the groundhog day project

If you've been reading this blog lately-- and you're still reading? --you know I'm maybe a few steps past your average bleeding heart liberal. I side with extremists. I appreciate a violent rebellion. It occurs to me as today's film in my "movie life" list-- having skipped both Summer School and Can't Buy Me Love because I have previously included them in this blog in different contexts. Also, I realized partway into writing what follows that somehow I put today's film a year early on my list, but oh well, it's already on --gets started, this might have been my first brush with the kind of 60s radicals that I would become much more enameled with in college (the second time). The movie, by the way, is Running on Empty . A couple of 60s radicals, responsible for a bombing in '71 that blinded a guy, live their lives on the run, moving and changing names every few months when the Feds get close. Thing is, they've got two kids. Th...

There's a really basic take on Stand By Me --it's about four boys growing up in the face of their own mortality--and there's plenty to explore just there. But, I kinda like the more specific thing regarding explicitly Gordie but also to increasingly lesser degrees--again, because this is Gordie 's story--Chris, Teddy, and Vern. That thing is an old standby in this blog--identity. Vern's is simple. He's the timid one, clearly still more of a kid than the other three. Just look at him saying "Geronimo" when he jumps off the train tracks when Teddy goes for the dodge. But, Vern has to at least gotta grow up a little by the end. Teddy, despite how horrible his father has been to him, still idolizes his father and clearly wants to be like him. His father stormed the beaches at Normandy. Teddy dressed in military colors, wears what is probably his father's army belt and surely those are his father's dog tags around his neck, and he makes a thin...