the groundhog day project

...the legend of Arturo, who was a Portuguese fisherman. He met this beautiful girl his first night in town--Catarina. And eventually they fell in love. But the problem was that Catarina's father was the territorial governor. He didn't want his only little girl running around with a lowly fisherman. So he told Arturo that he'd have to ship off. Which he did, but not before he told Catarina he'd be back for her. And when he came back, he'd signal with three long blasts, So she could dive off the rocks and swim to the boat, And they'd be on their way. So, a year later, everything went as planned. But when she was swimming out to the boat, The fog got so thick that she couldn't find the boat. Arturo panicked and he called out, "Catarina! Catarina!" Catarina yelled back, "Arturo!" With that, he just dove right off the boat into the icy waters, And they never found each other, And they both drowned. The legend is, They reu...

I forgot to mention yesterday that I was writing from the plane. It was a very long travel day, a couple hundred miles by car, a couple thousand or so by plane. I had intended to look over the blog entry before I posted it but by the time I was home, I was far too tired. I can barely remember what I wrote, some rambling about Murray and his wife, Murray and Paul, Paul and his fiancee, Paul and the postmistress. I think I might have said that these men of Tickle Head wanting to bring the oil company to their town just to have a good paying job was a bad thing. Well, maybe I didn't say it, but I feel like I implied it. I do sort of side with the postmistress--her name is Kathleen, by the by. She rejects the idea of the factory coming to Tickle Head specifically because it's the oil company. Sure, it's a "petrochemical repurposing plant"--essentially a recycling plant, but just a PR thing the oil company is doing--but it's still "the oil company", sho...

The Grand Seduction , like any movie—seriously, read back through this blog and you’ll see it time and time again—tells us something about gender, gender roles, gender expectations; and it also tells us something about living in a conservative, capitalist world. These two things twist together in the subplot involving Brendan Gleason’s Murray and his wife. We learn right away he is not only cashing his own welfare check, he is also cashing the check of a dead friend—he insists that as long as that friend remains on the government books, he has an moral duty to keep cashing those checks (and he has “power of attorney” paperwork, though it’s not clear how legal that paperwork is). Still, he wants to work. That’s the world in which Tickle Head exists, a world in which everybody (even the characters who seem much too old for factory work) would rather have a job—even an oil company job—than welfare. We’re presented Murray and his wife as a sort of counter to the flashback to Murray’s chi...

(Before I get into Rent for today, a note: Once again, I am writing a blog entry on a plane--on the way to Ohio for a speech tournament--and it still amazes me that I can do this. I know my thesis I'm working on--and after this week in Ohio I'm planning on getting into the work part of it finally, going back through the more than 600 entries now and coding them for content--is ostensibly about the presentation of self, the re-creation of self through writing... through blogging, but there's something to be said for the practical part of it as well. I started this blog in a one room apartment, writing on a desktop computer while Groundhog Day ran on my tablet next to the desktop monitor. I was stuck in one place if I wanted to save time and write while the movie was one--and I did want to do that. An hour and forty-one minutes a day for that movie was a lot of time as things kept going. Writing during the film (most of the time) made things a lot easier. I graduated for ...

Phil’s thing, before the loop, during the loop, after the loop, is that he is attentive. On Day 2, he recognizes the banter on the radio from the day before, for example. But, even before that, he has already been paying attention. Watch Rita in front of the bluescreen, arms up, jazz hands opening and closing. What does Phil do when he steps in front of that moving truck so many days later? Arms up, jazz hands opening and closing. For whatever reason (in that instance) he’s mimicking Rita’s movements from that day she changed him (according to him). By the way, in case there’s confusion, I don’t think it’s the radio banter that convinces him the day is repeating on that second morning; instead it’s when he looks around the room and sees his stuff in the same position not as the night before (from his perspective) but from the night previous to that one. Phil puts thought into the things he says, the things he does. When he gets out of the van and sees the Pennsylvanian Hotel on Febru...