the groundhog day project

Something I didn't know about Tremors was that the filmmakers made an effort to let the audience think a person was doing the killing early on. The graboid POV shots when Rhonda gets in her truck and Old Fred's death scene were added later when the studio decided to advertise the film specifically as a monster movie. In a way, if the studio hadn't jumped in, this could play like a slasher film almost. Except that most of the cast are adults, and most of them are quite capable. I also hadn't really noticed (and learned from IMDb trivia) that aside from two interiors--Walter's store and the Gummers' basement (and inside a couple pickups)--every scene takes place outside, which fits with our leads. They sleep outside, even though they clearly have a trailer; we see them exit it after the septic tank mishap, freshly showered and heading out of town. Whether monster movie or slasher film, or whatever other subgenre of horror you want to call it, this is a not...

I forgot to mention yesterday that I was writing from the plane. It was a very long travel day, a couple hundred miles by car, a couple thousand or so by plane. I had intended to look over the blog entry before I posted it but by the time I was home, I was far too tired. I can barely remember what I wrote, some rambling about Murray and his wife, Murray and Paul, Paul and his fiancee, Paul and the postmistress. I think I might have said that these men of Tickle Head wanting to bring the oil company to their town just to have a good paying job was a bad thing. Well, maybe I didn't say it, but I feel like I implied it. I do sort of side with the postmistress--her name is Kathleen, by the by. She rejects the idea of the factory coming to Tickle Head specifically because it's the oil company. Sure, it's a "petrochemical repurposing plant"--essentially a recycling plant, but just a PR thing the oil company is doing--but it's still "the oil company", sho...

Take a bit of Waking Ned Devine , some Doc Hollywood , a dash of Funny Farm , some themes left over from the likes of Brassed Off and The Full Monty and Billy Elliott (with those last two, I do not mean the dancing or the stripping) and you've got The Grand Seduction , an English-language remake of the French-Canadian Seducing Doctor Lewis . It's the simple story of a small town... village... "harbour" lying to an out-of-town doctor to convince him to settle there so an oil company factory will also settle there and the locals will all have jobs again. The film begins and ends with nice down-home narration about the importance of hard work--and the sex to be had at night when your tired, which, with at least one local woman, has amounted to a few too many kids. (Anyone who has seen the film might note a mistake there. Since the past seven years in town have been mostly everyone collecting welfare checks because their fishing industry dried up, that woman has not ...

Dr. Benjamin Stone (Michael J. Fox) is headed for Beverly Hills. Another doctor, one who will not be seen again in this movie, critiques his choices because cosmetic surgery is clean and no one dies... apparently medicine is only meaningful when it is a matter of life and death. Oh, watching Doc Hollywood before Groundhog Day today. If you haven’t seen it, think Cars minus the cars, and Lightning McQueen is a doctor instead of a professional racer. Apparently it’s based on a book—”What? Dead... Again?” Who knew? I’ve seen this move numerous times and would not have expected an actual source... not to imply that all book sources involve some clearly noticeable depth. Anyway, like Phil Connors getting stuck in Punxsutawney, Dr. Stone is about to get stuck in Grady after he gets off the main road to avoid traffic and ends up crashing his Porsche convertible into a fence. Problem is, the local judge built that fence, so Dr. Stone is sentenced to community service. Initially, only 1...

Subtitle: notes on the original (and I’ll still probably just harp on the voiceover today), because I didn’t finish doing it yesterday. So, I left off with the original version of the “god” scene, in which Phil ultimately tells Rita, “if tomorrow would ever come, you would fall in love with me.” In voiceover, he adds, “Even as I spoke the words, I knew they were true. And I knew that as sure as tomorrow never comes, Rita would forget them all over again.” Then, Phil gets on his god kick. Convinced he must be a god, he decides he has “to act more godly.” Faced with the unnamed guy he’s been punching every time he sees him (i.e. Ned), Phil tells us in voiceover: “One thing I know—a god wouldn’t use violence.” Apparently, he hasn’t read The Bible or the The Quran or, well, any religious text or ancient myth. That’s gods’ shtick—use violence… or trickery. Hell, by not hitting Ned, Phil has just proven he is not a god. Anyway, he explains (and sets up the Ned punchline): It had be...