the groundhog day project

(Taking a break from talking about feminism, ironically, because I'm watching the very female-centric and female-populated Orphan Black right now rather than another movie for today. The movie I did see was--) It Comes at Night . The kind of movie that refuses to explain itself. And, oh how I love that. No voiceover for the sake of a stupid audience, just get into the action and you can try to figure out what's going on because the script is not going to explain most of what's going on because the characters don't know what's going on. Not big picture anyway. Which brings me right back to yesterday with The Mummy because that is yet another movie that offers up some random text (in this case a supposed Egyptian proverb) and narration. Now, I am not against the use of voiceover. But it has to serve a purpose, like in, say The Opposite of Sex , or a film you've probably heard of-- Memento , but that one actually offers up an onscreen excuse for the voiceover,...

20th Century Women offers up multiple narrators and the convergence of several stories. A mother. A son. Their tenants. His girlfriend (of a sort). The mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening) tells the story of the son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) and vice versa. Others tell their own stories, though not in the same kind of voiceover. (Mike Mills trivia note: the family name here, Fields, is the same as in Beginners .) Dorothea has a fairly open-door policy about the house. She invites a fireman over to her birthday dinner, for example, after he helps put out their car fire. The girlfriend, Julie (Elle Fanning) comes and goes as she pleases, even when Jamie is not home. Dorothea asks Julie and Abbie (Greta Gerwig) to help her raise Jamie as a good man. (Then, interestingly, she tells Jamie that she asked them.) Though it's a common theme, it's done especially well--these people form a family even though they are not all related. Jamie tries to spread his wings with friends, but k...

Thumbsucker does not have the voiceover (and accompanying cutaways) that make Mills' Beginners and 20th Century Women what they are. That necessarily makes the film a little less charming. (I wonder if the original script had that stuff, and Mills didn't have the clout to get away with it yet.) It's good, but it's not as... Yeah, charming was probably the right word. Or maybe the problem is that focusing so much on the teen here means there isn't the more experienced perspective of Beginners or 20th Century Women . Or maybe I just don't buy Keanu Reeves as a dentist.           There is a sort of cutaway, but played more like slightly odd establishing shots. Closeups on name tags, for example. And, maybe it's not fair to judge this film for its focus on the teen. The point of this film seems to be that the adults are just as unsure of things, just as undeveloped, just as incomplete as Justin is. His mother wants to win a date with an actor. H...

I can forgive the voiceover initially in The Soloist because  the real-life Steve Lopez not only writes a column for the Los Angeles Times but also has done several narrative stories on TV as well, which involved him reading a lot of what would be a column out loud. Now, if it doesn't continue throughout the film, The Soloist and I may have some words like Horrible Bosses and I did yesterday . (I wish my head were clearer tonight. Came home rather sick after seeing a couple Oscar-nominated Foreign Language Films-- Theeb and A War . Watched the BAFTAs a little feverish, going to have to double checked what movies won things tomorrow.) I have seen The Soloist . Once. In 2009. I remember dismissing it a bit the way I would dismiss The Blind Side later in the year. White savior for a black man in trouble. (To be fair, technically, Steve Lopez is not white, but Robert Downey, Jr. certainly is.) Having read the book recently and having spent a few hours with Steve Lopez every Mo...

Sometimes, I just can't mince words. The Big Short made me angry. Not because it was a bad film. Far from it, in fact. The ensemble is great, Steve Carell giving the best performance probably, Christian Bale a close second (though Brad Pitt has the best moment in the film). The film makes use of clever voiceover--take note, Danny Rubin --and deliberately bazaar (and out of context) celebrity cameos to explain confusing investment terminology. And, it does a great job of mixing some documentary-style montages to offer up context as to the timeline of events. It tells the story of Inside Job in a simpler fashion, and expands Margin Call 's story into a larger setting. If you don't know either of those films, the former is a documentary, the latter a scripted film, and both are about the financial crisis of 2008. The Big Short begins a few years earlier, when Michael Burry (Bale) basically creates the "credit default swap" and banks let him buy a whole lot of them...

We need to be clear which emotions are harmful and which are helpful; then cultivate those that are conducive to peace of mind. Often, due to a lack of knowledge, we accept anger and hatred as natural parts of our minds. This is an example of ignorance being the source of our problems. To reduce our destructive emotions we strengthen the positive ones; such emotional hygiene can contribute to a healthier society. That’s the Dalai Lama, on Facebook this morning. Just this afternoon, I was reading about Socrates’ “rationalistic moral philosophy”—that is, the idea that, as T.Z. Lavine describes it in From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest , “reason, or rationality, is the exclusive or the dominant factor in moral conduct.” In other words, “to know the good is to do the good.” While I have some issues with this idea—and will probably bring them up in class tonight, I mention this reading and the Dalai Lama post because together they put my head onto a more serious bent than I ha...

How I Met Your Mother just began its final season this week. While some have complained about the implication that the show will once again revisit Ted and Robin and their potential as a couple, even as the entire season takes place during the weekend of her wedding to Barney, Donna Bowman at A.V. Club , has a great take on not only why it makes sense for the show to return to this before the end but also how this fits with storytelling in general: This show started with Ted and Robin. It’s not going to reach its titular moment, much less its final season endgame, without returning to Ted and Robin. Not only do I not mind this fact, but I’m happy to see it. Ted’s search for true love has become especially poignant this year. Robin’s engagement and impending marriage have raised for him an unavoidable question: Was she here all along? … This story, like all good stories, isn’t about getting to the ending. Good stories are about the hero becoming the person that the ending can happen t...

Subtitle: one lingering detail that wasn’t all in voiceover. Just after Phil was “learning how to listen” in Rubin’s original, there’s a scene at a Basketball Court. Phil plays one-on-one with “some TEENAGER.” In the direction, “Phil steals the ball and does a good lay-up. The Teenager calls it a “[p]retty good move for an old guy.” Phil says he practices a lot. (Six months, four to five hours a day, and you’d be an expert.) So, the Teenager says he’s going to practice a lot, too. And, Phil asks him, “Aren’t you supposed to be in classes now?” (Nevermind that in Punxsutawney, they probably get the day off school… despite the frog prince scene as well.) The Teenager responds: “You wanna be my daddy or you wanna play b-ball?” (There’s already some things going on on Groundhog Day regarding parenting and parental roles, but they’re worthy of a separate entry.) Then, it’s the Teenager’s turn to do some exposition, while dribbling: Everybody worrying about my future. I say, “He...

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...

Subtitle: notes on the original (and mostly I’ll probably just harp on the voiceover), because I never really did that yet. I can’t tell you when it began, other than to say “on groundhog day.” And I can’t tell you why it happened to me, other than to say I deserved a break in my career, and this was certainly it. So begins Phil’s forgotten voiceover. The time loop is already in effect, he’s already been mouthing the DJ dialogue and answering Mrs. Lancaster’s questions before she’s quite asked them. And, here you also see a bit of how Phil was different in the original, i.e. before they cast Bill Murray; Phil was young. While that “break in my career” becomes a break from his career in the time loop, what Phil is getting at is this is his first time in the field, not Rita’s. Though Rita is “about Phil’s age,” she’s a much more seasoned producer than he is a reporter in this version. The voiceover continues: How do I know these things before they happen? You may call it cheating,...