the groundhog day project

Talking with Fresh Air about Mad Max: Fury Road , director George Miller says "that a film's reception changes with time. 'First of all, people write about it in reviews and... [then] after a while The audience starts to tell you what your film is...'" I found this when looking for old interviews with Miller, get a better idea of his reasoning for making the original Mad Max or, more importantly, The Road Warrior . But, in this deconstruction going on in this blog of late, that is not necessarily the point. I mean, in 1981, I am five years old. I don't rightly care why a film gets made. If the film entertains me, I am just glad that it got made at all. By '83, when Return of the Jedi comes out, I am buying... Or having my mother buy for me behind-the-scenes books and magazines. I learned about blue screen from a section about the Speeder Bikes. But, I suppose that I might write more about that when I get to Return of the Jedi . What matters today is t...

          I sit here, watching The Road Warrior instead of writing about it. The combination of interesting and exciting vehicles with evocative musical cues, and very little dialogue--I have not counted but supposedly the titular Max only has sixteen lines--is quite captivating. I was going to say "oddly captivating" but it is not odd. Aside from me loving the film since I was young, it still holds up as a great action film. One of the definitive action films, really. (So much so, that I almost included it in the "month" (roughly January 2015, overlapping from late December to early February) of action films during phase two of this blog. But, then I skipped it for Top Gun (added to the month with Lethal Weapon , Die Hard , Commando , and Rambo: First Blood Part II ) because then I was dealing specifically in 80s American action films, which made for a more straightforward throughline--the decline of American Hegemony, the struggle to raise up...

1) Back to the childhood deconstruction. It's 1981. I turn five at the end of January. For whatever reason, the first film from 1981 that made my list didn't come out until May... According to IMDb. However Wikipedia says the film was not out in Australia until December of '81 but came out in the US in 1980. Roger Ebert's review is dated 1 January 1981, but he also mentions Raiders of the Lost Ark , and IMDb says the explosion of hte compound was filmed 22 July 1981, so who knows? I'll have better dates for the rest of the films from 1981 because they weren't imports. 2) This is a bit of a cheat. This is supposed to be a deconstruction of my childhood in terms of the films I watched time and time again when I was young. I did not have The Road Warrior on video until I was a teenager, but I know I watched it more than a couple times on TV. And, I think I saw it in the theater. I am not sure about that. But, as I have said before, the memory is often more impor...

I've reviewed Rango before . Not specifically as a Western, of course. I described the film as "a little bit Road Warrior (at least in one sequence [others compare the sequence to Star Wars (and Rattlesnake Jake licking Beans' face is framed like Jabba licking Princess Leia)]), a couple parts Chinatown, and a whole lot of parts spaghetti western, though framed in the present day." In fact, aside from the chorus of mariachi owls, Rango is not a Western for a good 20 minutes. Then, it has a habit of referencing other Westerns. Merrimac (Stephen Root) for example, sounds a lot like Colonel Stonehill, the horse trader in True Grit . The windmill squeaks like the one at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West . The hawk has a silver beak, like Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou . Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy) is modeled on Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) from The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (though his eyes actually resemble the eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings ). It ...

Yesterday was about, well, bookmarks left behinds, articles left uncited... stuff I won't get to, stuff I don't need to get to, maybe even stuff I shouldn't get to. There's an imaginary Groundhog Day Project entry that didn't happen once upon a time that is at or near the top of that list. I wrote a poem, so the story goes, while under the influence of something stronger than this water I am drinking right now. You can read that poem, if you like, on my website . The thing is, there were more lines written that day, as I turned on Groundhog Day . Those lines follow: words have different meaning for each of us i want to save them all anyway is it a trick of the light or a trick of the haze? sundown growing brighter dogs eating from a baby’s bowl the earth tries to drop me and the blindness falls away skip moments and everything is funny like watching “ rabbits ” every direction is the right one (impact out groundhog day to nuclear war ) feeling ocd and ...