the groundhog day project

[EDIT: If anyone is coming to this blog from the Believer article, welcome. To find the daily pieces on Groundhog Day you've got to look at August 2013 to August 2014. And, I will be watching Groundhog Day and writing an entry related to it later today--today being February 2. The piece below was posted late last night for February 1st. For the month of January, I watched 5 action movies from the 1980s. Enjoy.] Let us get the most important item out of the way first off on this last day with Top Gun : There’s a question on Quora — In Top Gun , why was Jester allowed to fly below the “hard deck,” but Maverick and Goose were reprimanded for it? But, I’ve got a better question—if the “hard deck” was 10,000 feet and Maverick gets in trouble for flying below said altitude, what were both jets doing flying so low well before the moment in question? I mean, look at this: Does that look like they are above 10,000 feet? (It’s so low, it reminds me of the opening titles sequ...

Watching Rambo: First Blood Part II for the last time--I like to toy with the idea that after watching any of these movies for multiple days I will retire them from my viewing repertoire--it strikes me that I haven't had much that was actually negative to say about this film. Sure, it represents an attempt to rebuild American hegemony symbolically, and a manipulation to reconstruct the myth of Vietnam, but it's just so damn fun. So, I figured I'd end this week of Rambo by looking backward, see where Rambo came from. I've mentioned David Morrell, author of the novel First Blood . I've even talked here and there about differences between book Rambo and movie Rambo. But, why does Rambo even exist? Wilder (1990) presents us with a story--I'll just provide the beginning of it: A young boy is raised in a patriotic Christian culture to love god and country; to believe "Thou shalt not kill." At the age of 18, not yet old enough to drink or vote, he is giv...

There may be a scientific explanation for why groundhogs (in the wild) would actually wake up midwinter. Consider this a sequel to my entry about the origins of Groundhog Day. Groundhogs are very simple animals; Stutz (2006) tells us, “They live pretty solitary lives, are good swimmers and adequate climbers, and, when not browsing on grasses, plants, and tree bark, spend the time working on their underground network of burrows. These activities take up half their lives. They spend the other half asleep. (p. 21) He goes on to explain how “winter in the northern hemisphere can mean sparse pickings” for a plant eater like the groundhog, hence they have evolved, like many other mammals, to hibernate through the colder months because that’s “better than retiring hungry every night and a lot less work than migrating”—and here’s where Stutz is just rude—“especially if you’re a lumpy creature with stubby legs.” Then Stutz provides a lengthy explanation about the hormone melatonin. Th...

Did anybody else find the name of the park where the groundhog ceremony was held funny? That's the start of a thread on IMDb regarding Groundhog Day 's Gobbler's Knob. Maybe I don't have the mind of a teenage boy but I never took it as anything more than the place's name. In fact, on the IMDb thread, I pointed out that knob is a geographical term and gobbler presumably refers to turkeys... I haven't confirmed the turkey thing as far as why the real Gobbler's Knob is called that, but my guess is once upon a time it has some wild turkeys hanging about. I never considered it as something suggestive because, if nothing else, that's the name of the actual place in Punxsutawney where they hold the groundhog ceremony. Still, people insist on thinking it's suggestive. Recall, my friend Stephanie , watching the movie for the first time--at my urging and on my iPad--suggested the name Gobbler's Knob was a sex reference... actually, she suggested it...

It's that time of the... couple weeks again when I take some impromptu speaking prompts and link them all to Groundhog Day , which I did here , here and here before (actually, that last one I didn't finish in just one entry because it was late and I was tired, so there was a part two ). Now, on with the show... Actually, I must interrupt first. See, today at the tournament there were several people asking me about this blog, what's the goal, what's the point, what's the value, and once again "what the fuck are you doing?" But, that last guy, aside from the profanity, can't be trusted anyway because he doesn't like museums or beaches or trees. That's just not normal. The museum thing is funny because a) he doesn't like paintings because they're abstract representations and not reality itself but he has been known to write screenplays and b) if he doesn't like abstract things, I suppose he wouldn't understand why I'm doing ...

I ended yesterday’s comments on Danny Rubin’s script notes with a simple justification: “…it’s appropriate that Rubin overthought it even before he wrote it because now, more than 20 years later, I’m overthinking it all over again.” Rubin’s got additional benefits to repeating the same day over—in addition to the generic “no consequences” and the “no hangovers” bit we get from Gus (and which is in Rubin’s notes): “No fear of V.D. No fear of what other people think.” Two very different benefits there. And, there’s more: Don’t have to wash clothes or dishes. Don’t have to go to bed. Always know where you left things. And, there’s a point in Rubin’s notes where he takes it farther than the script would ever go. First, there’s a note about deer hunting, noting cleverly, “All the sport could’ve gone out of that. He knows where all the deer are.” Then, there’s more killing: Macabre Twist: Since death had no consequence, (and he had grown bored with killing deer)), it’s [sic] couldn’t ...

I had trouble reading the Script Notes bit in the eBook of How to Write Groundhog Day before—it’s not Rubin’s notes typed up but scans of the original typed pages. Full page images are not the easiest thing to navigate (and text in them is hard to read) in the nook app. Then, I forgot about the section until recently, and finally read through it yesterday. Most of the Script Notes seem to have been written before Rubin even completed a draft of the screenplay. Then, there are some check marks next to each of them. Not sure if he was checking them off as he put them into the screenplay or what… not even sure all of these things went into the screenplay. But, it’s interesting to see even more of the process not just in Rubin’s head but what he put to paper before he even sat down to write. The first note kinda gets the movie totally, so really, I could just cover it and call it a day. But, of course, I won’t do that. Anyway, the first note: “If there are no consequences for actions,...

Subtitle: one lingering detail that wasn’t all in voiceover. Just after Phil was “learning how to listen” in Rubin’s original, there’s a scene at a Basketball Court. Phil plays one-on-one with “some TEENAGER.” In the direction, “Phil steals the ball and does a good lay-up. The Teenager calls it a “[p]retty good move for an old guy.” Phil says he practices a lot. (Six months, four to five hours a day, and you’d be an expert.) So, the Teenager says he’s going to practice a lot, too. And, Phil asks him, “Aren’t you supposed to be in classes now?” (Nevermind that in Punxsutawney, they probably get the day off school… despite the frog prince scene as well.) The Teenager responds: “You wanna be my daddy or you wanna play b-ball?” (There’s already some things going on on Groundhog Day regarding parenting and parental roles, but they’re worthy of a separate entry.) Then, it’s the Teenager’s turn to do some exposition, while dribbling: Everybody worrying about my future. I say, “He...

Phil only tells us a few things about Groundhog Day, the holiday. In the opening scene, he tells us the basic bits: “According to the legend, tomorrow, February 2, if the groundhog sees his shadow, we'll have six more weeks of winter.” Later, Phil also tells us—though it’s hard to judge just how serious he is—that the townspeople used to “take the hog out and they used to eat it” (more on that below). Punxsutawney Phil, the “prognosticator of prognosticators” can predict an early spring, supposedly. However, the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tells us that Punxsutawney Phil is actually wrong more often than he’s right. The Stormfax Almanac puts his accuracy at 39%. But, all this begs the question: why do we think a groundhog can predict the weather (or at least, why do we say as much)? Groundhog Day can be traced back to a few different things: Imbolc, Candlemas, and a group of hunters who actually did eat the groundhog. Im...