the groundhog day project

I spent 365 days (plus today is the 10th follow-up viewing) explaining and exploring why I chose (or, in retrospect, needed to choose) Groundhog Day for this blog. (And, I didn’t set up a recap for the past month—and those entries take more time than a single viewing—so I will recap two months next month... maybe.) If you want a good idea of what that was all about, start with Day 365 - so this will be the last time we do the groundhog together and work backward. There are some good highlights in that entry alone, with some links to past entries. Or, if you want to be able to see all of the topics ever covered, start with Day 363 - and you’d be an expert and work backward from there instead. Yesterday I argued that my discussion of films in this blog serves as a deliberate counterpart to discussion of life. I also do it because it’s fun. Officially, I’m going into my upcoming (starting in the next week or two) reread of all of my entries without a specific goal in mind. I’...

I like the rapport of these two. Whether it’s Meg Ryan (Sally) and Billy Crystal (Harry) playing off one another or the writing/characters playing off one another, they’ve got a nice back-and-forth almost immediately. Even when she’s only telling him things as if he has dared her, when all he did was remain silent—Harry’s “Fine, don’t tell me” is a great way of getting her to talk; Sally is just dying to tell someone everything about herself. And, Harry has a tendency to do just that about him self. They should both be bloggers, really, tell the world about themselves all the time, but veil it in some gimmick, like watching a movie everyday... I’ve said too much. My point is, I like how these two interact. I’ve got some people I can go back-and-forth with like that, at least some of the time, my kids, my ex, a couple of my sisters, maybe a couple of my friends. Particularly, I’d like to imagine that I am both as offputting and charming as Harry is. Like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day ...

Day 52 - if you only had one day to live --that's an entry I've brought up several times since I wrote it. It's the one with the jelly beans. It's definitive proof I write stuff as cheesy as some of the stuff in The Fault in Our Stars --which I saw recently. Edge of Tomorrow --or Groundhog Day with guns--the other movie I saw recently, has no real sentiment to it except for one scene... SPOILERS. Tom Cruise's Cage and Emily Blunt's Rita sit in a barn well past the frontlines. We (and she) think(s) this is the first time they have made it this far. But, Cage finds some coffee and knows that Rita takes it with three sugars. She (and we) figure(s) out he has already gone through this scene. He's stalling their getting into the helicopter they have just found because he knows that every time they have tried to take the helicopter Rita ends up dead. He doesn't want to see her die again. On the next resumption, he goes to meet Rita (for the first time), but...

Tonight in class, we were running ad hoc focus groups. A couple topics were political. Mine was not even really conducive to much disagreement, or necessarily a lot of conversation... I thought. I started with the Jelly Bean video I've linked a couple times in this blog, notably in Day 52: if you only had one day to live . My first question was simple enough but lead to discussion of elitism and whether or not any of us are wasting our lives, as the video seems to be telling us. Good times were had. A fellow student, Shawn, had us discussing the concept of villains in his focus group. For the briefest of moments, I thought I'd use that as the jumping off point for today's Groundhog Day Project entry, but I've already talked about how a) there is no villain in Groundhog Day or b) Phil is his own... antagonist ; there is no villain in Groundhog Day . (I would link but I don't think that topic was its own entry, just part of some other one. And, really, the conce...

I drove past my childhood home today--hadn't seen it in a while. It looks different but the same. Where there once was no fence dividing the front yard from the side yard, and where my father once built a fence, there's now a wall. Where there was a tree I used to climb and from which hung a tire swing and a rope, there is a different, smaller tree. I imagined going inside but the inside would probably be even more different than the outside. My memory of the place remains intact. That's good enough, I suppose. My daughter is in a play next week, and this evening she lamented that she's grown close to the other members of the cast and after their string of performances in just over a week she might not see some of them ever again. I thought that was at once a sad fact and a fascinatingly... happy isn't the word, but maybe somehow enlightening. Like a sand mandala or an ice sculpture--it's a form that exists here and now and is that much more powerful and affect...

I imagine the days where Phil Connors gets contemplative. Maybe it’s before he turns to depression. Maybe it’s after. And, a weird thought occurs to me—he can never fast. I mean, he can go without food for a day, sure. But, that’s it, a day. His digestive system will have food from the day before, so he probably won’t be all that hungry. I mean, yeah, when we’re used to eating regularly, we’ll get hungry after missing a meal. But, that’s not real hunger. There’s an interesting bit in Siddhartha in which Kamaswami asks Siddhartha what he has learned that he can give. Siddhartha’s response: “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.” Kamaswami asks, what good is fasting? He’s a businessman, a merchant who certainly doesn’t value the contemplative moments of life. Siddhartha explains: It is of great value, sir. If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do. If, for instance, Siddhartha had not learned how to fast, he would have had to seek some kind of work t...