the groundhog day project

So, I was listening to the soundtrack to the stage musical version of The Last Starfighter today. I only even learned of its existence today, actually. And, it starts off a little goofy, I'm not particularly liking it--production notes online about how they use the trailer park and a picnic table in particular for the trailer park denizens to act out the story, without much else actually seemed like it could be fairly cute, but the music felt immediately wrong in tone for a film that starts so casually, with the sleeping dog and the cat in the mailbox, awnings raising, Otis (Vernon Washington) scraping foot off a plate. Maybe it would be different on stage... I assume it would be different on stage. But, the songs alone don't quite get that same sense that this is a small-knit group of folks who all know each other and are used to passing messages from person to person all the time like they do early in the film when Elvira's (Peggy Pope) power is out and she's gonna m...

First reactions to Staying Alive after many years of not watching it: I still know this song , and wow, Kurtwood Smith is in this . [Alas, he disappears quickly.] Roger Ebert called Staying Alive "a big disappointment... [not] really a movie at all, but an endless series of musical interludes between dramatic scenes that aren't there... a Walkman for the eyes." I grew up on this movie and not it's predecessor, Saturday Night Fever ; I'd seen Saturday Night Fever , of course, but for whatever reason--probably because this movie is less gritty and certainly doesn't get anywhere near abortion--we had this one on VHS and watched it often. It may be cheesy, it may be "a Walkman for the eyes" but, you know what, sometimes that is exactly what you need from a film. (Plus, it was #8 at the box office for 1983.) When Tony Manero (John Travolta) eyes the mirror ball at the club where he works as a waiter, I'm sure plenty of people in the audience were...

Interesting movie connection, since I also watched The Jerk ( 1185 1186 1187 1188 ) for this childhood deconstruction phase of the blog: Steve Martin was supposed to play Rooster in Annie but he and Bernadette Peters had recently broken up, so he opted out. Interesting movie connection: when Annie, Grace, and Daddy Warbucks go to the movies, they see Camille . First of all, the lyrics to the original-for-the-film-version song "Let's Go to the Movies" actually SPOIL the ending to Camille -- "and Greta Garbo is probably crying while Robert Taylor is locked in her dying embrace. --but second of all--and probably the reason Camille is the film used (even though, its class-divided romance plot relates to Annie somewhat)-- Annie 's supervising editor Margaret Booth also edited Camille back in 1936. The classist stuff of Annie is interesting, despite mostly being a shallow layer of flavor. By boiling down Little Orphan Annie to just her rags-to-riches or...

Coming on the heels of On Golden Pond , the central premise of Annie --that the presence of a kid will inject some life in an old man (though Daddy Warbucks is not as old as Norman Thayer, Jr, of course) is quite a cliché, but Annie is built of different stuff--a shallow surface of classist structures and a rags to riches plot that might as well be a romantic comedy (a little bit Pretty Woman ). Oddly enough, it is also a big departure from the comic strip. Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks was not even always a regular presence in the comic. In the place of Warbucks' secretary (or whatever her title is) Grace Farrell (Ann Reinking), there's a Mrs. Warbucks in the comic, and she is not the nice woman Grace is. She doesn't like Annie and sends her back to the orphanage more than once. (An orphanage run initially by Miss Asthma and then by Miss Treat.) The first time she tries to return Annie, a "society friend" sees her and she keeps Annie instead. Then Oliver ret...

I've seen Annie live a couple times, for a History of Popular Culture class I read a bunch of old Annie comics... (Though I swear I didn't end up using any of those for the resulting paper. I wrote about some other comic that I had never heard of before that-- Bringing Up Father .) I saw the 2014 film version. (But not the 1999 one.) And, I have seen the 1982 film version of Annie more times than I can remember. And, a warning, if you don't like musicals, I've got three on my list for 1982. In fact, it might be very easy to establish up front what I got from 1982 films on repeat in my home--I got a love of musicals. Just last week, my daughter and I saw the new production of Disney's Aladdin at the Pantages. And, we're thinking of getting some of the rush tickets for the Pasadena Playhouse's production of The Pirates of Penzance . The film (and any stage production) is just the origin part of the Annie story, rounded out into a self-contained thing. T...

