the groundhog day project

Tonight, another milestone was reached in the Groundhog Day Project --I killed one of my copies of the movie. My blu-ray copy has been "laser burned." It will no longer play. A moment of silence, please.               That is enough of that... except, with the DVD copy I can no longer see all the fissures in Phil's face. I can be alliterative, though, it seems. No biggie. I have certainly run that disk a lot of times. Now, to kill the DVD. Of course, starting next week, I'll be watching the copy on my iPad a lot while I am out of town. But, anyway, today is not a day to lament the loss of a blu-ray disk. Today is a day to come at Benesh's (2011) Becoming Punxsutawney Phil: Symbols and Metaphors of Transformation in Groundhog Day hard. I've got a deadline . I was just looking at the screen and... I miss my blu-ray. Whatever definition this is, it is a sad sad simulacrum of a much more enjoyable (read: clear and crisp) version of this film. S...

Just watched Meatballs . Tripper Harrison is like my idol. Jumping right from Meatballs to Groundhog Day is interesting because the latter is some 14 years later and the style of comedy, not to mention the levels of Bill Murray's performance, is so very different. And, I like that Murray's character in the former is almost seeking attachment as much as his character in the latter is trying to avoid it. Of course, his romantic approach is not too different between the two. He starts out overbearing and eventually calms down enough to earn some actual attention and affection. But we are not gathered here today to talk about Meatballs , even if it does star Bill Murray and was co-written by Harold Ramis. Dearly beloved, we gather here today to pay our, well, probably disrespects to Julie Ellen Benesh. I should probably be more polite; I mean, she only wrote the dissertation a few years ago and I should email her or something. We could team up on something. I should also call ...

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. ...

I've critiqued Julie Ellen Benesh's (2011) doctoral dissertation before, for example in these entries: day 164 - good, clean fun day 167 - look out for your shadow there, pal day 172 - sweet dreams Her dissertation, for new arrivals, is the only one I've found reference to online. The only dissertation relating to Groundhog Day that is. I figured there would be more (and Bob Hudgins said he thought there were) but I have yet to find evidence of as much. Anyway, her dissertation is called Becoming Punxsutawney Phil: Symbols and Metaphors of Transformation in Groundhog Day. Her abstract is simple enough: She tells us, The 1993 romantic fantasy film Groundhog Day is considered to be an exemplar of the depiction of personal transformation. This study uses hermeneutics and a specific [Izod's Jungian] method of dreams interpretation to amplify images as symbols of transformation. She watched the film only 8 times over the course of 2 months--for which I've alrea...