the groundhog day project

The opening shot of Life as a House is a digital trick (one done much cleaner elsewhere, but not too bad for 2001)--the camera cranes down toward the shack, then through the window into the interior, focusing briefly on the model house that will be built later, then onto George in bed. The visual metaphor is simple: 1. we are being allowed into this man's life in an intimate fashion, 2. George is already being equated to that house and the shack; and 3. that house is inside the shack just as the idea of it, and the potential for its building is inside George. Additionally--and linked to #1 there--the window frame works as a stand-in for the frame of the camera, the frame of the movie screen, the frame of the TV as we watch the story begin. (That this window will soon not exist does not negate the metaphor because by then we're invested or explicitly disinterested.) At the end of the film, George will also see the finished house (looking as small as that model) through the ...

I've got a couple questions: Who is worse off-- Toy Story Buzz who thinks he knows who he is (with "years of academy training" in his memory) or Toy Story 2 Woody who doesn't know who he used to be (with years of cowboy adventures behind him)? Who are these toys, really? Hell, they choose to be toys; the "rules" are apparently voluntary and can be broken. They choose to live in servitude of an owner--recall Woody saying, "It doesn't matter how much we're played with. What matters is that we're here for Andy when he needs us. That's what we're made for, right?" It's a strange existence, built to be "played with" by others but having full consciousness of it. When Toy Story was on earlier--right now, I've got Toy Story 2 playing--I was talking with my daughter about there maybe being some metaphor or allegory for the practice of slavery in the way these toys exist for the sake of others... the differenc...