the groundhog day project

Author's Note: Color me a hypocrite, but I don't follow much, if any, of the advice I am about to give. Here's the present: I'm sitting on a pew in a church building someplace in Long Beach, California. My daughter's got rehearsal for a play and we're far enough from home that I just hang out during, work on my blog, watch some tv, read, whatever. Only my third time tonight, so I couldn't say there's a pattern but for writing this blog. I've already seen two movies today-- Wish Upon and War for the Planet of the Apes --but I don't feel like writing about either of those. I'm stuck in a different mode. Stuck in a loop. I was listening to the soundtrack to the Groundhog Day musical on the drive here. Between Phil's being stuck in a pattern he needs to get out of, but not for the reason he thinks; Rita being stuck on imaginary knights in shining armor from childhood fairy tales, but knowing that's unrealistic and not worth waiting f...

You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up? - Hard Harry Hard-On Pump Up the Volume is not about the stuff that's wrong with the whole country, or society as a whole. There are hints of bigger stuff (especially in Mark's final speech) but mostly, Hard Harry's broadcasts keep spiraling around Hubert H. Humphrey High School, where Principal Cresswood (Annie Ross) is following in Joe Clark's footsteps (a la Lean on Me ), weeding out the bad students rather than making them (or at least helping them make themselves) better. (Plus Murdock (Andy Romano), the Vice Principal does his own locker searches without anyone around and eventually gets into a fight with a student.) Meanwhile, the lives of many of the teenagers at the school... welll, they suck. They live in Paradise Hills, Arizona, suburb of Phoenix. (And presumably the equivalent to Paradise Valley, that includes eight resorts; it's a tourist town.) And, they're living in ...

There's danger ahead. See, I want to run Hedwig through the Kozlovic-Black scale, but I know my arguments regarding 15.75 atonement might offend some. Or should . Anyway, let's just do this. Hedwig is quite 1 tangible and 2 central and an 3 outsider . 3/3 Regarding 4 divinely sourced , Kozlovic (2009) explains, "Christ-Figures usually arrive onto the scene through some form of deliberate outside intervention, sometimes by a distant God-figure" (p. 6). The stress there is mine because obviously Hedwig is not in America because of a distant God-figure. He's there because of Luther... who coincidentally shares a name with the founder of a branch of Christianity. There is outside intervention. 4/4 Hedwig's birth is not exactly a 4.5 miraculous birth but Hedwig is born from Hansel because of an accident. I'm driven to Merriam-Webster for what should be a basic concept-- miracle . The first definition is "an extraordinary event manifesting div...

Hedwig. From the Germanic name Hadewig, derived from the Germanic elements hadu "battle, combat" and wig "war". Also, the name of, apparently, two different saints. Plus, on a very simplistic level, there's the pun on head wig . Hedwig is a character in conflict. With Tommy Gnosis. With Yitzhak. With the Angry Inch (the band). With her angry inch. With herself. She has little emotion but anger through most of the present storyline. While Yitzhak listens to Rent and wears a Rent t-shirt and auditions for (and gets offered a part in ) a traveling production of Rent ... Yitzhak is a romantic. He wants more than cold intercourse. He wants love. Or at least some sort of acceptance. On the other hand, Hedwig is stuck. She claims she's looking for her "other half" but she's just stalking Tommy. She cannot see what she has. She is too damaged. And, like another Tommy , she is a bit deaf and blind. Speaking of Tommy (which came up last week ...

In these dangerous times, where it seems the world is ripping apart at the seams, we can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day and [we] should reach out to each other and bond as a community, rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium. First of all, I'd change that ending to, well, ever; just cut it off at "the terrors of life." Forget the millennium ; live this every day. Reach out to people, connect. Second of all, those were some of the final words written by Jonathan Larson, found on his computer after his death. For those of you not paying attention, Jonathan Larson wrote the stage version of Rent . In his analysis of Rent , Scott Miller says quite succinctly (and obviously), " Rent is so many things to so many people." As it should be. As any movie should be. As any story should be. In Rent , we've got eight principal characters--Mark, Roger, Mimi, Maureen, Joanne, Angel, Col...

(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 ...

