the groundhog day project

I wish I had more home movies. I have a few, but the video camera I had when my kids were small was broken and its battery would never work; it only ever worked when plugged into an outlet. So, it was not very mobile. There are plenty of photos, but I can imagine being Henry Larson sitting in the den (not that I have a den now or expect to have one when I am an old man) watching old home movies. Someone posted an updated version of Frans Hofmeester’s video of his daughter Lotte on Facebook earlier today. He filmed her every day for 14 years now (the previous version going around was 12 years, and it was in a cellphone commercial so it got a lot of visibility), and it is a remarkable pseudo-time lapse of growing up. Here is the video . (Embedding videos in this blog just does not work anymore, and I do not know why.) I think the reason Home for the Holidays works so well is that it provides a rather universal snapshot of an American family celebrating Thanksgiving. The personality...

(A note from my sister Bobbie before we get going: Dana in Ghostbusters II has apparently—I did not check, so I can neither confirm nor deny this— not failed at being a cellist but simply took the museum job while Oscar was an infant and plans to get back to the cello when he is older.) From Kit’s “Remember the fish” in the first ten minutes of the movie to Henry’s bit about watching old movies and looking at old photographs in the last ten minutes of the film, there are a lot of references to the past in Home for the Holidays . As I have pointed out the last couple entries (and probably all month in some way or another), there is a lot of ritual and tradition involved in Thanksgiving. This holiday—and any, potentially—becomes timeless in the repetition. Every other day may be a piece of life moving forward, but today... today is endless (and beginning-less). Today is not just this Thanksgiving but also last Thanksgiving, and the Thanksgiving before and the Thanksgiving before...