the groundhog day project

Groundhog Day is on and I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about how watching this movie in Florida adds one more state to the list of where I've watched it (you can see that list here ). I don't want to talk about how it doesn't get old. I don't want to talk about how it is comforting to know something so well and to have it be there when I need it. I do want to talk about the message I got from Danny Rubin yesterday, but I'm not going to, because that's private. One of the critiques of autoethnography--an approach I'm using and quite readily defending in my master's thesis--is that you can never get consent from everybody involved in some story, some research, and while technically that just isn't true, certainly it might be hard to get consent for everything, from everyone, and some people may refuse. That doesn't mean you don't mean forward. That doesn't mean you leave out--and I'm just going to jump r...

(For the record, most of what follows was written prior to today. For my Monday-night class this quarter, we've been having to write drafts. I don't normally like writing drafts. That is why I like the blog format, I think—I just write and what comes out is what is, with only minimal changes as I go. Anyway, there has already been a 500-word assignment setting up the topic, and a 750-word draft that I put together as a sort of teaser, ended on a cliffhanger even. (I've also handwritten the last several lines (probably) of the final piece.) The final version is supposed to be 1200-1500 words. I have been taking word count as a challenge in this class, so I may aim for 1200 even. We'll see. [Note: I finished at 1320, then cut back to 1200, which was not easy.] As I write, because it is once again the 2nd of the month, Groundhog Day will be playing. This blog has been going for 31 months now. I have watched this film about 396 times in that span. That's from start t...

Another scene that I don’t know if they actually filmed it is the party scene: INT. PHIL’S ROOM - NIGHT There is a very wild party in progress. The revelers include everyone from college kids to bikers to farmers. Bruno the German Shepherd [who Phil called out by name while driving around in his new car just a couple pages earlier] runs into the scene, barking at the activity. Then Bruno runs over to Phil who’s just sitting on the sofa staring at the fake fire. He’s wearing a really loud sportshirt, a number of gold neck chains and rings on every finger. On his lap is a whole chocolate cake which he is absently eating with his fingers. A very trashy looking girl named ANGIE in too tight-jeans and halter top is coming on to him, practically licking his ears. (Ramis, 1992, March 5, p. 64) She’s graduated a little bit. In earlier drafts, she was present at a BIKER BAR first, and she was a slut named ANGIE and she was accompanied by another overweight, not very pretty MADONNA WANNA-...

Remember that time recently when I was talking about obsessing about things? You know, this entry . Well, I’m just getting to the big car chase in today’s viewing and I have yet to write anything because I was trying to finally solve a few location puzzles. Notably, I’m revisiting my attempts to find this location : Bob Hudgins said something about them filming the chase “between Country Club and 120” over in McHenry. Unfortunately, that area is a lot of residential blocks which even if I’ve found the location, would not look at all the same. So, I look for that “pillar” on the left side of the road in that photo. I have not found it… yet. An easier location was this one: The quarry was a specific location—Nimtx Quarry—in Love’s Park, so there were not a lot of streets to work with. Work backward and shrink the images… …and you’ll notice the hill next to the road. Since 1992 when this was, filmed, imagine they have reshaped and repaved the road, removed all the trees and now...

Before Phil's first line, Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) pops up from the bottom of the screen to tell us that in France, Groundhog Day was called Day Without End and in Brazil, it was called Black Hole of Love . Then he does an awkward Ned dance and disappears. This is how the "Needle Nose Ned Picture-in-Picture Track" bonus feature gets going. That's right, I'm on the blu-ray again finally after my previous blu-ray copy got laser-burned. (I actually sampled the beginning of this commentary once just to see what it was, but I have neglected to get back to it until now.) That first pop-up was torso only. Ned pops up full bodied for his next bit of info, pointing out the hilltop road that was the only bit in the film shot near the actual Punxsutawney. I hope this track is not just rehashing stuff from Ramis' commentary track. The next one is torso again, just before the transition to Day One. Ned asks a trivia question, an easy one--the name of the TV s...

If we took Benesh (2011) at face value, then we would have to assume every film in which characters have hands is somehow using those hands to mean something. I don't even think Benesh is all wrong in some of the symbolism she describes in Groundhog Day but she chooses such simplistic things--hands, snow--that the choices are more banal than meaningful. If there were closeups of hands--to be fair, there are one or two--or characters talked about hands or their hands were particularly meaningful in context of the story... except Benesh doesn't want us looking to the narrative; she advises (by way of Izod (2000) citing Hillman (1983 presumably) that we "focus on an image-oriented reading versus one that rushes, as it typical, to narrative conclusions" (p. 63). But, the problem here is when looking at images pushes us not just past the narrative but into an entirely different universe from it. She wants to look at the film in terms of Jungian psychology and dream inter...

There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. All you have to do is get in touch with it. Stop thinking. Let things happen and be... the ball... Find your center. Hear nothing. Feel nothing. That's Chevy Chase as Ty Webb in Caddyshack . I get the impression from quotations in articles or interview clips that Harold Ramis was a bit zen like Webb. He didn't "want to be the Buddha," though, he told Perry Garfinkel of Shambhala Sun . "I just want to admire him." Brett Martin, writing for GQ in 2009, calls Ramis a "sympathetic, though nonpracticing, Buddhist." With that one character in Caddyshack , with his own understated performance as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters , and most obviously with the entirety of his cinematic masterpiece Groundhog Day , Ramis infused his films with a relaxed sort of zaniness that makes them hold up quite well long after the fact of their releases. Despite his success, he didn't particularly buy in...

I must admit I had nothing to write about today. So, I asked my daughter Saer to ask me a question about Groundhog Day and I would spend today's blog answering it. She asked what Phil Connor's favorite color is. But, an aside first: I kept busy most of the day, including cutting apart the deleted scenes from Groundhog Day for later use, skipping through Planes, Trains & Automobiles and all three of the Nolan Batman movies (because Bob Hudgins mentioned that the Amstutz Expressway in Waukegan, Illinois--which is where Phil talks to the trooper in the snow--was used in one of those... (I swear he implied it was the latest one, but it was in Batman Begins (and I started with the latest and worked backward) that I found the brief moment in which Batman drives the Tumbler on that highway.) Since I found it and all, here you can see the shape of the overpass (where the Amstutz deadends): Which is the same shape (but I'm fairly sure not the same bridge) as the one ...

I feel like I could keep writing about my weekend in Woodstock for days and weeks on end… but I’m not going to. Seriously though, I could give a narrative account of trekking through the snow to get a few photos of locations that wouldn’t be on the walking tour. Or, I could invent a more interesting end to my interactions with a local unemployed man who reminded me of O’Reilly, or the random woman standing on a street corner a block off the square who I imagined might be my Nancy Taylor if the day repeated. Or, I could just share the last batch of photos and get on to other topics. Hell, I’ve got more of Benesh’s dissertation to pick apart, actors to profile. And, I’ve got more graduate papers to tie into Groundhog Day and I’d surely share them here… Anyway, photos… First, this photo, taken today. That’s the current setup for my Groundhog Day stuff… though I just noticed my signed copy of the screenplay isn’t there. Gotta fix that… Had to make a judgment call between display...