the groundhog day project

Once upon a time there was a guy named Joe Who had a very lousy job... I worked office jobs in my 20s. The opening scene of Joe Versus the Volcano is amazing in its satire (and it's awesome that both Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack (who played it relatively straight in Airplane! are in this), workers all dressed in black, trudged through a muddy parking lot, turnstile doors, a zig zag walkway, all to enter a factory that makes medical devices and leaks exhaust into the air. The lighting inside makes everyone look sickly, the hat rack doesn't even work right. It's no wonder that Joe Banks (Tom Hanks) feels like he's always sick. Effectively, he is . His job drains away his life. Or as he tells DeDe (Meg Ryan) (regarding his shoe), "I'm losing my sole."           Strictly speaking, Joe Versus the Volcano is not a bad movie. But, I'm going to end this month of bad movies with it because 1) it was one of the first movies recommended when I asked...

I can relate a bit too well to the fictional Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation. . The awkwardness, the nervousness, always being stuck in my own head. Laroche as well. His obsessions. His movings on. And Susan Orlean. How she wishes she could end things as abruptly as Laroche is capable. How she wants to want something as much as "these people want flowers." This week two new episodes of The X-Files aired after more than a decade without. I used to have a copy of Mulder's I WANT TO BELIEVE poster on my wall... You can see it in this photo of my small, cluttered bedroom in circa June 2000. The other X-Files poster there was signed by a few actors (including Gillian Anderson) and several of the writers of the show at a couple X-Files -specific conventions. Thinking about this conventions just now I found it interesting how I could waiver between different versions of myself in just one day. Awkward and alone through most of the day then happen to be in line with, as you m...

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...

This entry goes out to all those researchers in the distant future trying to discover some information about the origins of The Groundhog Day Project . This is after the project has gone on to inspire the nations of the world to unite and we have world peace and Rufus and his ilk (yeah, I'm mixing my cinematic metaphor, so to speak) are trying to figure out how to worship me. I've explained before that I used Groundhog Day in nearly all of my impromptu speaking rounds when I was competing in collegiate speech and debate. I had even planned to alter the "normal" impromptu format for my final round of impromptu to, instead of taking one quotation and building examples around it, take all three quotations I was offered and apply them each to Groundhog Day . But, then life got complicated and I stopped doing impromptu a tournament or two before I thought I might. In retrospect, though I wouldn't have done too well at nationals, I probably should have done impromptu ...