the groundhog day project

Opening narration: 53% of the American workforce is female. Three generations of women that turned 1,000 years of tradition on its ear. As little girls they were told to grow up and marry doctors and lawyers. Instead they grew up and became doctors and lawyers. They moved out of the "pink ghetto" and into the executive suite. Sociologists say the new working woman is a phenomenon of our time. Take JC Wiatt, for example. Graduated first in her class at Yale, got her MBA at Harvard. Has a corner office at the corner of 58th and Park. She works five to nine, makes six figures a year, and they call her the Tiger Lady. Married to her job, she lives with an investment banker married to his. They collect African art, co-own their co-op and have separate but equal IRA accounts. One would take it for granted that a woman like this has it all. One must never take anything for granted. Of course the narrator will not return; it's one of those openings. Plus, you know, the usual b...

Jericho "Action" Jackson is a Cowboy Cop (on TV Tropes ). Captain Armbruster is Da Chief . Except neither of them really are. See the thing is, however poorly Action Jackson is executed, it seems to be trying to be something more interesting than just another rulebreaking-cop movie. He's a loose cannon, but DAMMIT he's the best we have! That's the Cowboy Cop . Furthermore: Sure, our society may be built upon rules and procedures, but they usually make for bad television. Sometimes you have to bend the rules, rough up the suspects, moon your supervisors and shred the Constitution to get stuff done. Jackson very much used to be that. As the two officers in that too-long cold open play him up as a bogeyman for criminals: Kornblau: Yeah, some say he didn't even have a mother. That some researchers created him to be the first man to walk on the moon without a space suit.  Lack: Mm-hmm.  Kornblau: Others says his mother was molested by Bigfoot, and...

My impulse for today was to write about the so-called manic pixie dream girl . Madison in Splash is perhaps an early prototype for a such-labeled character. But, then I was looking up pieces about those stereotypical cinematic women who, according the the TV Tropes definition, exist to "come along and open [the] heart [of a "soulful, brooding male hero"] to the great, wondrous adventure of life" and I realized something interesting... And not entirely unbelievable given the patriarchy's ability to self-perpetuate: the term coined by Nathan Rabin at AV Club that implied a weakness in "the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors" turned into a way to put down female characters instead of their creators. As Zoe Kazan, who starred as an all too easily labeled manic pixie dream girl who quite literally sprung from the fevered imagination of a sensitive writer in Ruby Sparks (but that character actually came from Kazan's own imagination, a...

I wrote a bit about The Magnificent Seven a few days ago . Talking about character classes (a la Dungeons & Dragons ) and archetypes, how each character needs to have a different personality trait or skill that makes them distinct from the other characters. What The Encylopedia of Fantasy refers to as the "seven samurai" and TV Tropes calls "the magnificent seven samurai". A reminder: I'm watching the latest incarnation of The Magnificent Seven tonight, so the seven are: Denzel Washington as Sam Chisolm, the leader, a warrant officer Chris Pratt as Josh Faraday, a gambler Ethan Hawke as Goodnight Robicheaux, the veteran sharpshooter Vincent D'Onofrio as Jack Horne, the mountain man, who is also religious Byung-hun Lee as Billy Rocks, the knife thrower (and "a mysterious man of the Orient") Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Vasquez, an outlaw Martin Sensmeier as Red Harvest, a Comanche warrior Plus Haley Bennett as Emma Cullen, the woman who gets ...

Permit a sidetrack. Not that there's a clear throughline driving me this month. I wanted to revive this thing and I did, and I've mostly just been winging it. One day at a time. Life is good that way. Make plans, sure. But, it's each day that matters. Do the useful things, the productive things, but also find time for the fun things. Save Buster from choking and light a woman's cigarette... Not that I want to get into Groundhog Day references right now. King Arthur is today's film. And, what TV Tropes calls "Cast Calculus" (or more specifically, depending on how this goes, "The Five Man Band" or The Magnificent Seven Samurai"), and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy labels simply as "Seven Samurai." Specifically, because lately I think about way too much in terms of Dungeons and Dragons references (because D&D takes up far too much of my spare time), I noticed as I watched King Arthur last night that Arthur and his Knights p...

The internet always includes a bit of backlash to any film that people love. Whether it is deserved or not. Whether more voices speak positively or not. I am here, for the third day in a row to speak against some of that backlash. Like Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times , who describes Star Wars The Force Awakens as "depressingly unimaginative and dull in long stretches" then just a sentence later says, "This isn't to say that it's not an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours." That kind of contradictory bullshit pisses me off. Does The Force Awakens hit a few too many of the same plot beats as A New Hope ? Of course it does. But, here's the thing... Or my thing, anyway--I still watch A New Hope sometimes. Those plot beats are worth hitting because they're good. In fact, I'm thinking of watching The Hidden Fortress tomorrow to see those same plot beats even earlier than Star Wars . There are only so many plots available to wrap stor...

So, today is Labor Day, and the movie I watched at the theater featured in Groundhog Day (aside from Groundhog Day two mornings in a row) was Labor Day starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin, directed by Jason Reitman. It should have been better than it was, given its parts, but still, I scored it higher than a lot of people on IMDb . Oh, I’m also not watching Labor Day right now. Gotta watch Groundhog Day one more time to get through the final revision of the screenplay. Not too many pages to go. This should be ending today. Then, on to other movies tomorrow. Unless I get sidetracked. Or just want to make it an even seven days, to echo what I was doing with so many other movies last year. Or something really controversial comes up that demands a detailed analysis and an intricate study of Ramis’ themes, his writing tendencies, his Buddhism, or the complicated question of which of the flat tire ladies is which... ...which is actually going to be not that complicated, once the s...

Return to teachers. Get a little Roger Ebert in at the top for the transition back to the sort-of-ongoing theme... "Dangerous Minds" tells another one of those uplifting parables in which the dedicated teacher takes on a schoolroom full of rebellious malcontents, and wins them over with an unorthodox approach. Movies like this are inevitably "based on a real story." Maybe they tell you that because otherwise you'd think they were pure fantasy. He calls "this version" of the story "less than compelling." I mostly remember this movie in pieces. I worked at a movie theater in 1995 when it came out (20 years and 3 days ago). The movie opened #1 at the box office. If I remember right (and I probably do), our theater also had Something to Talk About (#4), The Net (#6), Casper (#13), Batman Forever , and Braveheart at the time. (Saw a lot of movies in the six months I worked there because in addition to being able to see our own theater'...

Episode 5 of Day Break : "What if they're stuck?" Today I will be watching several episodes of Day Break , so I will try not to just list details about the plot with a comment on the time loop stuff here and there. Instead, I hope to comment on the larger use of the time loop and the show's themes. For example, Hopper's got a To Do list this morning, and he tells Rita that for the first time in a while "I see some daylight." The metaphor is simple; the time loop is Hopper (or Phil) in the dark, with all its complications, but there's light at the end of the tunnel (to mix metaphors). Speaking of which, I haven't commented on the title of the show itself: Day Break . On the one hand, the time loop seems to begin and end around daybreak (one word). When Hopper headed out of town a couple episodes ago, as the sun rose over the horizon-- Ehrmentraut (at the rock quarry, where this time they have Hopper and Rita): "Do you believe in deja vu?...