In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a weatherman named Phil who sucks so thoroughly, he has to live the same day a thousand+ times in order to become remotely deserving of Andy McDowell.

Time loops are a wonderful SFF trope ripe for all sorts of narrative opportunities. Groundhog Day is probably the definitive example. Star Trek aired their take earlier (the episode “Cause and Effect” aired in 1992), but Groundhog Day has a slant both more spiritual and funnier.

It’s hard not to talk about Groundhog Day without also talking about my favorite movie, Palm Springs, which was a response to Groundhog Day and reuses/reconceives/expands upon almost every element. Most notably, Palm Springs puts both of the romantic couple inside of the time loop; Groundhog Day leaves the guy in the relationship looped while he’s desperately in love with the woman who remains outside the loop. The former feels more relevant to actually having a relationship with someone. The latter leaves Phil gamifying his meet-cute with Rita in ways that are terribly creepy.

In fact, the conceit of Groundhog Day – an awful cynic needs to loop through time in order to grow some humanity – demands that we spend a lot of time with someone thoroughly unlikable making unpleasant decisions. Sure, he grows out of manipulating women to get them in the sack. He grows out of pushing his way past Rita’s boundaries to try to hook up with her before time resets. But he doesn’t do it until we get a full montage of this asshole trying his best to violate her verbal and physical refusals, which makes me hate him no matter how he changes.

With infinite time, Phil becomes a master pianist, an expert in French poetry, and someone who actually commits to helping people. His desire to become kind springs from his love for Rita. He admires how she approaches the world with kindness, and he has to internalize it to get better. I can say this nodding along with myself, like, “Yeah, the whole thing is about someone so stubborn he needs intervention from God to stop sucking and fall in love for real,” and I still just don’t like the guy or want him to end up with Rita. Even once he’s a zen coolguy sculptor who changes tires.

The movie teaches Phil that he cannot save everyone, and that some people simply must die because it’s their time. But there is no lesson that he cannot have whoever he wants, whenever he wants. People are something he can learn to manipulate so effectively that he can get anything. He is still rewarded by winning Rita at the end. Despite being given loads of details and opportunities to refuse him, Rita still feels like a hollowly warm feminine character whose approval mostly serves as a metric of how well Phil is growing.

Did you know some of us learn to be kind through the normal course of life, despite having trouble, despite being abused, despite trauma? Why does the universe need to massively intercede with this one asshole anyway?

But I know that this is emotional metaphor, really. It’s about the seismic way that love can change you and make you hope to be better for the right person. Whatever.

As a Harold Ramis movie, this is a National Lampoon-style comedy where you just have to swallow the cynical shitty protagonists and their attitudes whole in order to enjoy the great elements of filmmaking. The crappy characters are always drawn with full humanity. They feel vividly real. You’d believe that any of these people lived around your corner back in the 90s. I wouldn’t want to know or befriend them, but…

I also love this screenplay, frankly. I love how little handholding it does on the subject matter. There isn’t ever an answer as to why the loop happens, and there is little dialogue or textual explanation of Phil’s growth. When something happens, the emotional impact on viewers is so profound that you know what Bill Murray’s thinking with That Look in the morning, and it’s all the narrative necessary.

The jokes are hilarious, when it wants to be funny; it’s incredibly moving when it wants to be sad. I never get tired of looking at a chunky lil groundhog either. They move through concepts at a proper clip. This was always very watchable for me as a kid, and my 13yo sat through it with joy. I just find all the comedies with National Lampoon adjacency to have a too-bleak edge, and it evokes memories of people I don’t like, but Groundhog Day remains a philosophical and romantic scientific classic. It’s a staple. I have fun watching it, especially with my family. I kinda hate it.

(image source: Columbia Pictures)

Scream is a slasher flick about a killer who taunts his victims over the phone (mostly about scary movies) before killing them. The final girl, Sidney, is still mourning the death of her mother the prior year; her life was disrupted by accusations, rumors, and reporters months before more killings began to strike. It’s a mix of genuine horror and intelligent satire of horror.

