the groundhog day project

The Presidio begins a little oddly--like the filmmakers didn't know how to do a cold open. Some obligatory San Francisco skyline shots, the Golden Gate Bridge, a military march past a stage (with Sean Connery up there because we need to be reminded he's in this movie like we didn't see the trailer and choose to see this in the theater... Or maybe we didn't watch this one until it was on home video; I can't remember. I know we saw Big Business in the theater and that was this same weekend. Given that we went to the second-run Academy Theater a lot in the late 80s, maybe we saw it there. But, my point is, until it's on cable much later, no one is turning this movie on and not knowing that Connery is in it. So, the film would be better served pulling a cold open with the dark foggy night, the MP coming upon a robbery and getting shot, the car chase, instead of wasting time on) basically a bunch of pointless establishing shots instead of getting to some action...

From the opening slasher moment I mentioned yesterday , Jack's Back cuts to a cheap knockoff of Peter Gabriel's "Red Rain"--and they purportedly wanted "Red Rain" but couldn't get it. And, it's obvious that 1) this movie is taking itself seriously, which will be good later, and 2) this movie is going to feel fairly generic if you've seen enough movies, and will be even more generic if you watch it a few decades later and write about it. And then the movie goes from the knockoff song to jumping to the day of the final copycat murder, which is a waste of a far more interesting plot, but I will get to that below. Roger has a great Line about the plot of this film: All of this sounds contrived. Of course it is contrived. A movie like this is nothing without contrivance, and one of its pleasures is to watch the plot gimmicks as they twist inward upon themselves, revealing one level of surprise after another. Roger may have bought Jack a...

(Note: in the chronological order of this childhood deconstruction, The Private Eyes should have been several movies ago. I borrowed the DVD from my sister, set it aside and forgot to put it in its place. So, I will end my 1980 movies with this one from April of that year. A movie I have seen far too many times. And, not enough.) I have often heard that the most accurate medical tv shows were comedies like Scrubs , the most accurate cop shows comedies like Barney Miller . Is it any wonder that The Private Eyes actually has as good a mystery at its center as many dramatic mysteries, and despite its bumbling heroes, makes pretty good sense along the way? It opens with a murder, of course. And, despite the bickering between Lord and Lady Morley (Fred Stuthman and Mary Nell Santacroce), there isn't any immediate hint that this is a comedy. Then there is the overly long animated sequence with the opening credits that makes it clear this isn't a serious film (but I wish t...

It's interesting that, as a kid, the big mystery films I watched a lot were Murder by Death (watching it now) and The Private Eyes (watching it sometime in the coming weeks, months, years? Who knows how long this "month" will take). Comedies that parody and/or satirize older detective films and stories that I had less access to. My views of detective stories in film would forever be tainted by these movies.           And, I sit here watching (and being distracted by cats and people, but mostly just watching). And thinking about genres, about how we experience them based on past experience. The same way we experience every film, of course, in context of your history with every other film we've seen. And, with genre, we learn the tropes, the conventions, we learn the character archetypes, the usual plots beats and settings. And, after a while, the details become so common and well known (even outside the films (or stories) themselves) that even if you hav...

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...