the groundhog day project

Roger Ebert ends his review of Joe Versus the Volcano with a great bit: What's strongest about the movie is that it does possess a philosophy, an idea about life. The idea is the same contained in "Moonstruck": that at night, in those corners of our minds we deny by day, magical things can happen in the moon shadows. And if they can't, a) they should, and b) we should always in any event act as if they can. First a note: Roger references Moonstruck because John Patrick Shanley wrote both and directed Joe Versus the Volcano . Second, though, I love especially that last line. That we should always act as if magical things can happen is one of those ideas that so many movies put forth--from the eternal recurrence of Groundhog Day to the hyperrealism of American Psycho , from the time travel of About Time to the deliberate fantasy of Moulin Rouge . And, yes, Moonstruck . Joe Versus the Volcano takes place in a reality where miracles can happen, where desk lamps ...

Author's Note: Color me a hypocrite, but I don't follow much, if any, of the advice I am about to give. Here's the present: I'm sitting on a pew in a church building someplace in Long Beach, California. My daughter's got rehearsal for a play and we're far enough from home that I just hang out during, work on my blog, watch some tv, read, whatever. Only my third time tonight, so I couldn't say there's a pattern but for writing this blog. I've already seen two movies today-- Wish Upon and War for the Planet of the Apes --but I don't feel like writing about either of those. I'm stuck in a different mode. Stuck in a loop. I was listening to the soundtrack to the Groundhog Day musical on the drive here. Between Phil's being stuck in a pattern he needs to get out of, but not for the reason he thinks; Rita being stuck on imaginary knights in shining armor from childhood fairy tales, but knowing that's unrealistic and not worth waiting f...

I was writing today about the choices we make as bloggers. Or, as people on the internet more generally. Papacharissi (2009) Calls it an "information game." But for the moment I cannot talk about that. I've been stuck on High Fidelity because I find a bit too much of myself in Rob Gordon (John Cusack). Tonight, I'm checking out the deleted scenes before I get into the film proper, and I just watched one that surprised me because who else plays Rob's father but Harold Ramis. And, I'm done. I mean, to loop back around like that. Andie MacDowell's real first name is Rosalie (my mother's name) and now Harold Ramis is playing the father of a guy named Rob (my name, you inattentive passerby). Everything loops back to Groundhog Day , eventually. Every movie is every other movie. I intended to talk about white male privilege today, I want to talk about punctum, but here I am talking about links back to Groundhog Day because every blog entry is the same, e...

After two new movies today-- The Gift and Southpaw --my IMDb seen it list has 4144 titles in it. And, I'm convinced there are still a whole lot of obscure movies I've seen over the years that I've neglected to add to that list. Walking home from the movie theater today, I wondered at what point I will have seen enough movies. Like there's a hole in me that I keep filling with them and at some point it will runneth over. I suppose my "edition" of each of these films (and, to be fair, a few TV series have found their way onto that list, I'm pretty sure) doesn't really take up much space. Not physical space anyway. Backtrack a moment to that "edition" line and flashback to, for example, Day 173 - who dreams of you at night , for a bit from Benesh (2011)--if you are new to this blog, Benesh wrote her doctoral dissertation on Groundhog Day and, over the course of a whole lot of days worth of blog entries, I systematically deconstructed, deba...

I spent 365 days (plus today is the 10th follow-up viewing) explaining and exploring why I chose (or, in retrospect, needed to choose) Groundhog Day for this blog. (And, I didn’t set up a recap for the past month—and those entries take more time than a single viewing—so I will recap two months next month... maybe.) If you want a good idea of what that was all about, start with Day 365 - so this will be the last time we do the groundhog together and work backward. There are some good highlights in that entry alone, with some links to past entries. Or, if you want to be able to see all of the topics ever covered, start with Day 363 - and you’d be an expert and work backward from there instead. Yesterday I argued that my discussion of films in this blog serves as a deliberate counterpart to discussion of life. I also do it because it’s fun. Officially, I’m going into my upcoming (starting in the next week or two) reread of all of my entries without a specific goal in mind. I’...

