the groundhog day project

John McClane was born in 1966 and his name was Joe Leland. He was born in the pages of a novel called The Detective by Roderick Thorp. In 1968 he would be played by Frank Sinatra in a film adpatation. In 1979, Thorp would publish a sequel called Nothing Lasts Forever in which Joe Leland was trapped in a building taken over by terrorists. Supposedly, Sinatra had a clause in his contract for The Detective that made him the mandatory first offer to play the character in a sequel. I'm not sure when that happened, but at some point, Sinatra turned down the role. The script was reworked as a sequel to Commando but Arnold didn't like it... I should mention, since I probably will not have cause to cite specific passages that I am going by information from Ryan Lambie's Den of Geek piece, "The strange history of the Die Hard movies," 24 November 2011; Andrew Barloq's I Choose To Stand blog entry, "Retrospective: Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)," 10 De...

Many people thought I would run out of things to say about Groundhog Day long before Day 365 (another 2 weeks away). This evening, as I sit down to watch the film and write something about or inspired by it, I have an inkling not that they are right, but that I had too much other stuff to do today. Work on my card game, work on my short film, a trip to the science center with my daughter. And, I didn’t even get to revising my paper to be published or prepping lesson plans for my speech class for the fall, or even going over a lesson plan for the speech practice this Wednesday. Made dinner, got Saer to Improv class, and now here I am… sitting… with nothing particular to say. I got out my Chekhov book so I would remember to read one of his plays. I’ve got 2 outings of a sort in the next couple weeks (before the Day 365 party) for this blog, but I cannot do either of those at 10:00 P.M. on a Friday. As for topics at hand, my folder of unused Groundhog Day -related articles has a handfu...