the groundhog day project

Both Brigsby Bear and Dave Made a Maze , about which I have been obsessing a bit of late-- Brigsby Bear Dave Made a Maze day 1229 - dreams and imaginations to help us escape day 1230 - it means something day 1231 - the best version of yourself day 1243 - i wanted to make something day 1244 - it's a little on the nose day 1245 - get the story to come off the page day 1246 - everything we've got to work with day 1247 - people are gonna want to see this shit day 1248 - everyone is assholes --deal in a fundamental need to (1) complete something meaningful (2) with the help of friends (3) in order to move on to some semblance of a normal life. In both cases, (4) the process ends with the destruction of the world... sort of. In Brigsby , in the film within the film, the entire universe has to be reset (reminding me of one of my favorite movies ever, The Fountain ) for Brigsby, and for James, to have a new beginning. In Dave , the labyrinth has to be completed and then d...

There's a poster on James' (Kyle Mooney) bedroom wall in his... captive home? It says: CURIOSITY IS AN UNNATURAL EMOTION If you could ever actually convince someone of this, you would certainly be able to imprison them and control them... And, yes, that was leaning into a rant about religion or politics, but instead I wanted to concern myself with something closer to the actual text (or at least its subtext) of the film today. James has been held captive since he was a kid, but he thinks his captors his real parents, he thinks the world full of toxic air so they cannot go outside without protection. He only knows the underground bunker in the desert where they have raised him, and the worlds of Brigsby Bear , the TV show his father has produced just for him over the years--25 volumes, 736 episodes. He has these on VHS and has watched them time and time again. They are, in many ways, more real to him than his own monotonous life inside the bunker--his Groundhog Day Effect, i...

Flash forward a decade and a half. It's 1993. It's February. I'm watching Groundhog Day on the big screen--75% sure it was at the Mann 3 in Hastings Ranch, Pasadena, California. It's opening weekend and I'm seeing a film that, well, I have no idea how important it will be for me a couple decades later. But, that's how it is for any movie, isn't it. You might have an idea of what you'll think of it before you head into the theater, or rent that video tape (or DVD... or whatever file format movies are on things like Amazon Prime nowadays), but when the lights go down and you're in that movie for that hour and a half (or longer), something changes in you. Or many things change in you. Groundhog Day that first time was not one of those films where I could divide my life easily into all the days before and all the days after, like I emerged from the darkness of the theater a completely different person. I was 17, I would graduate from high school in a ...

I am, legitimately, an expert on the movie Groundhog Day . Or at least I was a few years ago. I don't 100% have the script memorized anymore, I don't think about the film every day. But, during the first year of this blog (and a few times since) I have been contacted by strangers with questions about the movie. (I also, while IMDb still had its message board, actively joined multiple conversation threads about the film, effectively positioning myself as someone who knows the film). Similarly, I should be considered an expert on Star Wars , or an ex-expert. When I was a kid, I watched the trilogy often. There was no box set then so each film was on a different VHS tape. (If memory serves, Star Wars was on the same tape as Adventures of the Wilderness Family , The Empire Strikes Back was on a tape with The Natural and The Last Starfighter , and Return of the Jedi was on a tape with Silverado .*) * I don't just trust my memory. My sister recently sent me pictures of our...

The year Shine (today's movie) was nominated for Best Picture was the first year I actively tried to see as many of the Oscar-nominated films as I could. I had been watching the Oscars since as long as I could remember, had been obsessing a bit about them for a few years by then, but the 69th Academy Awards (for films from 1996, nominated and awarded in early 1997) was the first time I really made an effort. In case you weren't around in 1996 or were not then (and maybe are not now) a lover of film, Shine is the (disputed in the details) true story of pianist David Helfgott who suffers a mental breakdown after, as the film seems to play it, getting obsessed with being able to play Rachmaninoff (and dealing with an overbearing father). The film was nominated for Best Actor (Geoffrey Rush), Best Supporting Actor (Armin Mueller-Stahl), Best Film Editing, Best Original Score* (David Hirschfelder), Best Original Screenplay (Jan Sardi and Scott Hicks), Best Director (Scott Hicks),...

Clive Barker talks with Lisa Tuttle in 1991* about creating good gods and bad gods in fiction and he says, I think that is so much more interesting than the division into the white hats and the blacks, between human and non-human, where anything that is defined as "non-human," whether it be slug, shark, crab, Woman, is presented as this terrible threat. It's grotesque, and funny, and simple, and what bothers me is its simplicity. I mind it not because it's grotesque, but because it's simple-minded, and that's boring. You know what I mean? If you turn all of nature into something to be repulsed by, you ignore the fact that whatever is read one way as grotesque or frightening can also be read another way, as something beautiful, as a celebration of variegation and paradox. * original source unknown, but it's reproduced in Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden . I was thinking about why the producers did not want this film to be named, like its source materi...

