the groundhog day project

I saw A Wrinkle in Time today and it occurred to me while watching it that I don't remember ever being disappointed by a movie when I was a kid. Not that I didn't see bad movies back then. Just, I guess, I didn't care or didn't notice. The magic of whatever story it happened to be up there on the big screen (or later on the small screen as we rented a lot of movies on VHS) was bigger than my sense of narrative, maybe. Bigger than my need for great performances. An entertaining script was more important than a good script. Fantastic details or plot twists and turns could make up for faults in the production. When I run out of these on repeat childhood films I'm writing about through phase 4 of this blog, maybe I will hunt down movies I saw way back when that look, now, like they probably weren't any good. I'm looking at the top box office for 1984 right now and really only noticing one that might qualify: Ice Pirates . It's a good year for movies, a...

Guillermo del Toro has a couple modes when it comes to horror films; there are those that prove he is enamored of old gothic horror and those that break the mold and do something a little more original. The former tends to be more predictable, the latter more interesting. Crimson Peak falls squarely into the former camp. Because it is del Toro, though, it is certainly well made, and looks far better than most horror films. It has a solid cast—Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam—and a sound design that is, at its best, an evocative score that brings to mind some of the greatest horror and, at its worst, seems trite and clichéd, bringing to mind the most stereotypical of horror. The plot hinges on common tropes from gothic romance and gothic horror, an isolated house on the English moors—one so old that it is quite literally falling apart—an enigmatic nobleman, an impressionable young woman, ghosts that—MINOR SPOILER—barely affect the plot at all but sugges...

Groundhog Day wasn’t the first exploration of the day-on-repeat phenomena, or its technical term per Star Trek : a temporal causality loop. Though, we shouldn’t confuse this with the causality loop of a “predestination paradox.” And, now that we’ve lost the non sci-fi fans, let’s discuss these loops as represented in a handful of relatively recent (one of these actually predates the release of, though not the writing of, Groundhog Day ) television shows. And, they are all genre shows. And, I watched all seven of these yesterday, declaring on Twitter that it was time loop day. Just to get the list out of the way (and there are more episodes like this left from other shows (and movies) so I may have to do this again sometime ), the seven episodes are: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - “Life Serial” Angel - “Time Bomb” Stargate SG-1 - “Window of Opportunity” Star Trek: The Next Generation - “Cause and Effect” The X-Files - “Monday” Supernatural - “Mystery Spot” Fringe - “White Tulip...