the groundhog day project

Backtracking a bit before really getting into The Fox and the Hound . I talked yesterday about the Mandela Effect, particularly related to how I never knew Tod's name had only one D, but also how many people remember Chief dying rather than just breaking his leg. But, there's another thing about The Fox and the Hound that vexes me. I couldn't be sure about it until the movie was over yesterday--and I had already posted the blog entry, so I couldn't add this then--that I had invented this (or maybe my mother did or one of my sisters; like, maybe it was a thing we said in response to the dialogue in the film and I just always remembered it as being actual dialogue. (If it is that, I am sure one of my sisters will chime in after I post this entry. The youngest two, at least, pay some attention to this blog.) So, this is the thing (and this will actually tie in to the topic I expected to write about today, which is fortunate): Copper and Tod, when they are still cute an...

Look, I can appreciate this. I was young too. I felt just like you. Hated authority, hated all my bosses, thought they were full of shit. Look, it's like they say, if you're not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven't turned establishment by 30, you've got no brains. Because there are no storybook romances, no fairytale endings. So, before you run out and change the world, ask yourself, "What do you really want?" --Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey), Swimming with Sharks The movie begins with lines from Lord Byron, not just because of the link to nature. Also, Chris McCandless--the fictional version, if not the real version--is a Byronic hero. A bit like an antihero, the Byronic hero doesn't fit in with society. He's got a distaste for social norms and the trappings of life as most of us know it. I don't need to deliberately be political (or avoid being so) in this blog, as I did yesterday , because the Byronic hero is inherentl...

The commentary track includes director Michel Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman. It starts amusingly. Gondry describes the action on screen as Joel gets out of bed and Kaufman wonders if he's just going to narrate the whole thing. As I listen to them discuss when they thought they might film in Canada, I find myself also looking at the book, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The shooting Script . Gondry writes the introduction, and he's got some outlandish ideas that... well I'll let him tell you. It all started at a Brussels restaurant when my friend and artist Pierre Bismuth challenged me with this concept: "What if in your mail you find a kind of official card stipulating: 'We are acknowledging, Monsieur Gondry Michel, that Lisa Brook had you erased from her memory. Please don't try to reach her.' ... They point out how Clementine invades Joel's personal space on the train. Gondry suspects it was Jim Carrey and not Joel Barish who didn't...

(638) I've got so many sources bookmarked regarding Groundhog Day that I couldn't find a certain one I was looking for in preparation for today's entry. It's Day (3) with (500) Days of Summer and I want to talk about movies. As if that's unusual. What I mean is that this is a story about a story, a movie about movies. No, it's not a love story, but it's a story about love stories. Summer is named Summer for a couple reasons, for example: 1) it's romantic, it's special and 2) it's a season, something bigger than a single day, bigger than a single person... she's practically a force of nature. She quotes a song lyric in her high school yearbook and sales of that album go up for two years. She works at an ice cream parlor and sales increase 212%. She checks out an apartment for rent and is offered a price below asking. She loves pancakes and she loves The Smiths and she loves Ringo Starr, but she just cannot love Tom. She's somewh...

(637) (That's the number for this blog entry. It will be consistent neither with the personal numbers or any film references below.) I don't remember what day I "met" my wife, or "met" either of the girlfriends before her. Since I met them online, they were just names on a screen for a while before they became someone important to me. I know Katie mattered to me sometime in July, Miranda in June, Sarah in August. That last one--who I would later marry and from which I will soon be divorced--August 15th, 2001, what I would later call "Arrow Day." (And, not for some cheesy, Cupid-related reason, and that only even occurred to me now because I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron tonight and watched the latest episode of Arrow earlier today and the bow-and-arrow thing was in my head... No, Arrow Day took its name from a particular message board post of mine that got us talking. I posted an arrow pointing to the link to my website after mention of writing...

It's interesting that the CliffsNotes for The Notebook suggests a religious theme to the story. On the surface, I don't think there is one... at all. Sure, the swan could be taken for its Christian symbolism (though I am not at all sure where that association comes from; some versions of the Bible list the swan among unclean birds but otherwise, the swan is not in there), OR it could be taken for its symbolism in that swans supposedly mate for life. (Plus, the whole migration thing I already mentioned yesterday .) Taking the presence of swans together with the clothing at Allie's family dinner, we get an interesting thing, though. While Fin and Sara dress in white and blend right in with all the rich folk, Noah wears black, standing out like a black swan--which in science is an unpredictable outlier (or something like that). Let us assume that Noah is not an unexpected thing existing simply to disrupt Allie's life... but not go so far as the CliffsNotes author who ...

