the groundhog day project

The opening lines (which reappear at the end of the film as well) of Gone Girl are: When I think of my wife... I always think or her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brains, trying to get answers. The primal question of any marriage: "What are you thinking?" "How are you feeling?" "What have we done to each other?" The tone at the beginning is romantic. The cracking open of the skull is love, wanting that thing where you're not sure where one of you ends and the other begins--that's how I described romance once upon a time on the interwebs, on a message board back in the olden days before Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or even Myspace. Well, there might have been Myspace already. The couple who ran the message board--a semi-pretentious place called Cafe des Artistes --both called me a hopeless romantic, or something along those lines. And, I was . I've been rewatching How I Met Your Mother on Netflix lately and I...

Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post calls Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike) in Gone Girl "the only fictional character [she] can think of who might be accurately described as simultaneously misogynist and misandrist. In fact she hates pretty much everyone else on the planet, except, briefly, her husband Nick" (Ben Affleck). Like Chad Piercewell in In the Company of Men , yes, she seems to hate everyone. She may have only ever gotten together with Nick in order to have something that "Amazing Amy" doesn't have. (In case you haven't seen the film--and don't mind the inevitable SPOILERS that will happen in this blog entry--"Amazing Amy" is the children's book character created by Amy's parents. Amazing Amy tended to have it better than Amy did. As Amy puts it, "When I was 10, I quit cello. In the next book, [Amazing] Amy became a prodigy." Asked if she played volleyball, she adds, "I got cut, freshman year. She made ...