the groundhog day project

Flashback to the Jeopardy! entry of The Groundhog Day Project ... or to the Jeopardy! scene in the film, I suppose. One of the clues is: This South American lake drains into the smaller Lake Poopo in Bolivia Don't be alarmed if you don't remember it. You can't really hear it in the movie, because Phil is already answering: “What is Titicaca?” There's a blog called Things with Awesome Names that basically spells out my reaction to the combination above (which oddly I didn't even notice when I wrote the Jeopardy! entry). The author--Bungle Jerry--writes: ...Lake Titicaca. The lake, located in the mountains of Bolivia, is a God-send to lovers of awesome names everywhere. A schoolyard word for breasts and a schoolyard word for human waste stuck together: it couldn't be more awesome if it was called Lake Boobycrap. No matter your age, once you've stopped giggling at the name 'Lake Titicaca', you've stopped smiling at life. I think people who...

Phil’s thing, before the loop, during the loop, after the loop, is that he is attentive. On Day 2, he recognizes the banter on the radio from the day before, for example. But, even before that, he has already been paying attention. Watch Rita in front of the bluescreen, arms up, jazz hands opening and closing. What does Phil do when he steps in front of that moving truck so many days later? Arms up, jazz hands opening and closing. For whatever reason (in that instance) he’s mimicking Rita’s movements from that day she changed him (according to him). By the way, in case there’s confusion, I don’t think it’s the radio banter that convinces him the day is repeating on that second morning; instead it’s when he looks around the room and sees his stuff in the same position not as the night before (from his perspective) but from the night previous to that one. Phil puts thought into the things he says, the things he does. When he gets out of the van and sees the Pennsylvanian Hotel on Febru...

Before I get into today’s thing, I must say that it was worth a shot. But, my mention of this blog on the film’s Wikipedia page has been removed—my blog, when it must be its own citation, is trivial and irrelevant. Gotta work on that. Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I need to compile a list of the goofs I have discovered in the movie to add to the IMDb page once it updates with the changes I made yesterday. But, neither of those things are what I want to talk about today. Nor do I want to talk about how The Groundhog Day Project ’s Twitter got a retweet from a guy with nearly 10,000 followers last night and today The Groundhog Day Project has gotten more pageviews in a single day than ever before. No, today I want to talk about Jeopardy! In the middle of Phil’s depression, he plays along with the show. It’s a part of the movie that should be memorable. Phil Connors hanging out with the mostly old crowd at the Cherry Street Inn. The episode of Jeopardy! that we see is ...

Groundhog Day is about life. Your life. My life. Life. Except, in one draft of the script, there was a reason for Phil’s plight. It wasn’t just the human condition. It involves a woman named Stephanie who Phil’s dated a few times and a book entitled 101 Curses, Spells and Enchantments You Can Do at Home . But, more on that for another day (after I’ve had a chance to read that “second revision” of the screenplay in more detail). In the version we see on screen, there is no first cause , just a situation out of control. It’s like an atheist's dream, the inherent meaningless of life in the face of a universe we cannot control. But, we do what we can. If all of this is just happening , then Phil Connors’ escape from the repetition has no logic to it. It’s like the hair dryer in that early episode of Quantum Leap ; Ziggy did some calculations but it’s all math that is far beyond any of us. So, the question is, given the way we take the film—put simply, Phil gets out because he learns...