The opening shots of The Notebook evoke something peaceful, natural. Noah (though it might not actually be Noah in this instance) rowing in the early morning suggests something pastoral. Something timeless. In cinematic terms, it places the story within this film in the context of something bigger. There's a good reason, perhaps, that Noah has little more personality than crazy, borderline-stalkerish guy, who now 15 minutes in is seeming more free-spirited and maybe--just, maybe--a little less insane. He's the adolescent impulse to pursue the girl. That's it. Noah--his name even evoking something from long ago--is a guy who could be living in any time, any place, not just 1940s America. (Hell, after Allie leaves and he goes to war, his hair suggests someone who's a bit of an anachronism.) Gosling's character in Blue Valentine could be this same guy--and I don't mean to dismiss his acting ability; rather Noah Calhoun and Dean Pereira are like two ends of a spec...

Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams--two beautiful people cast to tell, well, a beautiful story I'm guessing. I've never seen The Notebook . I was busy its opening weekend seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 . That's the kind of thing I was watching then--not that romantic movies were every my thing , really. Also in theaters, though I didn't see any of these until video or cable: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (hilarious), The Terminal (a solid film), The Day After Tomorrow (a ridiculous little mess), The Chronicles of Riddick (not even close to being as good as its predecessor, Pitch Black , but it had its moments), Napoleon Dynamite (didn't care for it as much as some people, liked it more than others), Mean Girls (I remember liking it but barely remember much of the detail), Man on Fire (pretty solid action drama), Hellboy (a pretty good movie and a damn fine DVD), The Story of the Weeping Camel (I barely remember this one but I know I liked it), and The Punisher (no...

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...

Saw a lot of movies today, most of them short. Sixteen short films, ten of them nominated for Oscars next week, then a feature film-- Still Alice --nominated for best actress. Now West Side Story . That's a good day for me. But then, there's disappointment... And, I find myself just sitting her watching the movie instead of bothering you all with personal details. Forty minutes in, Tony and Maria have just met. It's good timing to actually get to some typing. Anyway, the disappointment--ran into someone I know at the movie theater, did not talk to her. Avoiding her was easier. I argued the other day that musicals operate in a world where love at first sight is, you know, a thing. It exists, it happens. In the real world, I figure I'm unlucky or that's a load of bullshit that keeps us going to movies and reading romance novels and listening to pop music, because it just doesn't happen. In the real world, what we call love takes effort. It's not a dance ...

From 12 years to a couple days, love, especially on film, can sneak up on you. It can also leave just as unexpectedly. Loretta Castorini Clark (Cher) waited for love before she married the first time and her husband was killed by a bus. Ronny Cammareri was engaged to be married then he lost his hand and his fiancé left him. In Moonstruck , Ronny is clearly the more damaged of that pair, prone to emotional outburst and threats (demanding the big knife to cut his own throat) and acts (knocking over his kitchen table) of violence. Loretta is more sedate. And, early in the film, when her florist client—she does a few small businesses’ accounting—gives her a rose, the film lingers on her and that rose. It’s a beatific shot, a romantic shot. However much it must have hurt to lose her husband, Loretta is still a romantic. Later, after she has gone shopping and has gotten her hair done for a night at the opera, there’s a scene that adds little to the plot but demonstrates again that Loretta...

I wanted to start this final entry for When Harry Met Sally.. by mentioning tarot cards. Long time readers of this blog will know that tarot cards came up a few times in relation to Groundhog Day , and returned in relation to both The Ring and The Sixth Sense (the latter without any cards being in the film at all). And, sure enough, When Harry Met Sally... includes both Harry throwing cards into a bowl— —and a specific reference to tarot cards—among the book titles where Marie and Sally are standing in the bookstore is The Mythic Tarot : But, it is late—the conference day has gone very long, and I have a few notes to get to before I move on to another romantic comedy. Hinnant (2006) details “seven different scenarios or narrative possibilities” or “models” of courtship and romance as demonstrated in Jane Austen (p. 295). When Harry Met Sally... has a tiny bit of what he calls the “drama of prior commitment”—really, the film only employs that as an excuse as to why it doesn...

So, I made some notes about Altman and Taylor’s Social Penetration Theory for this blog and then I was looking at them and realized something interesting. In a way, the same stages that make up the theory fit the way I approach movies in this phase of the Groundhog Day Project . Allow me to explain. The basic concept, which I mentioned before, is like that bit in Shrek : we’ve got layers to our personalities/identities, and as we get to know someone new, we penetrate the layers. Like a wedge being driven into an onion. There are four stages to this penetration—orientation, exploratory affective exchange, affective exchange and stable exchange. All of these are driven by a cost-benefit analysis, in which we weigh the cost of revealing more and more personal information against the reward of the relationship (or, in a slightly more cynical way, the simple reward of learning more and more personal information from the other person). Orientation – Griffin (2006) tells us, “peripheral ...