the groundhog day project

Yesterday , I watched Groundhog Day yet again, but I really didn't say much about the movie itself. To be fair, there isn't much to be said about Groundhog Day that I have not already said in one form or another. Still, it's the 25th anniversary of the film's release coming up, so I feel that I should say something. If you want a good story about me and this blog and the movie, and about the town of Woodstock, where they filmed most of the movie--and where every year around this time, they celebrate with their own Groundhog Days--check Michael Schulman's piece at The Believer , check my specific response to that piece and a personal message I got from screenwriter Danny Rubin, or just start reading with Day 1 and go from there. If you want to understand the holiday, check here or here . This week, The Federalist called the film, "a seemingly light and whimsical" comedy that "has had an interesting life." Author Robert Tracinski goes on t...

Though it is day three with After the Dark (AKA The Philosophers ), I don't think I have much to say about the film as a film . It's shot well enough, the acting is good for such large cast, some with only a few lines to work with. A warning going in: if you don't like Sophie Lowe's whispering in the opening scene, you should know that she continues to talk like that. Though she tells him to be quiet, ostensibly because someone is in the house with them--he assures her that they know she's there--she is not actually whispering to be quiet; that's just her voice. She will continue to talk like that and will not have many facial expressions either. Somehow, it kind of works for her character. A big problem this film has, generally, with its cast is some of the lesser (meaning, less screen time) characters have more personality than the leads--Petra, Mr. Zimit (James D'Arcy) and James (Rhys Wakefield). Freddie Stroma's Jack, for example, is more expressive...

Parts of After the Dark work, but the whole is lacking... something. One problem: the bunker scenario that drives the film doesn't feel like a last day of senior philosophy class exercise, especially at this international school in Jakarta where, Petra tells us, all the students are overachievers. It feels like a day one exercise. Seriously, I think I used the life raft exercise on either the first or second day of my middle school debate class, and the premise is the same. Given a group of characters with particular occupations (and in our exercise, each with a particular piece of equipment from which he or she could not be separated), we had to limit the pool to as many as the raft could carry. This is not a complex philosophical exercise. It's about as basic as the three examples given early in the film--the trolley problem, the ignorant bliss problem (I wasn't familiar with that one but it seems pretty basic), and the infinite monkey theory... which really, that last...

I don't particularly know where this film is going. But, it's opening scene intrigues me. We open on two young people, naked in bed, kissing. But the film doesn't really show us their bodies. So, we know this film won't shy away from human feeling, from sensuality, but we also know this film is probably aiming for a PG-13. Second scene (not counting the guy from the previous scene waking up late and running to get to what turns out to be school) is a philosophy class. Hard to know if this film will succeed in being thoughtful but it certainly wants to be. The movie, by he way, is After the Dark . This philosophy class--it's the last day of the schoolyear--gets underway first by discussing the usefulness of philosophy then covers a few basic philosophical exercises--the infinite monkey idea, the trolley problem, some other one I hadn't heard of involving trying to get your friends to save your life--then they move on to a bigger idea (which I think is going t...