I want to see something new tonight. It's the 2nd of the month. I'm watching Groundhog Day . Again. In the meantime, I sit here and recite a lot of the lines as they go. Not spending every day with this movie--like I did in Phase One of this blog--my timing is off with some lines, but mostly I've still got it. You know one detail from Groundhog Day: The Musical (which I have yet to see because I can't make it to New York too readily, but I listen to the soundtrack plenty) that I love that differs from the film? When Buster announced that the groundhog said, "I definitely see a shadow" and he proclaims "Six more weeks of winter", in the film, the crowd just boos. The people on stage even have signs to egg them on: BLIZZARD, SLEET, 6 MORE WEEKS OF WINTER. The crowd in the musical has a slightly different take. Sure, they boo, but then, almost immediately, they scream yay, because they're such cheerful folk they can't really be sad about t...

The Room isn't even playing yet. I saw Girls Trip today--it was pretty good and very funny. But, right now, I've actually got the Critical Role panel from Comicon playing on Twitch. But, Pages is open and I'm typing because, you know, who cares what order things happen anyway? The point is not that things are organized but that things are tragic. You find a woman and you stay together for seven years, live together, and she'll betray you with your best friend. You find a man and you stay together for seven years, he will bore the shit out of you even though he's fundamentally a good guy, and you will cheat on him and he will kill himself. No matter what you do, someone will betray someone, someone will die, life will suck... except for when it doesn't. It's those moments when it doesn't suck that matter. When he brings you a new dress, or she has already ordered the pizza. As I write this I hear some lyrics from the Groundhog Day musical in my head-...

Author's Note: Color me a hypocrite, but I don't follow much, if any, of the advice I am about to give. Here's the present: I'm sitting on a pew in a church building someplace in Long Beach, California. My daughter's got rehearsal for a play and we're far enough from home that I just hang out during, work on my blog, watch some tv, read, whatever. Only my third time tonight, so I couldn't say there's a pattern but for writing this blog. I've already seen two movies today-- Wish Upon and War for the Planet of the Apes --but I don't feel like writing about either of those. I'm stuck in a different mode. Stuck in a loop. I was listening to the soundtrack to the Groundhog Day musical on the drive here. Between Phil's being stuck in a pattern he needs to get out of, but not for the reason he thinks; Rita being stuck on imaginary knights in shining armor from childhood fairy tales, but knowing that's unrealistic and not worth waiting f...

Watching Sing Street again, mostly because I really need a break. From politics. From the world. I want to spend more time out and about with my kids or with friends. I have an inkling to try dating. Or something. (Details I don't feel like putting out into the world in a blog entry... For a change.) Also, I love this movie. It's structure so simply, like a romantic comedy built on a musical foundation, Once  but with teenagers, and set smack dab in the middle of the 1980s (though it gets the timing of some of its historical references off a bit), and it's sweet and simple and entertaining. It has it bittersweet moments and it has its happy bits, too. And, like Once , it makes a good case for the idea of how varied people can come into your life, have some significant, life-changing effect, then maybe they just go away, disappear, and you're stuck by yourself for a time, or with new people, other people, other influences and life-changing effects, and the tiniest cha...

I've been obsessing over the Groundhog Day musical of late. I often obsess when I get a new musical to listen to, of course; this is not unique to Groundhog Day ; it's just the latest. And, I wanted to talk about it. I have not gotten to see it live yet, of course, because it's just in New York for now and I cannot afford to just fly off to New York whenever. As much as I'd like to. (And, as I was writing this, I just got a notification about Tim Minchin's tweet about the show being nominated for seven Tony Awards.) Thing is, I cannot cover all of it in one entry. Nor would I need to. Nor would I want to. This isn't a blog about stage musicals, after all. But, there are a few details that stand out. First: Nancy. I've written about Nancy many times, of course. I swear I spent an entire entry just on her once but I cannot for the life of me find that one. But, that's almost poetic in itself--that she is just a detail in other entries. That is Nancy...

You know what else Hedwig atones for? All of America's sordid history. Seriously, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is all about things divided, how we repair the damage, or cover it up. From the Civil War to Civil Rights, we've got a rather fucked up history full of divides and differences. And, however much we think we've got (metaphorically, of course) a good wig and makeup on, we're still split down the middle in so many ways. Hedwig tries to make up for that. Hedwig's at 17/15 by the way, on the Christ-Figuring scale. And, the completist in me wants to finish off the list. I also want to talk about America, about history, about life, about who and what we are. I would also love to write all about Hedwig's one liners and puns. Or the fact that Hedwig's mother's job in East Berlin was teaching sculpture to limbless children, which is immensely sad (unless they are all Buddhists or something and it's imaginary sculpture, like internal mandalas, and t...