A couple mishaps but we just rolled with it. That’s the short description for the Day 365 party. The waffles didn’t work out, pretty much because I hadn’t used my waffle maker in a while and forgot about getting the surface oiled just right (and I probably needed to compensate for the blueberries added to the recipe with some dry ingredients). And the projector, which I had tested out twice at home—even watched Groundhog Day projected big on the living room wall last week—decided not to work when darkness fell and it came time to watch the movie. But, we crowded into my sister’s living room instead and watched the movie on DVD—the easiest way to roll with the punches is to be prepared with a DVD copy in your bag… (Well, that may not apply to all punches.) Anyway, showed off my LEGO Gobbler’s Knob, ate some good food, flapjacks made by my daughter Hayley, sticky buns, white chocolate cheesecake, fudge, and chocolate pie with almonds and marshmallow topping (thus being a Rocky Road p...

I saw About Time again today, and I was reading over my entry here about that film, and I noticed an error. POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD… Taking the protagonist’s do-each-day-twice methodology and twisting it together with Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, I suggested the following: 1) live each day as if it were the specific day you had time traveled to, as if it's the most important day you have and 2) do with that day only things you would be willing to do again and again and again. I'm certainly not suggesting that eternal recurrence is real, but it's a great way to look at the present. If something isn't worth doing again, why do it once? And, no, that’s not the mistake. I still like the idea of that now, about five weeks later. And, considering this blog (and Groundhog Day is so often about the passage of time, it’s remarkable how recent that blog entry seems to me. But, anyway, I do think the day can be so much better if you both relax into it and make the effort...

Speech tournament the past two days, and today I judged, among other things, impromptu again. So, just like I did two weeks ago , it's time to connect Groundhog Day to all the... well, round one of impromptu didn't use quotations today but rather "haikus." And, I put that in quotation marks because some of them are not haikus by the usual shallow standard of syllable count and none of them are haikus by the less shallow standard of being about nature. But, anyway, I've got 14 of them--two each for up to seven competitors--and so my task is now to link them all to Groundhog Day . We hunt perfection true love and our destiny but it hunts us too Starting off with an easy one, these lines epitomize Phil's journey quite well, depending on what we take perfection to mean. We could apply it to Rita, or Phil's idealized version of Rita. We could apply it to the idealized version of Phil as well. The tricky part is that last line. Arguably, Groundhog Day tells...

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...

I think we in the “west” or the “global north” or the “core”—whatever you want to call the more privileged nations where we like to enjoy having options in our lives, things like traveling to see the world for example—are spoiled. I’d been thinking of Phil’s stay in Punxsutawney as horribly isolating geographically. But, I realized a couple things recently: 1. It’s a limited perspective to assume that geographic isolation is such an aberration as to be horrible. So many people in this world spend their entire lives within small areas. Whole cultures are so geographically isolated that they are still only barely getting infected by the so-called modern world. 2. That being said, Phil’s story could only take place in such isolation because the culture that produced the story is just the type of culture that would find said isolation scary. I think, in fact, that Phil’s visit(s) to his mother in Rubin’s original—after he steals a plane and flies through the blizzard—for example, would ...

In Ramis’ second revision of the script for Groundhog Day —and, no, this isn’t part four—Rita has an interesting take on Phil’s situation. Phil is working away at a “small hunk of marble” (this would switch to ice sculpting after the recon trip to Punxsutawney, in which Rubin et al discovered the ice sculpting competition held on Groundhog Day). Rita is watching. Phil asks her, “But what if the rules changed? What if none of your actions had consequences?” Rita’s response: “There would still be an absolute morality. There has to be an absolute good, regardless of circumstances.” Rita’s not a fan of moral relativism, apparently. Phil proceeds to call her “Miss Plato” and asks, “Where does this ‘absolute good’ come from? From the sky?” Page 102 and Phil’s still snarky. But, this reminds me a line from Suzanne M. Daughton’s “The Spiritual Power of Repetitive Form: Steps Toward Transcendence in Groundhog Day ” ( Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13 (1996), 138-154). Daughton writes...