the groundhog day project

Today, I came to appreciate the sound design of Big Hero 6 while thinking of the next step in reifying my social justice warrior interactions with film. See, I had the movie on in the kitchen while making dinner, had my wireless earphones in, and while I could see the screen if I turned my head, mostly I was just hearing it. The sound in the opening bot fight, for example, was amazing. And, for the record, I like this movie. A lot. I gave it a 9 on IMDb. (You should know how my IMDb scoring works, I suppose, to be sure what that means. For example, while The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction get 10s from me, so does La La Land , which I think is a fundamentally flawed film, and Toy Story and The Big Lebowski and Zootopia and Sling Blade , Jaws and Deadpool . Now, as much as there was talk last year about Deadpool being nominated for Best Picture, I don't think it should have even been considered for that. Best Picture is a different sort of ideal. While Get Out earn...

Speaking of different cultures and different viewpoints, according to Brian Ashcraft at Kotaku , before Big Hero 6 even came out, some South Koreans were upset over "alleged Rising Sun imagery" in the film. One movie, one story, many interpretations and interpolations. For example, Sharon H Chang, whose blog I cited yesterday, goes beyond just the racial makeup of Hiro and Tadashi (and the Japanese imagery throughout San Fransokyo). She writes: The film also plays sardonically with racial stereotypes in a manner much appreciated. Of course Hiro is Asian and super smart, but he's also hip, trendy and the hero . Fred, the not so sharp science groupie who just hangs around turns out to be extraordinarily and inexplicably rich; hilarious fun-poking at unearned white privilege/wealth. Meanwhile, Wasabi, cautious, smart and orderly, is thankfully far from typical depictions of large Black men as 'dangerous' and 'threatening.' (Admittedly the female characte...

I was reading recently about folklorists having a problem with Joseph Campbell and his whole monomyth The Hero with a Thousand Faces thing. The hero's journey and all that generic crap that gets recycled again and again in modern stories, especially film, especially action or fantasy. Sara Cleto argues, in the above linked article: Campbell's approach tends to direct the read [sic] back to themselves and their own culture. By saying, "hey, it's really just the same story over and over, we are all basically the same, and it [sic] great!" He ends up erasing the differences, and it has a flattening effect on the stories. Nevermind my own contention that all movies are all other movies, and every story is the same story, let's side with the folklorists for the moment. Besides, my arguments regarding identity and the self suggest that the differences are what matter anyway. Sure, there may be a backbone, or several different backbones, on which all stories ...