the groundhog day project

Lest I complain too much, I will get one last detail of scientist 's piece out of the way. scientist describes the the death of Nurse Karen (Pamela Susan Shoop) like this: ...for sheer nastiness, nothing beats the hot-tub boiling of Karen Bailey. This sequence is truly ugly, with long, loving shots of Ms Karen's hideously blistered face interspersed with equally loving shots of her bare breasts--which, by the way, shouldn't be bare; when Michael enters the room, her towel is beneath her arms; when he grabs her, it's mysteriously around her waist. Also disturbing here is Michael caressing Karen before he gets to work, another action at variance with the child-man concept of the first film. Except, while you could call the shots of Karen's face "lingering" (at best), calling them "loving" suggests that scientist might have a problem. Also, there are not shots of her bare breasts while Michael is killing her. He dunks her five times into the wa...

We interrupt your regularly scheduled social justice warrior vs Big Hero 6 blog post for an interlude. See, today I saw Alien: Covenant in the theater and I feel the need to defend it. I also felt the need to defend King Arthur: Legend of the Sword last week but never quite got to it because my intention to watch 2004's King Arthur to stay on topic got a little sidetracked by obituaries and slinkies and The Fifth Element and Big Hero 6 . And the latter got a little... heavy? A little full of itself--my discussion of it, I mean. Not that such an approach is something new for me. As I told my students today (specifically regarding fairy tales and our breakdown of the meaning of "Little Red Riding Hood" but it can be cross applied quite readily to breaking down film), finding the flaws in something doesn't make it bad. Sometimes it can even make it more enjoyable. I mean, look where you're reading this-- The Groundhog Day Project . Watched that one over 400 time...

Today, I came to appreciate the sound design of Big Hero 6 while thinking of the next step in reifying my social justice warrior interactions with film. See, I had the movie on in the kitchen while making dinner, had my wireless earphones in, and while I could see the screen if I turned my head, mostly I was just hearing it. The sound in the opening bot fight, for example, was amazing. And, for the record, I like this movie. A lot. I gave it a 9 on IMDb. (You should know how my IMDb scoring works, I suppose, to be sure what that means. For example, while The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction get 10s from me, so does La La Land , which I think is a fundamentally flawed film, and Toy Story and The Big Lebowski and Zootopia and Sling Blade , Jaws and Deadpool . Now, as much as there was talk last year about Deadpool being nominated for Best Picture, I don't think it should have even been considered for that. Best Picture is a different sort of ideal. While Get Out earn...

First of all, hello new readers. It's that time of year when people are googling "Groundhog Day." And, well, if you're reading this, that might be you. (If you want to understand the holiday, go to this entry for the basics or this entry for a bit of melatonin science. Otherwise, stick around. Second of all, I'm watching Groundhog Day early. The usual thing for year three is that Groundhog Day falls on the 2nd of every month--and I will watch it tomorrow to be proper--but alas I had a problem. At school from 7am to 10pm, had not really thought about what movie I was watching today until I was on the ride home. I thought about watching The Paper , a little bit of Michael Keaton working at a newspaper as an echo of Spotlight , plus it would tie into the one class I am taking this quarter-- (I believe it is officially called "Constructing LA" and something about narrative. Taught by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez. Involves a lot of narrati...

Today is brief. Well, no, today still takes 24 hours like any other day. But, today’s entry here will be brief. IMDb still hasn’t updated the goofs page for Groundhog Day with my corrections… and I say that as if it has been a long wait. It has been just under 48 hours. Perhaps I should be more patient. Anyway, today I just want to share the additions I will be making tonight to that same page, which I hope doesn’t delay the original changes. Still, these changes must be added. 1. Inside the bowling alley, we see a guy bowl a strike and he has a friend sitting at the scoring table. Cut to Phil talking, then a wide shot that includes Gus and Ralph and the bowler and his friend are gone. 2. Behind Phil as he passed the homeless old man is a girl with an upside-down “Phil” sign. On the first three days of the time loop, she has a friend walking with her. Then, her friend disappears. 3. Since Gobbler’s Knob was crowded with people all morning and it did not snow in Punxsutawney all ...

Instead of writing a lot here in the blog today, I am finally fixing the goofs page on Groundhog Day ’s IMDb page. INSERT: Clouds moving swiftly as time passes in a clichéd manner. Come back a while later—started when the movie did and right now Phil is robbing the armored truck, just for a frame of reference—and I wonder what to put here. I was going to copy and paste the corrected version of the page. But, apparently, it has to be approved by IMDb ’s editors. (Perhaps I will update this entry with the copy and paste when the page updates.) If you like, in the meantime, you can go read my post from over 100 days ago in which I checked on every goof , many with screencaps… though they were not from a nice HD copy, so maybe I should replace them. And, since there’s still a bit of movie to go today, I think I’ll wander over to Wikipedia . INSERT: Some more clouds, only a little less clichéd. My first correction is this: Eventually, Phil becomes despondent and tries more and ...

Linking Groundhog Day to impromptu quotations--as I did here , here and here & here and here & here -- yesterday and the day before and it is not going as... I guess you could say smoothly. It's not going as smoothly as other days. I'm getting bogged down in details and the picking of nits--which obviously is not like me at all. As a regular reader of this blog, you would understand that I never obsess about anything to the point of picking it apart until it dies. Seriously though, how does something get labeled as a Danish Proverb when it is neither Danish nor a Proverb? But, then there's a bigger problem; spend too much time on "random" quotations and I miss the boat on larger things I could be doing. Like spending four days revisiting eternal recurrence or deja vu, or a whole week on some other topic... perhaps deja vu. I mean, just because Carl Sagan supposedly once said, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known," does...

Not much to say tonight. Instead, a few images as I start sorting screencaps… Actually, first, a bit of an addendum to my discussion of Time Freak two entries ago : Here’s a few shots of Stillman’s timeline diagrams… Think back on my discussion of another short film, Tango and the complexity in planning that out. And, relate that to Phil’s final day in the time loop… Here’s what I listed for that day before: his report from Gobbler’s Knob (after presumably picking up pastries and coffee again for Rita and Larry) spending some time at the Tip Top Café (remember, it’s Doris who gets him up on stage for the bachelor auction) buying a whole bunch of insurance—“whole life, term, uniflex, fire, theft, auto, dental, health with the optional death and dismemberment plan, water damage”—from Ned a piano lesson with Mary fanning the flames of Debbie’s passion for Fred finding Wrestlemania tickets somewhere in town fixing Felix’s back saving the kid (Zacchaeus) falling out of the...

To err is human. To point out someone else’s errors is, presumably, extra-human. So, let’s look at the errors in Groundhog Day . And, I don’t mean Phil’s errors in judgment or anything like that. I mean filmmaking errors. We’ll work off the IMDb goofs page for the movie and go from there. First category is “Audio/visual unsynchronized” In the last part of the movie, Phil is seen playing the piano on stage at the party. As he finishes up song before going and talking to Rita, the piano in the soundtrack is playing a glissando (running a finger rapidly down the keyboard) while Phil is still playing as he was before. Finally, at the last run, Phil's hands match the sound. Don’t have a screencap for this one (as you’ll see, I’ve got screencaps for a lot of the other “goofs” below), but I’m not seeing it—and I had two different screens going for the movie today, two different copies of the film. Aside from a possibly inaccurate use of “glissando” Phil does run his hand across the ...