I only recently began watching slashers, since I have a friend who is a horror scholar and she loves slashers. I had to get this meta framing on what slashers *do* in order to appreciate the movies. I’ve only ever been into supernatural horror, really – The Shining, 13 Ghosts, The Others – and I didn’t understand the appeal in watching normal people try to kill each other. My impression was one of meaningless gore and screaming.

I’d argue that slasher horror is an experiential genre: the gore/screaming isn’t exactly *meaningless*, but most of what you get out of it is the excitement of a chase, and the social experience of watching it with friends. The meaning is punching your bro in the arm saying “omg omg omg” because it’s getting tense, throwing pillows at the screen when the heroine is stupid, and then being too scared to sleep with the lights on later.

But there is actually a lot more going on with slasher movies, and Scream isn’t keeping any secrets about it. Scream is like a magician doing a trick while also explaining exactly how it’s done. Scream is so good at doing the trick, you can know what it’s doing and you still get the full exciting experience.

The fact there’s a bigger cultural discussion about slasher movies “rules” and final girls in horror is thanks to Scream. Aside from the Ghostface Killer’s fascination with bringing up classic slasher cinema, like Halloween and Friday the 13th, we’ve also got a bunch of teenagers talking about horror movie tropes at a party near the end. This alone makes Scream an utterly seismic moment in pop culture: it didn’t *just* bring slashers back, and it isn’t *just* a good movie, but it consciously educated people on how movies should be done, creating whole generations of intelligent moviegoers like my lovely horror scholar friend.

Wes Craven directed Scream, and he’s responsible for a lot horror classics: Nightmare on Elm Street, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, etc. It’s hard to imagine another director taking Kevin Williamson’s screenplay and turning it into such a success. IMDB trivia tells me slashers were considered dead at this point, so Scream was a risky proposition in the first place, and other directors considered for the project wanted to take it more like comedy. Wes Craven said “no way” and jumped feet-first into making it exactly as scary and splattery and sincere as any other flick.

The comedy aspects arise on their own from extremely smart writing. When the movie teens watch Halloween at a party, they’re yelling “look behind you!” at Jamie Lee Curtis as the Ghostface Killer approaches from behind them. And then we have another layer because there is a reporter spying on them from outside, with her camera guy watching on a time delayed monitor, and the camera guy is yelling “look behind you!” because he sees the Ghostface Killer approaching the teens watching Halloween.

It’s these kinds of moments that function as both meta commentary and as compelling sources of fear. You know exactly what it’s doing, yet you’re still excited as hell, the way that a toddler gets really excited about Daddy saying “ooh I’m gonna get you” and swiping with clawed hands. The rules of the game have been laid out on the table. Now it’s just time for us to play.

Somehow the smart writing and sincere directing isn’t the only charm. The casting of Scream is a minor miracle of excellence. Apparently Matthew Lillard was cast sort of accidentally (he was accompanying a girlfriend on an audition when spotted) and his performance of a character with minimal backstory is an absolute riot. Skeet Ulrich is so cute and steamy, I’m betting most girls kinda didn’t care if he was a baddy. Watching Courtney Cox and David Arquette flirt with each other, knowing they were actually in love at the time, electrifies their entire subplot. I could give paragraphs to everyone: Neve Campbell, Drew Barrymore, Rose McGowan, even friggin Fonzie. There’s just so much charisma around every corner, the actors could have made a much worse script successful. Having a good script with this much charm in performance is almost TOO MUCH.

Although I remain more interested in the supernatural, being who I am, this launched itself straight onto my favorite horror movies list as soon as I watched it. It’s sheer competency porn with a love of genre that shines out of every frame. It’s amazing when a culture-shifting blockbuster is as smart as it is deliciously fun. Dare I say that Scream was the 90s horror version of Barbie? I dare.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a movie where future-America, seven hundred years from now, is a utopia thanks to the transcendent rock music of a band called Wyld Stallyns. Unfortunately, the members of the band were extremely stupid teenagers, and they will not get to form Wyld Stallyns if they don’t pass high school. George Carlin is sent back in time to give them a time-traveling phone booth so they can give a report that will please their teachers.