Let us leave (presumably) the evil high school girls behind. ( Presumably because I haven't seen Struck by Lightning before.) Today, our focus is a high school boy, Carson Phillips (Chris Colfer). (And, admittedly, this movie was recommended by my daughter a good while ago and I have put it off. Which really shouldn't be parenthetical, actually, because I want to take this opportunity to a) write a bit about the movie as it plays and b) out my daughter as a crazy fangirl... except, as you will see, my point below is probably going to be that fangirls are not crazy. Plus it's a bit sexist to separate fangirls from fanboys, anyway.) Carson is rather amusingly sardonic and sarcastic--i.e. the best kind of cinematic high school character. I don't need someone who is you know, nice, and genuine. Less Rita Hanson, more Phil Connors. Just how I like a character... at least a comedy. (So, Saer--my 12-year-old daughter, for those of you who have not been following alo...

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...

There will be few words typed today, because today I spent a good portion of my day writing some… other stuff related to Groundhog Day . That is, the cards for Groundhog Day: The Board Game are pretty much done—playtested a cards-only version with the kids, didn’t like it, sketched a version of the board design and playtested that as well. The cards weren’t labeled well at that point, just their categories… You can see some cards that didn’t survive the playtesting in those shots—DISCARD, GIVE CARD, FORECAST and an I’M A GOD card that was a great idea that just doesn’t work in a game with categorized cards. And, that big white board in the upper right of those last couple shots—that will soon be the board for the game. I have the design, I just have to… draw it, I guess, on the board. (My copy of All You Need Is Kill , the novel on which Edge of Tomorrow is based, can also be seen in those last two shots. Only got it yesterday, haven’t had time but to glance through it.) ...

Remember that time recently when I was talking about obsessing about things? You know, this entry . Well, I’m just getting to the big car chase in today’s viewing and I have yet to write anything because I was trying to finally solve a few location puzzles. Notably, I’m revisiting my attempts to find this location : Bob Hudgins said something about them filming the chase “between Country Club and 120” over in McHenry. Unfortunately, that area is a lot of residential blocks which even if I’ve found the location, would not look at all the same. So, I look for that “pillar” on the left side of the road in that photo. I have not found it… yet. An easier location was this one: The quarry was a specific location—Nimtx Quarry—in Love’s Park, so there were not a lot of streets to work with. Work backward and shrink the images… …and you’ll notice the hill next to the road. Since 1992 when this was, filmed, imagine they have reshaped and repaved the road, removed all the trees and now...

(Note to my future self: do not cite this entry if you end up doing your thesis on the currently being proposed topic; that would be cheating.) First, let's get this out of the way. Yesterday as Groundhog Day played on my iPad, I was running the movie on the computer as well, skipping around to grab screencaps of the interiors of the Cherry Street Inn. Obviously, that is not the interior. That is the exterior as shot in Woodstock. The interiors, as I mentioned the other day, were in a warehouse in Cary, IL. This is the side of the building (from Google Street View): So, here's the thing I need to get out of the way: Phil's room is designed in such a way that it could not possibly be in this building as it actually exists. Here's my diagram again: The stairs go down to the left there, which would be west since the three windows at the bottom of that diagram look south . Now, if Phil's room was where it should be, at the top right of the Cherry Street ...

I was going to open with the following: The people of Punxsutawney, PA are assholes. And, this is why. They've got one homeless guy in the entire town, and they can afford to have a whole lot of groundhog banners and groundhog trashcans, not to mention that stage on Gobbler's Knob and all those Inner Circle guys' fancy suits, but they can't help out one nice old guy with a meal and a warm place to be? Then, I got sidetracked by math. To demonstrate that Punxsutawney was small enough that we can assume only the one homeless guy exists, I wanted to figure out just how populated Punxsutawney is. Mind you, I don't mean the real-world Punxsutawney but the film version. The film version of Punxsutawney is significantly smaller (in population) than the real one. I started by thinking the movie didn't tell us the population (a mistake I realized pretty quickly). So I looked up Punxsutawney's population, 5,962 as of 2010, closer to 7,000 in 1990 (the film presumab...

Fewer words today than yesterday . Today’s reason to repeat a day forever: to not obsess about the details.