the groundhog day project

Got Life Itself playing again right now. Also watched 45 Years today--not a film for people who don't like it slow, but I loved it until it didn't seem to really end, it was just... not on anymore. #NoClosure Sorry for the hashtag, but I just spent a couple hours watching and livetweeting # JurassicWorld on the Groundhog Day Project 's Twitter (after livetweeting (though I didn't actually tweet much for this one) the State of the Union with my personal Twitter ) and hashtags were getting thrown around a lot. I considered just copying and pasting the tweets here as today's blog entry, but I realized I have not gotten to something I really wanted to get to when I watched Life Itself the first time . I used Roger's line about movies being a machine that generates empathy as my title and never really got to the empathy thing. Plus, the tweets are probably best enjoyed in the format in which they were posted. Click the link above and check them out. Blasco an...

In class tonight, we were talking about finding a story. Like, you're producing a news story and you're in a situation and you need to know the main elements of the scene, but the story... the story has to be found. And, I got sidetracked in my head. I thought about one of my unpublished novels, possibly the best one of the bunch. It's called Clubhouse Blues . It began as my third attempt at a new storytelling format--a serialized story put online one chapter at a time. It was set in the same small California town as two of my previous novels-- Seeing Her Naked  and Twice Into the Same River . Each of these was built around children and/or teens trying to, you know, figure out life. Seeing Her Naked had run for ten chapters, building an audience as I emailed out chapters as I wrote them. Each chapter was written in one sitting, about one a week. The night I wrote the last chapter was, up until that point, about the most painful night of my life. I was writing on a comput...

“Here is one of the most innocent movies in a long time, a sweet, warm-hearted comedy about a teenager who skips school so he can help his best friend win some self-respect.” ( Ebert, 1986, June 11 ) “But that the film doesn’t live up to our anticipation of a rollicking good time is only part of its disappointment.” ( Siskel, 1986, June 11 ) “That was awesome.” (Me, probably... circa June 15 (the Sunday after Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out)) I say “probably” because, obviously I did not record my response to the film and I certainly wasn’t blogging back then. But, hell if this movie didn’t live up to my anticipation. I say “circa” because, I am not actually sure when that weekend we saw the film, but it was most likely Sunday afternoon... Also in theaters that weekend: #1 for the weekend was Back to School but I wouldn’t see that until sometime later at the Academy second run theater. Ferris Bueller was #2. Top Gun (click 1 2 3 4 5 6 for more on that film) was stil...

I really wanted to have some fun and write about the homoerotic subtext in Commando for Day 7, but as I was readying to start the movie, I turned on that Siskel and Ebert special I mentioned the other day . (You can watch it in four parts on YouTube starting here .) And, I was reminded of my research for my Rambo speeches a few years back... (fall 2010, I think). One of the things I watched while putting together my two speeches on Rambo was an episode or two of Rambo: The Force of Freedom , Rambo's cartoon that aired in 1986--between Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III . I'll get into Rambo more in the next week (i.e. I'm watching Rambo next for this month of 80s action movies), so I won't get into too much detail there (yet). But, as I'm looking into some information about this special--I do scholarly writing so I like to know the specific citation for my sources (even if, for this blog at least, I sometimes let a hyperlink suffice)--and I find reference ...

It’s daytime, hardly good for horror films, especially slasher films. They tend to take place in the dark exteriors (e.g. Friday the 13th ), or in badly-lit interiors (e.g. Halloween II ). Even when we know what’s in the dark—Michael, Jason, Freddy—it is scarier when we can’t quite see it, can’t quite gauge the moment or angle of attack. The unknown outweighs no matter how much detail is known. We fill in the gaps, we make it worse. But, circumstance leaves me blogging from my office today, where even if I turned out the lights, would be rather bright because of the big window. And, there may be interruptions; even though I have no office hours right now, other TAs with whom I share the office may be in and out, and students may be by. But, in the meantime… Friday the 13th Part VII – The New Blood . As the movie gets going—with a nice narrative setup—an interesting flashback is necessary. I found today some old reviews by Siskel and Ebert of Friday the 13th Part 2 and the origina...