I rewatched this with my 13yo Eldest, whose favorite movie is Back to the Future. Their review was, “I knew it was going to be one of the movies of all time (sic) when Napoleon went down a waterslide.” Too true, offspring. Too true.

It’s probably good I watched this with my kiddo because I had to play it cool. Otherwise I would have spent the entire time *screaming* over how cute Keanu Reeves and Alex Winters were. It truly feels like these two young lads were just kind of tossed around a movie set so they could react to things with wide-eyed earnestness, dropping many a “whoaaa” and “far out!” The pairing of their clueless-stoner voices with their sometimes loquacious vocabulary is probably (sincerely) the basis for how I talk: extremely casually, like a total idiot, with multisyllabic words thrown in simply because I know them. It’s extremely adorable coming out of these babyfaces. (The jury is out on having it come from a middle aged mother.)

The titular characters speak half their lines simultaneously. It’s just so cute – these boys clearly only share a single brain cell between them, and that lonely braincell is overclocked. Charmingly, I’m not sure any of the historical figures they grabbed have extra brain cells to share. They are deeply underwritten in a way that feels totally unimportant. It’s just a total frivolous delight.

I actually didn’t realize this feels like a pretty straightforward kids’ movie until this watch. The realization came around the time we time travel to the Wild West and are treated to fart sounds in an outhouse. In order to keep the plot moving, everyone in all time periods are casual about the weird events unfolding, so characterization always plays second fiddle to concept, and the shallowness feels like part of its appeal.

The extremely “history lite” version of the world is wholly appropriate as a platform for merely introducing various historical figures. I didn’t realize, for instance, that my child (who is well-versed in Napoleonic history) had yet to hear of Joan of Arc, so having to look up an article to explain exactly what she did counts as homeschooling. But if you already have the 101 on historical figures, you can just enjoy the way the script puns about what each of them might do when unleashed in a 1988 California shopping mall.

Of course this movie still has to be weird and gross about someone’s mom. It’s not as incesty as BTTF, but Bill’s dad married a woman who’s only three years older than his own son, and her hotness/Bill’s attraction comes up repeatedly. This is also why I had to explain what an Oedipal complex is to my 13yo, and I’m not grateful to the 80s for that one. Homeschooling doesn’t need to cover all subject matter.

The time travel is given exactly the rigor it needs, which is to say, none at all. Where Back to the Future delights in the science fiction questions raised by time travel, Bill & Ted is just here to have simple fun. I’m not even offended when these two dumdums call each other fags for hugging. They call each other fags at the exact same time, doing the thing where they speak their lines together, and it’s the faggotiest thing I’ve ever seen. Of course these sweet babies are in denial. How could I even be offended. I wanna pinch em.

~

It was really interesting coming back to Bill & Ted on the same day that I watched The Breakfast Club. Both movies feel like they came out of the drug cultures of the 80s, but The Breakfast Club feels like the bitter memories of someone crashing off a coke high, whereas Bill & Ted feels like a grownup stoner imagining how much easier high school would have been if Sigmund Frood Dood could have given him therapy for his final grade. Yet it also touches on that authoritarian rift between parents and kids that we also saw in TBC.

Worth noting that Ted “Theodore” Logan’s rift with his father is central to his character, yet he remains a joyful weirdo who wants to play lightsabers with medieval swords while time traveling, a rescuer of princesses, and a supportive friend. If we want to read the creators’ narrative/tonal choices as a reflection of their values, then I might observe not everyone reacted to the ultra-authoritarianism with anger and violence: some embraced cheery absurdity instead.

It’s kinda thinking too much to even broach this subject with Bill & Ted. I mean, this is truly the movie of all time. Napoleon really does go down a waterslide (at a park called Waterloo, no less). They’re not aspiring for anywhere near the same level of humanity as John Hughes’s work. Tonally and stylistically, they’re completely different. But I think you can kinda get a sense of life of teens in the 80s in the places that the venn diagram of these movies overlap, which makes them a fascinating double feature.

