the groundhog day project

Davies (1995) tells us that Groundhog Day "ignor[es] considerations of race and gender politics" (p. 215). But, in no uncertain terms, Davies is wrong. Well, somewhat wrong. Well, actually mostly right on the side of race. Gender is a different story. Take a "rom com" of any era and it will tell you something about gender politics at the time it was made. It's harder for the film to have anything to say about race when there are only two people in the cast who are not white and have lines. I argued in a media studies class once that Phil is effectively put in the position of the disenfranchised (as evidenced in his conversation with Ralph and Gus at the bowling alley bar) in that the regular rules of so-called civilized society do not apply to him anymore. Money has no value. His work has no value (though he does continue to work at least most days because Rubin wanted that check-in to sprinkle through the original script). Because this is a mainstream comedy ...

Maybe it is because I am old, or because this apartment is often quite noisy, or just because, but I like having subtitles turned on when I watch movies, especially when I'm writing this blog. The Private Eyes ' DVD has no subtitles. And, tonight, I've got a commentary track playing--costar and cowriter Tim Conway and director Lang Elliott--and can barely hear the dialogue from the movie. Fortunately, I have seen this movie so many times that I know the dialogue anyway. Lots of talk about the Biltmore House to start. Then, some talk about the car--I'm fairly sure Conway is kidding, but he implies that they didn't tell the car's owner they intended to crash it into the water. A bunch of things right away that are in the IMDb trivia section--stunt guy nearly drowned when that car was stuck in the mud, a valuable book went missing from the library and the FBI got involved. Perhaps once we're past the opening credits, there will be more interesting insights. C...

It isn't all politics, of course. When it's the 2nd of the month and I come back to Groundhog Day again* it's nothing but a delightful time, appreciating the personal, appreciating the will to improve, the impulse to go after the things you want, and the urge to help others when you can. (* in case you're confused because I also watched Groundhog Day yesterday, 1) you must be new, 2) that was the last day of the Groundhog Day Project year, so I went with the titular film and 3) you should have been here for phase one (aka year one) when it was Groundhog Day every day. That kind of commitment lets you know what you're capable of, lets you know what you can handle, lets you know just who you are.) And I've written so many thousands of words about this film, it's a wonder that I can still say anything. But, it's also a wonder that anyone couldn't, you know, because the film is timeless--and I don't mean that as a pun--and universal. Everybod...

The Room isn't even playing yet. I saw Girls Trip today--it was pretty good and very funny. But, right now, I've actually got the Critical Role panel from Comicon playing on Twitch. But, Pages is open and I'm typing because, you know, who cares what order things happen anyway? The point is not that things are organized but that things are tragic. You find a woman and you stay together for seven years, live together, and she'll betray you with your best friend. You find a man and you stay together for seven years, he will bore the shit out of you even though he's fundamentally a good guy, and you will cheat on him and he will kill himself. No matter what you do, someone will betray someone, someone will die, life will suck... except for when it doesn't. It's those moments when it doesn't suck that matter. When he brings you a new dress, or she has already ordered the pizza. As I write this I hear some lyrics from the Groundhog Day musical in my head-...

I've got this urge to choose movies this month that will get me political angles, topics that will allow for me to fill these spaces with worry and with anger. (For example, yesterday, I had intended to watch Slam a third time, and briefly while still on the planeride home, I started writing what would have been the blog entry for that third viewing-- Meanwhile, I am instead watching Howl tonight and it just moved into its first bit of animation, it's play at being poetry about poetry. --and there was going to be a thing about minstrel shows, and a reference backward again to that final poetry round at the national speech tournament from which I was returned yesterday. But, I found the writing pushing me into a corner almost immediately. This comparison--or, more appropriately, as it would go, contrast--between black performers telling black stories and white performers in blackface inventing black stories was going to take 1) research and 2) a lot of thought and 3) car...

1. Today is the third anniversary of Roger Ebert's death, so I thought I'd share his thoughts on today's film--repeating Slam . 2. Today was the final day of AFA Nationals, it's already after midnight local time, and we're heading for the airport in the morning... Since it is (was) the last day of AFA and the final round I watched was, like yesterday, poetry--an amazing round, six brilliant performances, five of those six on issues about black Americans, so that's why I'm repeating Slam . 3. I'd like to get into some serious political stuff related to, primarily, the argument between Ray (Saul Williams) and Lauren (Sonja Sohn) that comes (oddly) late in the film. (Oddly, because the structure of this film seems a bit off. The jail sequence just goes on a little too long, and structurally comes too early to be the second act, and goes too late to be confined just to the second act. Also, the jail sequence is not split appropriately to be both acts on...

