the groundhog day project

It has been a good long while since I have connected a film to impromptu quotations... For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, the usual setup for the impromptu speaking event at our speech tournaments--I'm a coach, and we just had two tournaments in two days this weekend--is you get a quotation, and you use that as a prompt for a 5(-ish) minute speech after 2(-ish) minutes of prep. During phase one of this blog, when I was watching Groundhog Day every day, several times after a tournament weekend, I would take a sheet of the quotations we had and link them to the film because when I was a competitor and participated in that event I used Groundhog Day as an example in nearly every round. Anyway... I judged the final round of impromptu today and instead of quotations, per se, competitors were given a choice of three meme-ish images. So, I'm looking over them and on speaker two's sheet, I see this one: Now, it really is not that great a line. But, it...

We open on Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson) playing the drums, then a little montage, Keith (Eric Stolz) walking along the tracks, past a factory, past Amanda Jones (Lea Thompson) making out with Hardy (Craig Scheffer). Establish our characters, establish the setting--got some class issues coming, but they probably will remain mostly subtext as usual. For example, Keith's father (John Ashton), who didn't go to college, wants Keith to go to college because, you know, that means he can have opportunities he (the father) didn't have. By the way, it's Some Kind of Wonderful . Amanda Jones is not the same sort of character as Cindy Mancini in Can't Buy Me Love or Maggie in Lucas ... Actually, I'm not so sure those two are even that much alike. Cindy's mother has money, but I think they are still far from upper class. Maggie seems a bit more working class, though obviously above whatever Lucas is. Amanda Jones, here, is like a rich girl, but that's "guilt...

Something interesting about yesterday's movie-- Can't Buy Me Love --and today's-- Lucas --that many people wouldn't notice is the opening shot. Can't Buy Me Love , you might remember, starts with Ronald on his riding mower, except not quite. It actually begins with a shot of cactus in the foreground, a little bit of sky above, then Ronald comes into view in that gap between the cacti. (There's a nice echo in that the movie also ends with Ronald on his mower, of course.) And, this movie begins with a closeup on a bug. The title character (Corey Haim) is fascinated by insects, of course. And, insects will be important at a couple points later in the film. But, also, these visuals make for some simple metaphors--Ronald (and his friends as well) is like cactus; other (more popular) people don't want to get close to him or be around him. Similarly, Lucas is an insect--most people just don't want to be around him. (Hell, his nickname is Leukoplakia, which ...