the groundhog day project

I tend to like weird little movies. A couple of my favorites from last year were The Lobster and Swiss Army Man . A couple of my favorites from this year now would be Brigsby Bear and Dave Made a Maze . I'm gonna watch both of those again tonight because... Well, because I can. The year is coming to an end. It's Oscar season, the Golden Globes are just over a week away, and it's time to start putting it all together, some perspective on 2017 in movies—putting off the perspective of my childhood in movies for a few days from now (but I will get back to that)—and make some recommendations perhaps... First, there's this—when Dave Made a Maze art director Jeff White was asked by Tessa Morrison at Other Worlds , "Knowing everything you learned from this, what would you travel back in time and tell yourself on Day One of fabrication [of the cardboard sets]?": I'm not sure that there was anything I could tell myself at that point that I would have believed. ...

On the other hand , popular culture is a dangerous distraction. This week, they almost elected a racist pedophile to the senate in Alabama. Today, the FCC voted to get rid of net neutrality. Trump's still president... And, regardless of which side you're on in any of those things, it is easy to get distracted binge watching the latest Netflix series, watching the latest movie, updating your social media accounts. Our lives are not as streamlined as James' life is in that underground desert bunker, with just one tv show to watch, just a handful (literally, he names them later and you could count them on one hand) of friends online, and his parents. We've got larger families, more friends, jobs, school, obligations, a larger world to worry about. Bigger politics than a trio of people and one fantasy tv series--the politics of which he cannot control (except inasmuch as his interest might influence the way his father writes the show, but he doesn't know that, so it...