniel's preachiness that the movie might get a bit preachy, too. If it can refrain from just sitting back and letting Robin Williams get carried away with jokes and impressions (many ad libbed). (* Because that was most of my day, today--watching the second season of Daredevil . It's spring break and, while I hope to get another section of my thesis written before school is back, I've got to waste a little time, too.) I think the film is going to end up favoring the comedy over the potential drama--like these deleted scenes --and whe...