(Image source: Orion Pictures Corporation)

The Breakfast Club is a legendary culture moment for Gen X about growing up. Five teenagers have detention at school on a Saturday, and the long, boring time in the library helps kids across cliques and caste realize they’re all fundamentally human.

I was born ‘88; this takes place in ‘84; this was not part of my personal canon growing up. I’ve seen it before though, just not in a while. These days I usually watch older movies and think, “Wow, everyone looks so young.” Everyone in The Breakfast Club somehow still looks exactly my mom’s age. I think it’s because this is such an anachronistic movie: beyond the music and fashion, the exact dynamic expressed between generations is distinct to Gen X.

I expected the story to be more timeless. If you boil it down to the core message — one where People Are People, and Growing Up Is Hard — that feels extremely timeless. Yet the way that the people interact feels distinct to its time.

We’ve spent decades growing away from the sort of social attitudes that made open mockery of weird, naive, earnest, or *anyone* culturally acceptable. Relentless bullying from Bender against his fellow students gets groans and eye-rolls, even when he pulls a switch blade–that’s how commonplace it seems. One kid is found with a gun in his locker and sent to detention instead of help. Violence is both explicit and verbal. Also, there is no communication between these children that is not hyper-aware of their position in society and prioritizes that before anything else, so accepting other people as human must be their primary development. They are still far away from a point where they might actually be able to build healthy relationships, and that’s so depressing.

Further, the dynamic between Gen X and their parents is distinct. Older gens were extremely traumatized by the depression and great wars; they passed a lot of authoritarian junk onto their children out of fear. There was such a rift in trust between many parents/kids, and this haunts our protagonists. Remember how we judged Helicopter Parents? That was a lot of Gen X trying to figure out how to *actually* bond with their kids, because their parents expected them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Millennials, meanwhile, have coined “gentle parenting” and get judged for being too nice. I suspect we’re going to see a swing back into more trauma-influenced parenting trends through the 21st century, but I’m not sure the teen/parent dynamic will ever quite look the way it did in 1980s.

Every character in The Breakfast Club feels vividly real–probably because they *are* so screwed up in such authentic ways. The personal-feeling nature of it — the fact I can only associate these characters/situations with people I actually know, who were not adults for me when I needed them — means I just feel uniformly bad encountering it. But that same very evocative personal nature is its charm for many fans.

I can’t add anything about the Claire/Bender dynamic that wasn’t better described by Molly Ringwald in a thoughtful article reflecting on her time working with John Hughes. I feel pragmatic about the toxic masculinity of this era of cinema. Even before seeing Ringwald remark that Hughes took rejection like Bender did, I sensed the story is obviously a very personal one to Hughes, and the fact he can harass the girl thusly and get at her by the end is obviously fantasy fulfillment for the creator. This is true of quite a few movies. If someone is narratively rewarded for bad behavior, it’s usually fantasy fulfillment for the creator.

Of course, one wants to sympathize with Bender/Hughes, especially if Bender’s story of abuse has any reflection from Hughes’s life. Men have learned throughout the generations that they can get sympathy despite bad behavior if they claim an abuse history. It’s human instinct to protect our fellow person. But loads of people are abused without turning into abusers, sexually assaulting girls, and pulling knives on classmates; likewise Hughes was more than grown enough to handle rejection without violent explosions.

I don’t think anyone likes seeing Allison’s transformation at the end of the movie, nor do I find her HFN with Andy satisfying or compelling. We’ve seen too many transformation from “ugly” girls to “actually pretty” (whether or not the movie meant to say that) to take it as anything but policing aesthetics of femininity. I mean, the two of them are still better than Claire and Bender. I am willing to accept these things as an expression of the theme, though: In order to accept that people are just people, these kids had to realize that they can do and be all the same things as their peers. They can date anyone, dress any way they like, and be who they want. That’s a good message, even if it gets bogged down by grossness.

After all, this movie is predominantly a fantasy for a successful white dude who wrote extremely offensive coked-out comedy (citation: Molly Ringwald’s article), and I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it to be anything else. It is what it is. It’s a microcosm of a generation that feels toxic as hell, but it was trying to heal. And when I take it from that direction, I can appreciate it, even if my urge to rewatch is going to be pretty low. All I can think is that the people who relate to this movie must have *really* needed it, and I’m comfortable setting it down as “not for me, not my time, but clearly a noteworthy part of cinema.”

