the groundhog day project

On the first or second day of my public speaking classes, I talk to my students about a couple things that I was thinking about tonight. Eye contact and the differences (and similarities) between a speech and a conversation. Regarding eye contact, at some point, I tell them a couple things. Don't think of your speech like a speech. You don't have to talk to all 20 or 30 or 40 students at once. You can just talk to the one you're looking at at any given moment, for any particular sentence. It's just you and them, in that moment, with that idea. And, if you really need validation for something you're saying-- And maybe I recount the story of how at the state speech tournament my senior year in college, I had a particularly emotional dramatic interpretation piece and it made the climax so much easier for me to embrace the sadness of it if I had someone in the audience buying into that sadness as well. There was this girl Chelsea--competitor of mine I had only met tha...

(I'm writing a thesis because my memory is not always what it used to be. Throw some movies in there and they'll stick. But, throw a communication theory and I will absolutely be able to understand it and explain it back to you but later I will have to look up the specifics again. Tonight, I wanted to start with a reference to encoding and decoding in basic communication, and I wanted to reference whoever first used the terms in the way I mean them here, but my theory book is... Well, it's either on a shelf in my office or another grad student borrowed it. Probably the latter. Instead of the book, I google it and find it's totally someone obvious--for we communication scholars, anyway, maybe not for the rest of you--Stuart Hall. 1973, he wrote a piece calls "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" and apparently that's where people started using the terms as I'm about to mean them.) Backtrack to The Beatles and "Eleanor Rigby"-...

Instead, we get to Beginners from August: Osage County , the opposite direction of the original plan for this month. Things go backward sometimes. Plans fall apart. Marriages end. College plans get changed. A particular movie isn't available so a month has to be reconfigured so it will all still elicit the same poetry it was supposed to from the start. Poetry may be overselling it, but we'll get to that. (In the meantime, an aside: tomorrow is the Oscars, yesterday I saw the last of the nominees--Foreign Language Film nominee Embrace of the Serpent . This is only the second time I have managed every nominee. I've got a party of a sort tomorrow, but I don't even know how many people are coming. A speech tournament and a conference and a whole lot of sickness will be keeping people away. But, no big deal. Whoever comes comes, and we'll eat, drink, and be merry and I'm sure I'll tweet a whole lot (under my personal account, not the Groundhog Day Project o...

Despite some of the wiggle room I might have created (or tried to create) yesterday regarding Nathan's motives, I think we can safely assume that the character of Nathan is misogynist. The big problem in the film, in terms of the men, is how much worse than Caleb is Nathan, or how much better than Nathan is Caleb? I already wrote about how Caleb makes no effort to include Kyoko in his escape plans, how he simply tries to save the girl who is willing to put out. (So to speak; there is no actual indication toward the sexual between Caleb and Ava, except explicitly by Nathan. But, that information--that Ava is capable of sexual intercourse--is offered why? Because Nathan wants Caleb to fall for Ava. Modern sexist parlance requires that sex be on the table or Caleb will not care about Ava at all. And, Nathan clearly subscribes to such parlance.) Now, there are two paths we can take at this point with this discussion. 1) That Caleb has no (apparent) interest in also saving Kyoko,...

Shrek: For your information, there's a lot more to ogres than people think. Donkey: Example? Shrek: Example... uh... ogres are like onions! Donkey: They stink? Shrek: Yes... No! Donkey: Oh, they make you cry? Shrek: No! Donkey: Oh, you leave them out in the sun, they get all brown, start sprouting little white hairs... Shrek: No! Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers... You get it? We both have layers. Donkey: Oh, you both have layers . Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. Cake ! Everybody loves cake! Cakes have layers! Shrek: I don't care what everyone likes! Ogres are not like cakes. Donkey: You know what else everybody likes? Parfaits! Have you ever met a person, you say, "Let's get some parfait," they say, "Hell no, I don't like no parfait."? Parfaits are delicious! Shrek: No! You dense, irritating, miniature beast of burden! Ogres are like onions! End of story! Bye-bye! See ya later. Donkey: Parfait's gotta be the mo...

"It's one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly" - Edward Albee, The Zoo Story (Sounds a little like Phil Connors.) Cameron Frye, to make a journey that is entirely internal, has to spend the day out and about. He's got to make a phony phone call, eat some pancreas, see a Cubs game, spend time at a museum, steal a car and later wreck it. This day Ferris has built is like a failed acupressure exercise--each event corresponds to some portion of Cameron's mind, but ultimately, it comes down to a failure (the odometer) and his own somewhat deliberate property damage to pull him out of his funk. (As I mentioned in passing, yesterday , in the shooting script, Cameron does not kick the car in a fit of rage but does knock the car off the jack, and does the latter on purpose.) And, wouldn't it be nice if real life worked like that? If depression like Cameron...