There's danger ahead. See, I want to run Hedwig through the Kozlovic-Black scale, but I know my arguments regarding 15.75 atonement might offend some. Or should . Anyway, let's just do this. Hedwig is quite 1 tangible and 2 central and an 3 outsider . 3/3 Regarding 4 divinely sourced , Kozlovic (2009) explains, "Christ-Figures usually arrive onto the scene through some form of deliberate outside intervention, sometimes by a distant God-figure" (p. 6). The stress there is mine because obviously Hedwig is not in America because of a distant God-figure. He's there because of Luther... who coincidentally shares a name with the founder of a branch of Christianity. There is outside intervention. 4/4 Hedwig's birth is not exactly a 4.5 miraculous birth but Hedwig is born from Hansel because of an accident. I'm driven to Merriam-Webster for what should be a basic concept-- miracle . The first definition is "an extraordinary event manifesting div...

Hedwig. From the Germanic name Hadewig, derived from the Germanic elements hadu "battle, combat" and wig "war". Also, the name of, apparently, two different saints. Plus, on a very simplistic level, there's the pun on head wig . Hedwig is a character in conflict. With Tommy Gnosis. With Yitzhak. With the Angry Inch (the band). With her angry inch. With herself. She has little emotion but anger through most of the present storyline. While Yitzhak listens to Rent and wears a Rent t-shirt and auditions for (and gets offered a part in ) a traveling production of Rent ... Yitzhak is a romantic. He wants more than cold intercourse. He wants love. Or at least some sort of acceptance. On the other hand, Hedwig is stuck. She claims she's looking for her "other half" but she's just stalking Tommy. She cannot see what she has. She is too damaged. And, like another Tommy , she is a bit deaf and blind. Speaking of Tommy (which came up last week ...

(650) I was going to make a point today about performativity and performance... but then I thought maybe I'd already made it. Some scribbled notes on my copy of Brickell's (2005) "Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion" that I wanted to share, and a quick Google search and I found the blog entry-- Day 557 - i think i hear a footstep --in which I typed up my scribbles word-for-word... I suppose you can go read that entry (which, ostensibly, was about Singin' in the Rain , by the way) but the basic gist was that all performance is performativity. That is, everything we do, even our subversions, our revolutions, are defined and con fined by what the world tells us we can get away with. I just recently started reading José Esteban Muñoz' (1999) book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics . The gist I'm getting so far to his idea of disidentification is effectively finding your identity in the differences, the opposite ...

I've already pointed out how the musical offers "the greatest illusion of spontaneity and effortlessness" (Feuer, 1995, p. 447). Additionally, it offers timelessness, even in the midst of its story. The stage version of Hedwig , I've heard, is set during a single show, with the asides and flashbacks (and I hope animations) drawing on that. This film version offers several different shows and a linear plotline that covers probably less than half the film, with the flashbacks and asides and animations adding to that plotline even as they pull away from it. Flashbacks as memory--they don't exist in the past, they exist in the present. (I remember in my Media Theory class last quarter, we were talking about Groundhog Day , which happened a few times, and whether or not it was "Classical Hollywood Cinema." The professor had a problem with the nonlinear structure, but I argued that the film is actually quite linear. Phil's story is linear. It's just ...

I feel as if I've told this story. It's not an elaborate, or remotely monumental, story. But, it's a useful story to establish some context for this week's film-- Hedwig and the Angry Inch . When this film came out, January 2001, it's not like I was busy with other movies. But, I was far from most movie theaters. I was living with my girlfriend at the time in Arkansas. That relationship was challenging but was going well right then. But, in Forrest City, Arkansas, the biggest city nearby, there was only one movie theater that I ever knew of, and it had three screens. I saw two movies there in the three months I lived in the area ( The Mummy Returns and Valentine ). It was a dark time for the movie-loving side of me. I knew of this movie, still. I still had my subscription to Entertainment Weekly (a subscription that has been continuous since 1994, but which I have recently chosen not to renew because by the time issues arrive, most of the information has alr...