the groundhog day project

In her review of Sing Street , Sheila O'Malley points out, "There are pitfalls everywhere in a coming-of-age period piece like this one." She argues that director John "Carney avoids them easily, keeping the film on its proper track" And, she explains how this works: "It's extremely confident: It knows what it wants to be, what story it wants to tell." And--coming back to the advice of the the other day--that's what a person needs to be, too. Gotta be confident. Gotta know what you want to be. Gotta know what story you want to tell, the story being you and how you present that self to the world. Easy to fake on the Internet. (I wrote a whole master's thesis about it.) Harder to fake in the real world. And, I mean real confidence, not the pathetic arrogance and ego-centrism that pretends to confidence online or, lately, in politics. Party lines draw people into corners where they're quicker to defend their positions out of the illusio...

For a Christmas movie, Gremlins starts with some seriously shady goings on. With the voiceover from the Rand Peltzer (Hoyt Axton)--which I had totally forgotten was a thing--it's like some film noir detective story, except with a whole lot of red thrown into the color scheme. Then he pulls out his "bathroom buddy" invention and things get silly. Then the Mogwai shows up, with some adorable singing, and we drift into some white privilege territory with Rand thinking he can just automatically buy anything he wants to buy just... because. Kidding. I mean, yeah, I'm totally right about that, and it may mean that the entire Gremlins incident may just be a warning about what happens when we do not check our privilege. But, I was specifically looking to not get into politics or social commentary today... Which, when I think about it now, is pretty stupid. As I have argued many times about movies in this blog, every movie can tell us a lot about the time and place where...

Groundhog Day is not a romantic comedy. And, it’s not just me who thinks so. Dowd and Pallotta (2000)—you know, my go to academic quality romantic comedy source—specifically excluded it from their coding. They explain: Our principle genre-relevant rule is that romance must be central to the story depicted in the film and not a secondary aspect... If the film is a mixed-genre effort—and adventure story, for example, in which two of the characters become romantically attached, such as was the case with Romancing the Stone [—I must interrupt this extended quotation to say that I love the movie Romancing the Stone and actually have it on the potential list of movies to watch for this blog at some point. Perhaps an adventure month, do a little Romancing the Stone , some Raiders of the Lost Ark and some... ah, there’s the rub. There aren’t a lot of adventure movies anymore. Maybe High Road to China , although I barely remember that from when I was a kid and maybe it doesn’t qualify....

Many people thought I would run out of things to say about Groundhog Day long before Day 365 (another 2 weeks away). This evening, as I sit down to watch the film and write something about or inspired by it, I have an inkling not that they are right, but that I had too much other stuff to do today. Work on my card game, work on my short film, a trip to the science center with my daughter. And, I didn’t even get to revising my paper to be published or prepping lesson plans for my speech class for the fall, or even going over a lesson plan for the speech practice this Wednesday. Made dinner, got Saer to Improv class, and now here I am… sitting… with nothing particular to say. I got out my Chekhov book so I would remember to read one of his plays. I’ve got 2 outings of a sort in the next couple weeks (before the Day 365 party) for this blog, but I cannot do either of those at 10:00 P.M. on a Friday. As for topics at hand, my folder of unused Groundhog Day -related articles has a handfu...

...Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. -- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis ...you can follow Phil's lead to achieve this transformation in your own life. Like Phil, we can all wake up and discover joy rather than boredom, hope rather than emptiness, and love rather than self-absorption. -- Paul Hannam, The Magic of Groundhog Day Sometimes I watch this movie and I ...

Today’s entry will contain very few words. I just wanted to compile the various YouTube videos I’ve put together for this project because, though I make them and have shared a few on Facebook , they rarely are useful here in the blog. In fact, I cannot remember having included any of them here. Note: These are not just clips from the film that I put on YouTube ; those I probably have used here when I made them. Like this one: The ones I mean to share are this one, which worked out quite well: And this one (which I’ve had to reedit twice now because for some reason the original version I put on YouTube repeated the first bit for no reason, and then when I reedited, apparently I uploaded the same version again and deleted the new one): And these two silly ones: And, I used this Doctor Who one . But, here is the latest: Today’s reason to repeat a day forever: to systematically edit bits of Groundhog Day into every other movie I can find. P.S. The Groundhog Day...

I don't like that Gregory Solman, writing for Film Comment in November 1993, calls O'Reilly a "wino." But, even more I don't like that Solman labels the old man pejoratively yet suggests that his death is undignified... as if a "wino" would have any other kind. Even worse, though, he says Phil "is doomed to witness daily" O'Reilly's death. The first two things were somewhat subjective, but that last one is not. Phil does not witness O'Reilly's death until the day he takes him to the hospital. On screen, that is only two nights before the end, which means Phil witnesses O'Reilly's death twice. Even if we assume (appropriately) that many days are not shown on screen, putting the old man's death this late in the presentation implies that it became a part of Phil's experience late in the loop. So, no, Phil is not "doomed to witness daily" the old man's death. He's not doomed to witness it at all, i...

