the groundhog day project

Subtitle: notes on a draft, because these things don’t write themselves, part three. Scene 100, Page 75 - this deleted scene (which has very little content; I would rather see something like the room-destruction scene really, since it was apparently actually filmed): Kind of makes Phil seem like a stalker. I like the idea of Scene 102, in which Phil sees Nancy again and speaks to her. It’s like the brief bit in the costumed scene outside the movie theater in which he acknowledges her in the movie, but with a little more dialogue to it. “Hi,” Nancy,” Phil says. “Hi,” Nancy replies. “Do I know you?” The description here is interesting: “Phil can’t manage enough enthusiasm to pursue her yet again.” “No,” Phil says then, “I guess not. I thought you were someone else.” And, he keeps on moving to where Rita and Larry are waiting. In the banquet sequence at the end of the movie, we get to see Nancy again, and she even bids on Phil, but there’s no acknowledgement by Phil of there having...

Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times , 2 February 2013, opens with an interesting tidbit about Stephen Tobolowsky and Groundhog Day ; when he first read the script, he thought it "just another comedy, nothing special." He says it changed into "one of the greatest comedies ever created" as they were filming it. On the one hand, I do agree that it became that. But, I wonder when and where it became that. Tobolowsky told Macdonald that Ramis shot the scene in which Phil Connors "shaves his head into a mohawk, takes spray paint and paints graffiti all over the inside of his room, then he takes a chain saw and starts sawing the room in half." It was an expensive scene, and Ramis, after consideration, quickly cut it. He replaced it with a much quieter, simpler moment: [Connors], going to bed terrified, breaks a pencil in half and puts it on his radio. When he said, the audience gasped at that moment, "We expect a crazy Bill Murray movie... and [Ramis] repl...

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...

Just noticed and my mind is blown by: opening scene, Phil says he's "gonna go out on a limb" then at the end of the time loop, he saves a kid who has literally gone out on a limb... Ok, my mind wasn't really blown. But, hey, if there are more examples like that, I could certainly make an argument about the mirrored structure. In other news, a mistake--or just evidence that Phil is a fantastic performer: the news footage showing in the newsvan at the beginning of the date night sequence-- --is the same footage shown on Day 1. But, that's not what I want to talk about today. Today's business: Phil Connors may be a Christ-Figure , but that doesn't mean he's nothing else. I've spent plenty of time talking about other things Phil represents of course. Today, I wanted to get started down the road to the Bodhisattva , even though I've got a binder of articles on cinematic Christ-Figures and a paper I could be drafting about that very topic. ...