the groundhog day project

If you've been reading this blog lately-- and you're still reading? --you know I'm maybe a few steps past your average bleeding heart liberal. I side with extremists. I appreciate a violent rebellion. It occurs to me as today's film in my "movie life" list-- having skipped both Summer School and Can't Buy Me Love because I have previously included them in this blog in different contexts. Also, I realized partway into writing what follows that somehow I put today's film a year early on my list, but oh well, it's already on --gets started, this might have been my first brush with the kind of 60s radicals that I would become much more enameled with in college (the second time). The movie, by the way, is Running on Empty . A couple of 60s radicals, responsible for a bombing in '71 that blinded a guy, live their lives on the run, moving and changing names every few months when the Feds get close. Thing is, they've got two kids. Th...

Let us stick with rebels , but (semi-)real ones, and we will take them seriously. The Company You Keep references the Weather Underground right away, uses some news footage-- (Though I'm pretty sure it gives people's names that were not actually part of the organization... and, I trust my impulse here. I've written four papers (one published) about (at least in part) Weatherman (aka the Weather Underground Organization), the most recent just this past spring and I've been meaning to look into getting that one published. Thing is, there a few things I know a lot about in recent years-- Groundhog Day and Weatherman are two of those things. Got a copy of the FBI file and everything. Anyway, my impulse on the name Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) proved correct when we jump forward in time and that's one of our main characters. So, fictional.) --lets us know that this is going to be about the past coming back to haunt the present. A common enough theme. Solarz is ar...

T.V. Carpio's Prudence is a lesbian, or at least attracted to women; let's not limit her simply because the film (perhaps, necessarily) does. I almost want to give her a specific label to counter the notion of Anne Thompson (2007) in Variety , who refers to "songs about confused sexuality, politics, war, race riots and psychedelia." I'll give you the last four, Thompson, but the movie never tells us that anyone in it is "confused" about her sexuality. Prudence quite directly points "I Want to Hold Your Hand" at a female cheerleader. And, Taymor makes this quite clear by letting the male football player stay in the frame just long enough that we in the audience might automatically assume he is the object of Prudence's affection then having him leave and the cheerleader look toward Prudence/us. That young woman is the object of Prudence's attraction. There is confusion but that arising in the audience from heteronormative impulses watch...