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...

I would especially note the kitchen scene late in the film between Dave (Nick Thune) and Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani). It goes a little something like this... Keep in mind, Annie has bought into the maze (she is the one who hangs the towel over the exit to keep the Minotaur inside). The apartment has been taken over by the maze. They have just come up with the plan to create the chrysalis at the heart of the maze to give the whole a weak spot. Dave didn't make a weak spot originally because, "then someone could destroy it." Harry and Annie don't come right out and say it, exactly, but they frame failure (or the potential for it) as part of life. No matter how much Dave wanted this maze to last, it is supposed to have a weak spot, because everything has a weak spot. That is life itself. Success really matters because to get there you overcome the potential for failure. Dave says, of the maze, "This is the only thing I've ever started that's worth finishi...

One more time: Dave Made a Maze . Because repetition is the heart and soul of this blog, of my life, of life itself. Day in day out, what makes it all interesting and worth bothering are the little things, the moments that make one day unique and different from the next. Dave's incorrect use of "tertiary" for example--when friends of mine make silly mistakes with grammar (or, Phil forbid, I make one) I notice. I don't always correct them. But, I note it and if I had the memory capacity of, say, Santa Claus, I would have a list at the end of every year and I would let people know. Like, Hi Jared, you have made [this many] grammatical errors in public this year . Hi Shari, please repair the grammatical issues and try better next year . And, so on. Eventually ending with myself: Hi Robert, you have made thousands of grammatical errors, and far too many typos to ever be forgiven. You have to do better next year. Clear and civil communication is essential to a peaceful ...

Being the Groundhog Day enthusiast/obsessive/blogger that I am, it is interesting to me that out of all the characters in Dave Made a Maze , the one who never actually enters the maze is the hobo played by Rick Overton, aka Ralph from Groundhog Day . The one guy--who just might be Ralph all these years later--who has been around this kind of relentless, repetitive, lesson-making fantastical venture before, is the one who never participates now. (Not that he, you know, ever really necessarily knew what Phil was going through in that time loop. The closest he might have come to understanding it may only have been on that night that he and Gus were quite drunk. And, of course, they would not remember it the next day, anyway.) Also, in the opening credits, he gets a "with". The hobo is, of course, the person that, by choice or circumstance, exists outside the normal channels of everyday life. Everyone else is eventually caught up in the cardboard labyrinth in some way. Even t...

I saw All the Money in the World today but I have nothing really to say about it. Performances were fine, but it was a bit too plot-driven to really offer any insight into the characters. Solid but nothing special. So, the next movie on my "movie life" childhood deconstruction list is For Your Eyes Only . I watched that once before for this blog when Roger Moore died. I will likely get to it tomorrow. Instead, I am watching Dave Made a Maze . I will save you the jump over to IMDb--though why anyone wouldn't want an excuse to jump over to IMDb, I don't know--and say it is about Dave (Nick Thune), who builds a cardboard box fort in his living room that turns out to be bigger on the inside. His friends go in after him, along with a documentary crew.           Rick Overton (Ralph from Groundhog Day ) plays a hobo that Dave's friend Gordon (Adam Busch) brings in because he says he knows cardboard.           There's a Minotaur...

I was writing today about the choices we make as bloggers. Or, as people on the internet more generally. Papacharissi (2009) Calls it an "information game." But for the moment I cannot talk about that. I've been stuck on High Fidelity because I find a bit too much of myself in Rob Gordon (John Cusack). Tonight, I'm checking out the deleted scenes before I get into the film proper, and I just watched one that surprised me because who else plays Rob's father but Harold Ramis. And, I'm done. I mean, to loop back around like that. Andie MacDowell's real first name is Rosalie (my mother's name) and now Harold Ramis is playing the father of a guy named Rob (my name, you inattentive passerby). Everything loops back to Groundhog Day , eventually. Every movie is every other movie. I intended to talk about white male privilege today, I want to talk about punctum, but here I am talking about links back to Groundhog Day because every blog entry is the same, e...

I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over? Phil’s problem here: he thinks the day just happens to him. He doesn’t realize that while there may be a few elements here—the girl and, well, the sea otter lovin’—that aren’t things that would be on repeat. Just like the second snowman scene we see in Groundhog Day , when Phil tried to get that same girl again, he might come on just a little too strong, and she might not be interested. Or, his assumption that they might make like sea otters might be just the thing to make her unwilling. Phil, prior to being trapped in the time loop, where his choices are limited, apparently doesn’t understand free will. Phil assumes a repeating day to be the same thing again and again, even though by the time he tells the story above, it’s Day 3 and he’s already changed the way the day goes. He’...

That’s from The Sandman —Morpheus sentences the guy who imprisoned him to recurring awakening. Basically, he’s constantly under the impression he has just woken from a nightmare only to find himself in a new one. It’s like Jungian false awakening (Celia Green’s version thereof, especially) taken in a very dark direction. I’ve linked Groundhog Day to dreams before , of course. I’ve had a note since working through Benesh’s (2011) dissertation on Groundhog Day to get into false awakening as a topic, but in the modern parlance, I just wasn’t feeling it. Then, today, I was watching the latest episodes of Louie and there’s this surreal quality of late, with bizarre news reports— (For example: “Ten people died in the Bronx last night due to a fire that killed ten people in the Bronx last night during a fire.”) —and just as Louie’s new relationship is about to come to an end, there’s a hurricane coming into New York City. And then, suddenly, the hurricane, and the woman, are gone. ...