(Not tonight, but in the next couple days (and entries) I will likely try to be a little more formal and less free-flowing, because I will be building a paper about Moulin Rouge! for my media theory class. Tonight, I want something more free... And this is my blog, and I get what I want. And, I don't say that last thing to be a smartass, but to make a point. This , the page you're reading this on as well as the blank white screen on which I am typing it, is my world. Not my entire world. But, it belongs to me. I create it. In the prospectus for my master's thesis (turned in today, yay), I argue in favor of--though I don't call it as much just yet--a constitutive theory of communication; that is, what we say creates the world around us. With this blog, I create a certain order for my life. And, that is a good thing. And, that is my thing. I could use a few new things in my life as well, plus some more time with the things I already have, i.e. my kids. But, right n...

John McClane is "a New York Cop." His label makes him who he is. It defines him. It keeps him from moving to California to be with his wife. His wife's label: "Gennaro, Holly." (also, Genn e ro, movie mistake.) Her label paints her as a single woman, available to do business with Nakatomi clients. It also invites--even though he actually knows better--Harry Ellis to hit on her. The reality of her being married is less important to her day-to-day life than the "reality" of who she presents herself as. Goffman's presentation of self or something similar that I've referenced before... Insert that here (as I noted yesterday , I'm away from my binders and working on two devices which limits on-the-spot research.). We are who we say we are, until our actions prove otherwise. Through Die Hard , McClane remains a New York cop. Holly, on the other hand changes, giving her name as McClane at the end of the movie... which is actually rather wro...

From Argyle trying to keep McClane talking--and, seriously, he sits in the front of the limo and expects to be able to stay quiet?--to McClane and Powell getting to know each other over the radio, Die Hard is full of people trying to communicate. Now, I'd love to go hard into some communication theory, but I just can't tonight. I'm in a hotel room in Utah with some speech team folks--had two very good tournament days--and don't have any of my binders here. Plus, watching the movie on the tablet, typing this on my phone, there isn't much room for research on the go. So, let's just work more casually. Ellis hits on Holly when he knows her husband is on the way and it's Christmas Eve and she's got kids at home. At the party, a guy comes up to McClane and kisses him, wishes him "Merry Christmas." Takagi knows who McClane is, though he hasn't met him before. Holly and John have an awkward not-quite-hug, not-quite-kiss thing when they fir...

I want to get into talking about Deborah Tannen’s Genderlect Styles , but it’s hard to map it onto The Mirror Has Two Faces . Gregory is hardly the stereotypical male that Tannen talks about, nor really is Rose the stereotypical female that Tannen talks about. Tannen’s male wants status—meaning he wants the score that comes from having bedded a woman. Gregory is far from that, wanting anything but the score. Tannen’s female wants connection, but Rose gets the connection and wants more... Arguably. The question is—and this may just be a reiteration of my attempt to define the successful relationship the other day —does a connection include or preclude sex? Personally, I think it’s inclusive, and The Mirror Has Two Faces seems to support that idea even if Gregory and Rose have still not consummated their relationship at the end of the film. When Harry Met Sally... comes to the same conclusion (including the sex) thought it approaches it from a more stereotypical direction; that i...

Doing some last minute studying with my fellow grad students earlier this evening, I put out a hypothetical—if the Comm Theory exam gave us a question in which we picked a theory and picked what we applied it to, I was going to apply Howard Giles’ communication accommodation theory to Groundhog Day and I would copy and paste my answer as my blog entry for today. But, that was not allowed to happen, and I didn’t even use that theory in any of my answers. However, that doesn’t mean I cannot write about it now. First, let’s backtrack a little. Last fall, for a different class, we had to read and evaluate someone else’s thesis. I ended up choosing The Effects of Nonverbal Synchrony on Perceived Trust: An Extension of Communication Accommodation Theory by Judith Ann Reiten (1993). She made some of the connections I might make below, between Giles’ theory and similarity attraction theory and neurolinguistic programming , particularly to measure trust through synchrony ( mirroring ...

Day 52 - if you only had one day to live --that's an entry I've brought up several times since I wrote it. It's the one with the jelly beans. It's definitive proof I write stuff as cheesy as some of the stuff in The Fault in Our Stars --which I saw recently. Edge of Tomorrow --or Groundhog Day with guns--the other movie I saw recently, has no real sentiment to it except for one scene... SPOILERS. Tom Cruise's Cage and Emily Blunt's Rita sit in a barn well past the frontlines. We (and she) think(s) this is the first time they have made it this far. But, Cage finds some coffee and knows that Rita takes it with three sugars. She (and we) figure(s) out he has already gone through this scene. He's stalling their getting into the helicopter they have just found because he knows that every time they have tried to take the helicopter Rita ends up dead. He doesn't want to see her die again. On the next resumption, he goes to meet Rita (for the first time), but...