the groundhog day project

Note: I've only read half of the recently discovered "third revision" of the screenplay, so I won't get into picking that apart just yet . Today, I've watched 3 more episodes of Tru Calling and, while I don't intend to go episode by episode like I did with Day Break , I figured I'd share some thoughts. Also, I've had some thought about the future of The Groundhog Day Project after Day 365. First, Tru Calling : Episode 6 - "Star-Crossed" - Turns out Davis (Tru's boss) knows what she can do, so there's a brief conversation about it, and she's got a great response to Davis calling her repeat-a-day gig "a gift." She says, "Candles are gifts, boots, bath salts maybe, but this is... I don't know what this is..." My first problem (for this entry, not my first problem with the show; that would be the lame, 90s-indie-band-that-never-made-it-big theme song) here is the more Tru does this, especially now with h...

Some random thoughts about Phil Connors: Maybe he spoke French already and he just had to get over his impulse to laugh in that restaurant scene. Maybe he already knew how to ice sculpt, he was just such a misanthrope he had never bothered to share his talent with anyone. Maybe his father really was a piano mover... not that that necessarily made Phil a great piano player. And maybe his "six months" of card throwing didn't even happen within the time loop but when he was a teenager and had mono. Just the other day... Oh man, how long ago was it that I rambled on about the use of that phrase, " the other day in TV shows? I think that was early on in this blog, back when I was still wide-eyed and innocent. But I digress. Just the other day, 24 April to be precise, Charles Murray at Fox News was describing some scenes from Groundhog Day that he says "illustrat[e] the unplanned and bumpy trajectory that Phil's thirty or forty years [referencing Rami...

I imagine the days where Phil Connors gets contemplative. Maybe it’s before he turns to depression. Maybe it’s after. And, a weird thought occurs to me—he can never fast. I mean, he can go without food for a day, sure. But, that’s it, a day. His digestive system will have food from the day before, so he probably won’t be all that hungry. I mean, yeah, when we’re used to eating regularly, we’ll get hungry after missing a meal. But, that’s not real hunger. There’s an interesting bit in Siddhartha in which Kamaswami asks Siddhartha what he has learned that he can give. Siddhartha’s response: “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.” Kamaswami asks, what good is fasting? He’s a businessman, a merchant who certainly doesn’t value the contemplative moments of life. Siddhartha explains: It is of great value, sir. If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do. If, for instance, Siddhartha had not learned how to fast, he would have had to seek some kind of work t...

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage – Lucius Annaeus Seneca And, sometimes it’s just going through the motions. As I write this particular entry, I’m a couple weeks away from the fall quarter starting, a couple weeks away from being really busy. Some days—today, for example—this blog is the only commitment I’ve got. I went to a movie screening last night, might go to one tonight… alone. At least my only option isn’t Heidi II . The thing is, I’ve been thinking about the passage of time, how we reference the past or the future, how we put some things off for later even when we’ve got nothing to do. I’m reminded of a line from Tremors : Yeah. See, we plan ahead, that way we don't do anything right now. Earl explained it to me. I look at a group of post-it notes with ideas scribbled on them and instead I start writing about something else. The post-it notes are like a safety net for when I’ve got nothing to say. The weird thing is, I want to complain about something that i...