the groundhog day project

It's 1995. The internet is still mostly a fantasy. A scary fantasy. We had Lawnmower Man a few years ago. Later this year we'll have Virtuosity and Hackers . Right now, it's July and we've got The Net . When we meet Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock, and that name means Blessed Angel; we'll get to that below), she's playing Wolfenstein. Killing a computer virus. She's got a friend who collects them. I had a friend like that in high school. She orders a pizza online--state-of-the-art stuff right there--and "A Whiter Shade of Pale" plays and that's a love song, right? Her and the pizza? Back up. The movie begins with a politician killing himself at Hains Point in DC. The camera pans up and over The Awakening-- --and I'm wondering if the choice is deliberate, a metaphor for... For the Internet struggling to dig it's way out of the earth into regular use? Humanity (like Angela) struggling to live life while being buried by an increasingl...

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...