the groundhog day project

Though it is day three with After the Dark (AKA The Philosophers ), I don't think I have much to say about the film as a film . It's shot well enough, the acting is good for such large cast, some with only a few lines to work with. A warning going in: if you don't like Sophie Lowe's whispering in the opening scene, you should know that she continues to talk like that. Though she tells him to be quiet, ostensibly because someone is in the house with them--he assures her that they know she's there--she is not actually whispering to be quiet; that's just her voice. She will continue to talk like that and will not have many facial expressions either. Somehow, it kind of works for her character. A big problem this film has, generally, with its cast is some of the lesser (meaning, less screen time) characters have more personality than the leads--Petra, Mr. Zimit (James D'Arcy) and James (Rhys Wakefield). Freddie Stroma's Jack, for example, is more expressive...

There's a moment in the third act of Westworld in which Peter finds a woman he thinks is injured after the robots have gone... wrong. He believes she's a guest who has been injured because, unlike so many others nearby she is semiconscious (and chained up). Then he gets her some water and she shorts out. Turns out she's a robot. The fact that the robots cannot be distinguished from the guests (except by their hands) is important. And, it makes me wonder if there isn't some greater similarity between the two. I'm reminded of the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded ... [The Oracle] stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. I'm reminded of The Purge , which if you haven't seen it a) isn't that great a movie as it ends up just being a rather straightforward home invasion story but b) is based on an imag...

It’s day two. If I were Phil Connors, I’d be confused, and I’d probably be trying to review Groundhog Day again, and getting a little carried away with myself—did I really say I’d help my readers get a better grasp on the human condition? I might as well be calling myself “the talent.” As Larry would say in response: “prima donnas.” I guess I am one. But, I digress. As I was watching the movie again—the second time in two days, the third in the past week, as I went to an outdoor screening last Saturday in Old Town Pasadena—I wanted to write a review from scratch, pretend I hadn’t tried that yesterday. I thought that would be clever. But, I don’t need to be clever just yet. I don’t need any more of a gimmick than watching the movie every day. A few things did occur to me while watching the movie, this time. I already was thinking more about specific scenes, trying to figure out nuances I might not have seen before—the newsvan drives past the Alpine Theater where Heidi II is playin...

I’ve never written a review of Groundhog Day , as far as I know. But, I’ve seen the movie many times, and I used it in nearly every round of impromptu when I was doing competitive speech and debate in college. That last one—that’s because you can use the movie to cover just about any theme. Phil Connors is not only a great central character for a good comedy like this—not that there are many comedies like this —but he works as an everyman and he goes through all the emotions we all do every day of our lives. There is time in the film (not to mention the many parts of his journey we don’t see on screen) for joy, for sadness, for arrogance and humility, silliness and seriousness, flippancy and philosophy. The trailer for the movie gets a lot out of the idea of “living life like there’s no tomorrow.” That is perhaps the central idea to the film. But, for Phil, it’s not just a question of doing anything and everything; he starts out arrogant and self-centered, so his early attempts to ...