the groundhog day project

Ben wants a big answer. His story here begins with a dream that leads to the design of a new antenna the leads to the space bubble thing, which leads to the Thunder Road spaceship which leads to the alien vessel and Ben wants it all to mean something. Like, there's got to be a reason he and Wolfgang are bullied, when Trisha over at Charles M. Jones Junior High School is just as much a nerd... but maybe not as much of a geek. A reason why Steve Jackson and his friends are assholes. A reason why Darren's father is the way he is. Why Darren's mom died when he was young. Why movies like War of the Worlds and This Island Earth can lift Ben out of his mundane suburban life. Why he can't manage the confidence to talk to Lori Swenson. Ben is still a child. He's got a crush on Lori but when he gets the opportunity to hover outside her bedroom window, he isn't looking for her to be undressing--as Darren points out, it's too early in the evening for that--but is e...

After talking about names , we need to move on to something more about identity in Annihilation . HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. Annihilation , which structurally echoes films like Event Horizon or The Arrival , or an under appreciated tv show from a few years ago called The River , or most any explorer adventure story. It harkens back even to Conrad's Heart of Darkness , except Kurtz and Marlow are on the same trip into the jungle. Or there have been many Kurtzes, including Kane (Oscar Isaac). This is a trip into the unknown taken by characters who are all dealing with loss, with grief, with the universe turned against them. And, in response, they explore because what else is there? They could wait to figure out who they are, or they could act, and hope that in action, the become someone recognizable in the mirror. The film relies on an understanding of the psychological underpinnings of depression but doesn't make much effort to explore them explicitly. Emily Yoshida at Vulture c...

In the opening scene of Annihilation , which I saw for the second time today, Lomax (Benedict Wong) asks Lena (Natalie Portman) "What do you know?" She has no real answer for him. The film cuts back to him questioning her a few times throughout, and the more she tries to explain things, the less he probably understands. The lack of conclusive answers throughout the film, though, is fundamental to appreciating it. As Elizabeth Bruenig writes in the Washington Post , the story's central drama concerns the protagonists' efforts to come to terms with something they can't, as mere humans, understand. It certainly leaves a confusing impression: It was only a few days after seeing "Annihilation" that its curious moral logic began to creep, fungus-like, across my conscience. I've begun to think that the particular character of that formless, nameless danger--its eerie, morbid bounty--makes it an excellent villain for our moment. Additionally, like many a...

And sometimes, I take the bad movie personally. Sometimes, it's not supposed to be a bad movie at all. Sometimes it's a sequel to one of my favorite films as a kid and I'm excited, and then increasingly disappointed as I watch the horrible followup. That followup: Highlander II: The Quickening . Roger Ebert's review begins with a lovely line about the awfulness of this film: "This movie has to be seen to be believed. On the other hand, maybe that's too high a price to pay." I have paid that price twice. I saw this movie in the theater. Second run theater, actually. Didn't see it opening weekend. I cannot remember if I knew ahead of time not to rush out to it, maybe some bad things said about it in Starlog magazine. Maybe I (or my parents, though I could drive by then) was just busy. I also rented the film on VHS once. Imagine, if you will, my confusion, having loved the swordfighting and magic in the original Highlander , coming into this movie wit...

I forget to begin as The Fifth Element involves the ancient from 1914 Egypt. We'll jump the the future soon. First, some adorable aliens? cyborgs? robots? (They're not German.) Tiny little heads, giant bodies, and they waddle like penguins. And the madness of The Fifth Element begins. It should be no surprise that so much of this film was in the director's head when he was young. This is like every kid's crazy version of science fiction and fantasy writ large. You've got absolute evil. You've got monsters. You've got a brave hero, a beautiful heroine, comic relief. You've got fantastic visuals and profound concepts shoved into tiny, easy-to-understand boxes. You've got black goo that come out of folk's foreheads when the big evil... thing approaches. Hell, you've even got (briefly) Luke Perry. Okay, maybe Luke Perry is not a part of the quintessential science fiction fantasy world of every (pre-)adolescent.... (Pardon the sexism, but I...

