the groundhog day project

Groundhog Day is on and I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about how watching this movie in Florida adds one more state to the list of where I've watched it (you can see that list here ). I don't want to talk about how it doesn't get old. I don't want to talk about how it is comforting to know something so well and to have it be there when I need it. I do want to talk about the message I got from Danny Rubin yesterday, but I'm not going to, because that's private. One of the critiques of autoethnography--an approach I'm using and quite readily defending in my master's thesis--is that you can never get consent from everybody involved in some story, some research, and while technically that just isn't true, certainly it might be hard to get consent for everything, from everyone, and some people may refuse. That doesn't mean you don't mean forward. That doesn't mean you leave out--and I'm just going to jump r...

I haven't really talked about why there are three versions of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby yet. (I'm watching Her one more time tonight, by the way.) It was written as two movies-- Him and Her . Two separate scripts that shared a few scenes (with slightly different variations between those scenes). It was only after The Weinstein Company bought the film(s) that a third, combined version was requested. Editing began with Him . It's the easier film in terms of structure, because, as editor Kristine Boden tells Indiewire , Conor is "more reactive and just want[s] to keep going." Her , on the other hand, has "introspection and gravity." Conor's energy made Him a shorter film. Eleanor, being more contemplative, has the slower burn. Still, Her is only a few minutes longer than Him . And, Them is, as you might expect, longer than either one, taking pieces of each and combining them into one film for both characters. For the separate versions of...

I really wish that the opening line from Roger Ebert's memoir Life Itself were said out loud in the film Life Itself instead of just being text on the screen because I really want to use it as the title for this entry but tradition puts only lines of dialogue (or lyrics) as the title here at the Groundhog Day Project . (And, there should have probably been a comma in that sentence somewhere.) I was born inside the movie of my life. That's the line. I would figure that my life is a movie except, well, my life is not very exciting. If my life is a movie, it's some weirdly slow indie film. I'm trying to remember Julie & Julia . I saw the movie once when it was new, and I've read Julie's book (and a whole lot of Lawrence Dai's blog entries about the film), but I'm barely remembering how Julie's story works as a visual narrative. I remember some shots of Amy Adams failing at cooking, something with lobsters, but it's the Julia Child sequen...