the groundhog day project

I was talking with Lane—she’s on the CSULA speech team—tonight, and I mentioned that tonight was my last night of Planes, Trains & Automobiles and I had nothing planned to write about. Her response: that I should write about how John Candy—and I hope I get the phrasing right—was fucking amazing. The problem, as I explained to her, is that she just covered that topic in one sentence. It seems wrong to write an entire entry about John Candy, but none about Steve Martin. Candy, and Candy’s characters, are a little nicer, though. In his New York Times obituary, 5 March 1994, Glenn Collins writes: “Mr. Candy was frequently cast as a sympathetic, stumbling, ordinary guy, and often played the slob.” His characters Freddie in Splash (on one of my family’s videotapes when I was a kid, along with Footloose and Romancing the Stone ) has one of my favorite lines in that movie (which might not make any sense out of context): Telephone. He was on the phone in ‘Nam when the grenade went off...

I think the reason the blog entries have been short this week goes beyond me being kinda busy. I mean, yeah, grad school stuff has gotten to a particular busy point, and I’ve got two classes I’m teaching now in addition to coaching forensics and all the work that goes with that, but I’m not complaining. The thing is, while I enjoy this movie, I don’t think I’ve really connected with it so far. So, it’s hard to get to my usual ramblings at least, if not something particularly meaningful. And, without some good scholarly (or even not-so-scholarly) articles to source on this one, there just hasn’t been a lot to respond to. I mean, maybe I could get an entire blog entry out of my decision to assume (despite his name being John here and not Tom) that Lyman Ward’s character at the beginning of this film was Ferris Bueller’s father, and that Kevin Bacon’s character (if you can even call him a character) chasing down that cab is Ren MacCormack from Footloose and Edie McClurg’s ticket agent ...