the groundhog day project

(Cross-posted between my daily Groundhog Day Project movie blog and my far-less-regularly updated Against the World political blog.) The Naturalization, Alien Friends, Alien Enemies and Sedition Acts of 1798. Anti-German and anti-Irish sentiment in the mid-1800s (and beyond; is not the drunken Irishman still a staple of film?). More anti-German sentiment around the two World Wars. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Anti-Italian sentiment from the 1800s into the 1900s. (For example, the largest mass lynching in US History was that of nine Italian-Americans who had been found not guilty of murder and let go in New Orleans, 1891. They and two other Italians held on unrelated charges were dragged from jail and lynched. Arrests followed, but not of those who did the lynching. Rather, more Italians. In a piece at cnn.com , 10 July 2012, Ed Falco describes how President Roosevelt called the lynchings "a rather good thing.") Anti-Catholic sentiment just ...

I was watching Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance ( Przypadek ) earlier tonight. It’s basically Run Lola Run structurally, with a little more of the gravitas of Sliding Doors — and I did not expect to use the word gravitas in connection with Sliding Doors . I like the movie, but that just wasn’t a word I would have put to it —a slow-paced alternate-reality story about, well, chance and choice in decided one’s fate. It starts each of its three segments like Run Lola Run does, minor variations that don’t really mean anything, but those lead to more significant opportunities in the life of Witek (Boguslaw Linda) when he a) makes his train and meets an old communist and joins the Communist Party, b) misses his train, knocks a guard to the ground and receives community service which eventually leads him into an anti-Communist group and religion, or c) misses his train but has no altercation with the guard, meets a girl on the platform and goes to medical school. It got me thinkin...