We are all screwed up in our ways, and Hughes allowed those people to be visible, to be heroic, to be *cool*. His work is fascinating, problematic, and nuanced, and The Breakfast Club is one of the problematic but also more iconic examples.

(movie credit: Universal Pictures)

Joker was too political in its moment to be evaluated on its own merits. The PR around Joker’s release turned into an arm of Trump-era pre-pandemic culture war. Joker, both the movie and central figure, were claimed as icons of right-wing reactionaries. Being part of the left-leaning internet, I mostly saw analyses talking about how much incels loved it. It didn’t feel at the time like anyone was actually watching the movie.

But basically, if you wanted to be a libertarian neckbeard pissing off SJWs for the lols, you associated with Joker (often seen alongside memes like Pepe); if you were mostly trying to survive these guys, then you were following Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn redemption journey instead.

Now that we’re five years out from the mess of its Discourse, it’s easier to see that Joker is just a character piece akin to Taxi Driver wearing Batman clothes. Fleck’s journey is one of a man let down by society and his mother, the only two possible support systems he has, and gets real revengey about it. The revenge element, and knowing what power the Joker gains as a crime boss after the end of the movie, certainly makes this an appealing fantasy for a certain kind of person.

Does Joker intend to appeal to right-wing reactionaries? I don’t think so. Does Joker do anything to dissuade bad behavior from such reactionaries? Also no, but Joker’s bad behaviors and public shootings are not narratively approved. They are only *Joker* approved, and the movie can’t say anything Joker doesn’t think by virtue of its close POV.

This falls into the trap of any character piece about a villain: when you take a sympathetic and aesthetic look at bad guys, you give irl bad guys someone to misinterpret.

My biggest issue with the movie is that I personally don’t like incarnations of Batman’s Joker which give him a back story. I have never liked Red Hood. I wouldn’t even acknowledge The Killing Joke if Babs hadn’t spent so much time as Oracle thereafter. My preferred Jokers play into his role more like a chaos-entity, like the mischievous Coyote of Batman’s rogue’s gallery, emblematic of themes and serving as a mirror to Batman/Bruce Wayne’s character issues. Turning Joker into an actual person takes away the arcane magic of the Batman mythos.

I don’t mind this Joker backstory too much. It doesn’t feel like a real Batman-universe movie, really. It’s an adoring homage to cinema that appealed to a trend of comic book movie dominance in order to get funded.

Enormous narrative tension surrounds both literal and metaphoric loaded guns, which you know must fire, but not when or how or who will catch the bullet. The close POV with an unreliable narrator means having no clue which parts of the movie are real until you get the perspective of a conclusion. You can sense that Arthur’s making things up, but the seamless slip through his version of reality and actual reality makes it difficult to grasp the difference. Truth doesn’t seem all that important after a while.

The editing and score have a gorgeous confluence, evoking some of Nolan Batman’s rhythms and grit but without any of the action. The style is beautiful to look at, in a horror movie way; Gotham’s 80s NYC wear-and-tear has been rendered in stark shadows and shocks of virulent neon.

The performances are outstanding. If you’ve never understood when someone says “the actor disappears into this role,” Joaquin Phoenix manages to do it with Arthur Fleck here. His development of Arthur Fleck is really such great work, hand-in-hand with director and writers who take great care to show us that Joker is actually a really bad guy and his barely sufficient healthcare really was keeping him from turning into a monster. It’s a fun approach to the king of the Batman Rogue’s Gallery. Batman’s rogues are so traditionally representations of mental illness and trauma that they literally go to an asylum instead of jail when caught. But Joker’s really, really just a Very Bad Man.

I agree it’s easily read with bad motives, too. It felt more irresponsible to release a movie so easily appropriated by right-wing reactionaries in 2019 when Americans were suffering under a chaotic orange clown in the White House. But within itself, on its own rules, Joker doesn’t have to say anything about that — it just has a terrible sense of humor and legendarily bad timing for its political moment. Arthur Fleck couldn’t have done it worse himself.