In the mood for some poetry after judging poetry semifinals at the end of today's tournament day. first poetry movie that came to mind was Slam (I couldn't remember if Total Eclipse really includes much poetry and I swear The Basketball Diaries includes almost none, and I've already watched Dead Poets Society for this blog) so I'm watching Slam , even though I remember liking the move but being underwhelmed by the poetry. (I suppose I could have finally watched Howl but I didn't feel like something new tonight; didn't even get back to the hotel until almost eleven. That's how Nationals goes. Early starts and late ends to the days, three hard days then you're out.) (Separate note: Danny Rubin pointed out that this---Gainesville--is his home town.) The movie is filmed like it's a documentary, and I think it's covering a lot of the same themes as the documentary SlamNation . It's talking about how black Americans ends up disproportion...

I remember when I was in Woodstock, Illinois two years ago--that's the filming location for most of Groundhog Day , if you must know, this blog's namesake and the film I watched for 365 days in a row and still come back to at least once a month--and I imagined being stuck in that location for a repeating day, and there was a "homeless" guy--really, he was just out of work and had made his way to Woodstock from a nearby town because he knew the crowd would mean he might be able to get more handouts from sympathetic passersby--that is, more people overall, more sympathy just by playing the percentages not that he was as cynical about it as I think I just sounded in describing it--and he was a nice enough guy, but unfortunately, I couldn't give him any cash because I saw him on my third day in Woodstock and I had run out of cash--I did offer to buy him Starbucks, I think, because I had just emerged from Starbucks, which is right by where Phil Connors hugged Ned Ryers...

Collective of wedges in your hand Bounce together, their tips joined as one Circle created, their joining done Break it Middle mangled, broken Stripped away to the wrong owners, pieces like tokens Wedges damaged, misshapen, alone           Today's reason to talk about divorce again: because fuck you all, sometimes I'm still dealing with it.

True Romance is Tarantino by way of Tony Scott. Almost immediately, the dialogue plays like straight Tarantino. And Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) almost feels like a slightly more grown up Mark Hunter from Pump Up the Volume . Almost. (Meanwhile, I’m here because of Brad Pitt. Or, by way of Brad Pitt. The poetry of these many degrees is almost at its inevitable end.) Alabama (Patricia Arquette) gives us some (probably) pointless Exporration... Does that work? Exporration ? Exposition crossed with narration. I wanted to get either introduction or opening into the compound word but neither one really fits with exposition or narration without just sounding like the two words mashed up next to each other instead of into each other. Anyway, it’s the usual bullshit opening stuff, life’s about to change and I didn’t expect it and all that. (Meanwhile, I want to explain. The short version is that it was a suggestion/dare from my friend Lane, current president of our speech team—to...

I'm watching a fairly obscure little movie in the theater today-- The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet and there two moments stick out as things I want to get into here. (First of all, the movie's directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet--if you know who that is and are interested, you should know that it's an English language film (though filmed in Canada). It's about a 10-year-old-boy who heads out on the road (almost Into the Wild -style) to get from Montana to D.C. to accept an award for inventing a perpetual motion machine. There's a whole thing about guilt over the accidental death of his twin brother and an almost painfully obvious metaphor--perpetual motion for the way the family has settled into its post-tragedy life, and everything resolves itself a little too neatly. But, the visuals, including overlayed maps and diagrams (apparently the book on which the film is based includes a lot of these things) are great, a lot of train rides and countrysides (Canada posin...

That Jonathan looks like his grandfather and (middle) namesake is not just a coincidence, or a cinematic convenience. That workers at the airport at the end of the film look like characters Jonathan has met on his rigid search is also not merely a coincidence, nor a cinematic joke. (I'm not even sure that it's a coincidence that both of Foer's novels involve an old Jewish man who was close to two young women when he was younger; when Lista says her mother thought Safran should marry Augustine because she was older, it reminded me very much of Anna and her sister in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close . Both of the primary plots are driven by objects, as well--the photograph in Everything Is Illuminated , the key in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , but I don't think I'm dealing in objects today.) These people look alike because this story is universalizing. It seems a part of the human condition that we want to know where we come from, and that's vital ...

Where was I? Adorno, perhaps. This: "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Which isn't what he said. Not really. Brian Oard, in his Mindful Pleasures blog, points out that this quotation is "always taken out of context and rarely footnoted." Hell, I quoted it indirectly from a study guide that has no clear author and which did not identify the specific source for the quotation. Fortunately, Adorno is well enough known among those who know him--he's come up, for me, in my undergraduate history program and my graduate communication program--so a quick google search and I've found more specific reference. The line is from a 1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society." In a bit more context (from an English translation of the collection Prisms ): The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threa...

When you are in the middle of a story, it's isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you're telling it to yourself or to someone else. --Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace With this quotation, Stories We Tell begins, Michael Polley reading it even before his "narration" begins. think of the story we are telling a twisted, amalgamated beast that eventually becomes history a history written by the winners the privileged hooks' "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" perhaps most of us knowing only a small piece of the whole many of us lack the capacity or power to substantially alter our place in the larger story some of us but for the grace of god or gods ...