Well, they may have been robots. I mean, I think they were robots. I mean, I know they were robots. I was at the theater today to see Ex Machina and there's a moment that got me thinking... Well, there were a lot of moments that got me thinking, but there was one in particular I thought was worth sharing here. Nathan (Oscar Isaac) asks Caleb (Domhnall Gleason) why his type is his type ; that is, did he look at all the various types of women, analyze them in detail, measure them, evaluate them and decide on one type , or did his type come from a genetic predilection, or a particular specificity of idealization supported and maintained by his parents, his friends, society in general around him? Actually, most of that phrasing is mine. But, the point is the same. Not to get back into the free will discussion, but I wonder if once a certain complexity is reached, the actuality and the appearance are indistinguishable. That is to say, if his type comes from such a complex combin...

There's a moment in the third act of Westworld in which Peter finds a woman he thinks is injured after the robots have gone... wrong. He believes she's a guest who has been injured because, unlike so many others nearby she is semiconscious (and chained up). Then he gets her some water and she shorts out. Turns out she's a robot. The fact that the robots cannot be distinguished from the guests (except by their hands) is important. And, it makes me wonder if there isn't some greater similarity between the two. I'm reminded of the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded ... [The Oracle] stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. I'm reminded of The Purge , which if you haven't seen it a) isn't that great a movie as it ends up just being a rather straightforward home invasion story but b) is based on an imag...

(This month, I'm doing things a little differently; I will be watching 10 films--each recommended by someone else, each one for three days.) For the equivalent of $5524.99 today, you can go to Roman World for the hedonism, Western World for the violence or Medieval World for... a different kind of violence I guess. This is a bunch of rich people. Let's get that out of the way up front. I mean, they're still humans, and it's easy enough to empathize with them when they are in danger. We learn pretty young to idealize the rich; it's no coincidence that so many of Disney's animated films are about princes and princesses. It goes right along with the whole protestant ethic... ...which I did not want to write about today. But it has to be said. This entire story is a fantasy. We have to identify with these rich people spending tons of money to play, and then we can fantasize about being them right alongside fantasizing about being at Delos, in one of those thr...

I'd like to comment on the symbol Klytus wears (and that is on the wall here and there in Ming's palace in Mingo City)--like the Masonic symbol: There's probably something there, with Ming and Klytus not only representing a foreign (alien) menace but a subversive secret society (also probably something to Klytus being a bit effete), but there's something more important to talk about since this is my last day with Flash Gordon . (This 3-days-only system leaves very little room for rambling.) (I'd also like to write something about how Ming basically created the various tribes of Mongo as they are. He gave the Leonans of Ardentia their claws and fangs. He gave the Coralians their fins and gills. He gave the Avions their wings, the lizardmen (not sure what they're properly called) their scales. He is effectively a god, which could put a religious angle on the film.) I'm more concerned with an old standby--gender. And, I don't mean to diminish the ...

Let's move right on past the whole yellow peril angle of a villain like Ming the Merciless for a moment and focus on the real racist tragedy in Flash Gordon . There are no Lion Men from Ardentia in the film. Instead of the awesome Thun with the mane and the fangs, we get what amounts to a stereotypical African native type. And then, to add insult to injury, he gets killed by Ming after almost no screentime. Let's not even mention the lizard men, who we see not only in Ming's jail but also Arboria's jail. Plus, one is killed onscreen, to be mourned alongside King Thun, and he doesn't even get any dialogue. So then, there's Ming. In Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America , Cheng (2012) argues that Asian villains in science fiction brought "the otherness of advanced and degenerate civilization... Degeneracy justified conquest--exploration's coincidental and expeditious by-product--as redemptive reclamation" ...

(This month, I'm doing things a little differently; I will be watching 10 films--each recommended by someone else, each one for three days. Today starts the second of these 10 films. The first one was The Room .) To start, I must say, it's amazing that Ming's computer readout labels are written in English. I mean if we didn't see the label EARTH QUAKE, would we have been able to guess how his actions destroyed that building on his screen? Without VOLCANIC ERUPTION, would we have know that was a volcano erupting? And, without HOT HAIL, would we have... actually we probably would have been really confused because hot hail is not a thing. If Ming can make hot rocks fall out of space, out of nowhere basically, no football player is going to save us. The premise almost immediately plays as ridiculous. Plus, there's the whole racism angle with the character of Ming the Merciless (and many other characters in the old comics and serials), but I will be dealing with th...