~

What I personally find irresistible about Joker is how I relate to Arthur Fleck’s early movie struggle with his “mental illness.” I saw the movie not too long after my stay in a mental hospital. The healthcare system in my state was like participating in my own degradation for the betterment of my health. It meant spending a lot of time in very old buildings with peeling walls. It meant fighting side effects for medication that were sometimes worse than the illness itself.

My outcome was ultimately positive, but it felt bleak to trudge through. Fantasies constructed for self-preservation in such an environment can easily skew toward seeking a horrible catharsis. I don’t have the angry character of someone like Fleck, but I can *feel* it sometimes. The dangerous allure of leaning into the worst fantasies. This is a lot of the reason I also can’t resist Donnie Darko.

If the arc where Joker goes from being an infantilized fool into a serial killing kingpin mostly by stopping his medication doesn’t convince you to keep taking those meds, then maybe nothing will. (I’m kidding.) (Is it a joke? Would Arthur Fleck laugh?)

(image credit: Warner Bros)

“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” -Lizzy from Pride & Prejudice

“Somehow, I’m mad and horny.” -Noah from Fire Island

~

If I’m in a TV mood and need to itch my P&P urges, I watch the BBC version starring Jennifer Ehle.

If I’m in a movie mood and need to itch my P&P urges, I grab the 2005 one with Kiera Knightley–then fling the DVD straight out the window! Sorry, Tom from Succession, you’re a great Mr. Darcy but I just don’t dig the adaptation.

I’m watching Fire Island, baby!

What I love about Jane Austen books – surely what everyone through the ages has loved about Jane Austen books – is the timelessness of gossip, relationship fuss, class arrogance, and how amazing femmes are. It’s only right to transpose the courtship drama of Pride & Prejudice on a bunch of modern queens as they spend their summer vacation on Fire Island.

Rather than sisters, we have a bunch of bff gay guys who spend every year visiting their fag hag, who is like Mrs. Bennet with all the good parts and none of the bad parts. The sisters’ personalities are flawlessly transposed on each of the friends: a lovely sensitive older sister (Bowen Yang!!!!), the two completely inappropriate little sisters, and the brainy one who thinks you’re all fools for subjecting yourself to toxic beauty standards.

Everything works perfectly compressed into a week. The nation’s gays have converged on Fire Island, a real vacation destination favored by mostly East Coast homos, and everyone’s around for a good dance and snort and suck. By everyone, we mean anyone who can afford it. Fire Island is real fancy and our girls are…not as much. Lesbian Mrs. Bennet is about to lose her house on the island. This is their last summer together. It’s easy to project the precarity of the Bennet economic situation upon our gays teetering on the brink of rich enough for the ultimate gay vacay.

This is their last chance for a big blowout. So Noah and Howie (Lizzy and Jane) seek to get laid, of course. Noah has sworn he shall not hook up until they find someone for Howie. They trip into the companionship of an especially wealthy group of friends. That’s where we meet Jane’s Mr. Bingley (really adorable and clueless in this adaptation) and Lizzy’s Mr. Darcy (the hunkiest robot-man-lawyer who makes dorkiness look cool). Everything you think will happen, happens – this is a great adaptation. It’s just that this version is if Jane Austen took poppers and wrote her book at a sauna.

Look, I don’t know how to tell you that our culture *needed* Queer as Folk mashed up with Pride & Prejudice. But it did. It really did. This is a celebration of femme gays with the textured writing of Joel Kim Booster, who plays Noah, and obviously knows exactly what he’s talking about. The Mr. Wickham scandal is handled with an especially deft modern hand.

There’s a season for all movies. In much the way there are different horror movies for Halloween season versus Valentine’s Day, there are also different romcoms for Valentine’s Day versus summertime. Fire Island belongs on a list of summer rewatches. You can put it on any time you want to recall the smell of sunblock, lube, and salt water, or when you want to feel like you’re watching your gorgeous best friends get up to bitchy nonsense wearing virtually nothing, the way God intended it.