I realized today I don't really experience the feeling in O'Reilly's death in the alley anymore. I know it's a sad moment and an important moment but to me it's become just another thing that happens in the movie. Just last night I was asked if the film was getting old yet. It isn't. I still recite lines along with it. I still notice new things now and then. But, I suppose that bit of feeling being gone means it's on its way to getting old. Maybe. In other news, an addendum to my recent Doctor Who -related entry: operating under the time lord version of things, Phil gets out of the time loop because of a specific good deed. Since, under that theory, Buster is The Master, and it's his hitting of the gavel at the start of the auction that ends the time loop, Phil doesn't get out of the time loop because he's a better person or because he's earned Rita's love but because he saved Buster's life. Every other day of the time loop, we can...

There's an interesting thing I realized in relation to yesterday's entry --for those of you who didn't read it, whose eyes glazed over when you tried to read it, or who just don't feel like clicking on that link to remember what it was, the entry included a theory that Groundhog Day is actually an extended episode of Doctor Who . The "interesting thing" is that, if we take Rita as the TARDIS and not a companion, then Phil trying to get inside her all those nights is not at all sexual... ...or the Doctor entering the TARDIS all the time is . Of course, despite some people's idea of just what Phil and Rita did before going outside on February 3rd, the movie doesn't ever actually tell us they consummated their relationship. So, maybe they didn't. Then, the relationship becomes a little Freudian or Oedipal... one of those, or both--I'll admit I haven't studied psychology enough to be sure. In his Transparency blog, Ken Sanes describes his ...

In their essay, “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture," Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis give us a slightly different take on Phil’s experience than Daughton’s (1996) notion that “Phil’s situation… parallels that of the economically disenfranchised, the Other”; Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis tell us “what comes under attack” in the film “is a particular manifestation of cyclical temporality that actually exists in capitalist societies.” One essay’s take on the “cyclical temporality” implicit in Ralph’s line, “That about sums it up for me” matches up with another’s take on Phil’s trap linking to him the disenfranchised, which arguably includes Ralph. That “arguably” of mine is a key point where many might disagree, though. Usually, we would only use “economically disenfranchised” to describe people living, say, below the poverty line, people without many options in their lives, people stuck… well, see, I’m already blurring the definition just enough to be sure I can include the likes of Ralph,...

This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down. The Tao Te Ching has an interesting take on water (not the answer to the riddle above, by the way). Water is compared to the highest good. The translation I own has this to say about water: The goodness of water is that it benefits the ten thousand creatures [taken as all living things]; yet itself does not scramble, but is content with the places that all men disdain. It is this that makes water so near to the Way. Water doesn’t try to stay on top. It gives in to gravity and, in doing so, is one of the most powerful things around, eroding mountains and forming great canyons. Not to necessarily personify things, but water is patient. Water has nothing but time on its hands. Phil Connors, similarly, has nothing but time on his hands. It becomes his only asset outside his mind. Sure he’s got that nice coat that Haro...

So, I think I’ve figured out what it is that gets the time loop going in Groundhog Day . But, first an aside: Last week’s Childrens Hospital episode “The C-Word” involved a running gag in which one of the characters, Owen Maestro played by Rob Heubel, thought he was stuck in a time loop. See, this season, the cast is working in a hospital on a military base in Japan and this guy’s morning started with the bugle playing reveille and a loudspeaker announcement of the time, and then his fellow doctor, Cat Black played by Lake Bell, comes in from working the night shift, which she calls “brutal.” So, Owen goes outside and sees another doctor, Blake Downs played by Rob Cordry, jogging right into some wet cement and then into a plate of glass two guys are carrying—old timey comic bits. The next morning, reveille again, the announcement, Dr. Black coming in from the brutal night shift, then Dr. Downs jogging, but this time Owen warns him about the wet cement. Then, as Owen wanders off, bel...

Have you seen The Prestige ? Some spoilers for that film follow, so, stop reading, go watch it because it is amazing, then come back here later. Seriously, I am about to spoil at least one and maybe two plotlines from that movie. Basic premise: a couple of magicians one-upping each other. But, between illusions and near-magical science via Nikola Tesla, things get complicated. Anyway, one of the magicians, Robert Angier, played by Hugh Jackman, gets Tesla to make him a teleporter… or so it seems. The thing is, the teleportation device is not really teleporting anything. Like Badger pointed out in a seemingly out-of-place conversation in this week’s 5.5 season premiere of Breaking Bad , arguably the teleporter in Star Trek is not actually transporting you; instead, it’s tearing you apart here and recreating you someplace else… i.e. it’s making a copy of you. This argument is supporting by, say, the creation of Thomas Riker. But, this isn’t about Star Trek . It’s not even supposed ...