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...

In the fall, I wrote three big papers. Two of them linked to Groundhog Day --my Christ-Figure paper and my confirmation bias paper--but the third--my rhetoric paper--did not. It was very sad. This quarter, I'm actually rewriting (and doubling in length) that rhetoric paper, and while I haven't figured out quite how to justify including a reference to Groundhog Day because there aren't really a bunch of movie examples, I did discover a quotation in one of my sources that fits into a discussion of Groundhog Day . It's a little backward, but it almost makes up for my inability to include it. (A sad sidenote: out of my three papers in this winter quarter, nary a one makes mention of Groundhog Day . I have clearly not been trying hard enough.) Anyway, the line, from Schiltz (2006): As we have seen, on the one hand, the account provided in Plato's Phaedrus makes the further move toward one in which the sensual desires are instrumentally valuable as motivation for ...

How I Met Your Mother just began its final season this week. While some have complained about the implication that the show will once again revisit Ted and Robin and their potential as a couple, even as the entire season takes place during the weekend of her wedding to Barney, Donna Bowman at A.V. Club , has a great take on not only why it makes sense for the show to return to this before the end but also how this fits with storytelling in general: This show started with Ted and Robin. It’s not going to reach its titular moment, much less its final season endgame, without returning to Ted and Robin. Not only do I not mind this fact, but I’m happy to see it. Ted’s search for true love has become especially poignant this year. Robin’s engagement and impending marriage have raised for him an unavoidable question: Was she here all along? … This story, like all good stories, isn’t about getting to the ending. Good stories are about the hero becoming the person that the ending can happen t...