the groundhog day project

No Jazz Singer tonight. Instead, I took my daughter to see Lady Bird . And, the affection for Sacramento inherent in Gerwig's direction throughout, plus more explicitly regarding the titular character's (Saoirse Ronan) affection for the city, despite her claims to the contrary, stood out. Sister Sarah Joan's (Lois Smith) pronouncement that is today's blog title had me thinking on a couple things: 1) on an obvious level, because that line was about the city, I was thinking about Pasadena, where I grew up. About places I used to go, the mall that no longer exists, movies theaters that have been turned into (I think this is what they are now) a bank, a church (which seems like blasphemy), and a school supply store. Another one was turned from a giant single-screen theater into a multiplex, and is now a gym of some sort. The theater where I worked for a while in my 20s is now a jewelry store. And, it's not all about movie theaters. Three used bookstores I used to f...

"Teenagers seem to occupy a time warp of eternally unchanging preoccupations" ( Ebert , 1981). I suppose we'll see this month. I'm finished with Porky's after tonight (and I so wanted to watch Porky's II: The Next Day and Porky's Revenge in my downtime this past week but I just didn't have time). Choosing four films to represent teenage, high school themes was difficult. Narrowing it down--like I did with action films--to the 1980s helped. On the one hand, that reduced my choices to about eight films (a much easier number to reduce further). On the other hand, it also stuck me back in my childhood in looking back at these films. I've got nostalgia for these movies, just as Porky's has nostalgia for the fifties. It's a simpler time, a more innocent time, when the world was ending and sex was on the big screen but I was constantly told how it was bad and I shouldn't even think about it. Now, I don't think that I actually saw the...

but I'm only on DayQuil . Still, I find myself reciting lines of dialogue along with the characters and I think I'm running some of these lines a little better than they are. Have I mentioned that Desson Howe at the Washington Post predicted back in 1993 that Groundhog Day "will never be designated a national film treasure by the Library of Congress"? He liked the movie, called it "pretty good" and said that, watching it, you'll feel like you've been through too many days yourself. With its zany daily episodes, "Groundhog" gets stuck in a non-progressive repetition. It's also headed for the usual Hollywood Life Lesson, in which Murray's moral winter must thaw. He also makes some factual errors--and I'm feeling petty as well as sick. For example, he says this: "Ned, I would love to stand here and talk with you," he tells Tobolowsky at their umpteenth chance meeting. "But I'm not going to." First,...

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...