the groundhog day project

My impulse for today was to write about the so-called manic pixie dream girl . Madison in Splash is perhaps an early prototype for a such-labeled character. But, then I was looking up pieces about those stereotypical cinematic women who, according the the TV Tropes definition, exist to "come along and open [the] heart [of a "soulful, brooding male hero"] to the great, wondrous adventure of life" and I realized something interesting... And not entirely unbelievable given the patriarchy's ability to self-perpetuate: the term coined by Nathan Rabin at AV Club that implied a weakness in "the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors" turned into a way to put down female characters instead of their creators. As Zoe Kazan, who starred as an all too easily labeled manic pixie dream girl who quite literally sprung from the fevered imagination of a sensitive writer in Ruby Sparks (but that character actually came from Kazan's own imagination, a...

Drifting away from the horror film itself for the moment. Room 237 is on instead of a second day with The Shining because I think it's important to understand why we do this. Why I do this. Why you read this, for that matter. These movies--they're just movies. We don't really need all the subtext to enjoy them. I would never argue that there is no subtext; in fact, I think there is always subtext. For example, maybe it's about the Tang cans or the Golden Rey boxes over the Calumet cans. Picking one detail out of many says more about you (me) than it does about the film. Day 113 , I wrote: Why am I doing this? Because someone needed to. Because every piece of art deserves to be studied and broken down. Every piece of fiction deserves to be dissected until we know not just what it means but what it can mean. Chuck Klosterman, reviewing Room 237 for Grantland , says, "It introduces a new way to experience and consider movies." I'm trying to rememb...

The first bit I've got highlighted in Benesh's (2011) dissertation is, "such an iconic film can be seen as contemporary myth proposing an interpretation of the culture from which it originated" (p. 1). This is the kind of argument I will have use as justification in my own thesis as to why I am using this particular film, Groundhog Day as my case study. Fueling this mythic notion would be the addition of "Groundhog Day" to our lexicon for any situation mired in repetition and getting nowhere (some examples here ). The next highlight-- and I realize this might be too "systematic" an approach --is, "The film has been adopted by 'Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and followers of the oppressed Chinese Falun Gong movement,' as well as Platonists, Aristotelian(s), and 'countless professors use it to teach ethics and a host of philosophical approaches' (Goldberg, 2005, para. 3, cited in Benesh, 2011, p. ...