The film version of Rent starts with a song--"Seasons of Love A"--that doesn't come until Act Two in the stage version. On the one hand, this is because a film, even a musical, doesn't have the two act structure common to stage musicals. But, this song also serves as a sort of love letter to Rentheads who will probably be disappointed by other changes made for the film--from small stuff like Mark never actually calls Alexi Darling to quit his job (seriously, though the lines are there, he's nowhere near a phone), or Mark opening up the film (after that initial transplanted song) with dialogue rather than singing; to big stuff like cutting half of "Goodbye Love" because director Chris Columbus thought it was emotional overload. Similarly, the film never explicitly lets us know that Roger's ex-girlfriend killed herself because Columbus thought that would be "too much." It's a musical about a bunch of poverty-stricken artists, many of w...

Thirty-seven minutes in, dancers dancer, and the screen goes blurry but for two spots of clarity--Maria on the left, Tony on the right. The rest of the dance ceases to matter (and is quickly reduced to just three other couples) as Maria and Tony dance for the first time. And, as the dancing ceases (for them) there's this line: "I knew something never before was going to happen, had to happen, but this is so much more." The something is clear--like Romeo and Juliet before them, Tony and Maria have fallen in love. Love at first sight. A trope of fiction, entirely necessary for a musical because we don't really have time to deal with anything more realistic. Not that musicals aren't realistic. Aside from the obvious break with, you know, normal human interaction, musicals tend to be quite grounded, more melodrama than drama. "You're the only thing I'll see forever," Maria sings, and a somewhat cheesy thought occurs to me to counter my usual cyn...

Considering Clark Griswold was supposed to be a little more forceful at Wally World and hijack the plane home in the original film (before details were changed), his aggressiveness on the road at the start of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation fits the character. It’s not in any way a realistic take on a human being but for Clark Griswold it makes sense. He’s more of a cartoon character. But, I don’t want to start my week of Christmas Vacation getting into Clark’s character, though I may get into that later; I want to talk about Christmas movies. About Christmas. About meaning. Home Alone is a modern classic among Christmas movies, but it’s barely about Christmas; it just happens to occur around the holiday. Even more so, Black Christmas . The question then is what is Christmas about and, more importantly, what should a Christmas movie be about? Let us jump past the obvious Christian aspects and the obvious pagan aspects to deal with something I think is bigger: capitalism...

(I wish I could title this entry, “don’t you just love every day” but I am not in that great a mood tonight.) I think it is that I like April... or I can relate to her, at least. That feeling that you do not belong, that everything about you is just wrong... well, maybe not everything, but the feeling is just a different level of the same. The feeling that no matter how hard you try, it will not matter anyway. Or, if it would matter, you will just be too timid or too weak-minded to try. My point is, however much this film may be flawed, I think I can relate to the character(s). For example, my family is doing a big Thanksgiving thing this year—just a handful of days from now—and there have been emails going back and forth about who is bringing what, and I have yet to respond because, well, I just have not had time to think about it. Between grad school work and teaching and, you know, life, if not for this blog and the theme I chose for this month, I would not really be thinking abo...

I suppose my problem, having watched La Boheme and seeing which scene they feature in Moonstruck , is that the two don’t actually play well together. On the one hand, you can take the experience of the opera as the thing that turns the heart of Loretta—even though that turn is inevitable from the start because it’s a romantic comedy... (Come to think of it, the use of Casablanca in When Harry Met Sally —something I never mentioned last week—makes more sense if you consider the original ending in which Harry and Sally remain just friends.) The turn may be inevitable, but it still needs a catalyst. Ronny’s persistence isn’t enough. But, the romance of the opera works. It’s simplistic. We don’t know—generally—what’s going on in that scene from La Boheme , but maybe we’ve got a vague idea that La Boheme involves love and romance, or maybe we just assume that the opera includes those things. There’s actually some room for discussion of class in this film, though I’m not sure I part...

Subtitle: notes on the original (and mostly I’ll probably just harp on the voiceover), because I never really did that yet. I can’t tell you when it began, other than to say “on groundhog day.” And I can’t tell you why it happened to me, other than to say I deserved a break in my career, and this was certainly it. So begins Phil’s forgotten voiceover. The time loop is already in effect, he’s already been mouthing the DJ dialogue and answering Mrs. Lancaster’s questions before she’s quite asked them. And, here you also see a bit of how Phil was different in the original, i.e. before they cast Bill Murray; Phil was young. While that “break in my career” becomes a break from his career in the time loop, what Phil is getting at is this is his first time in the field, not Rita’s. Though Rita is “about Phil’s age,” she’s a much more seasoned producer than he is a reporter in this version. The voiceover continues: How do I know these things before they happen? You may call it cheating,...