the groundhog day project

I gotta watch Sing Street this week for a podcast, and Fran's outburst here in Strictly Ballroom that was yesterday's (and today's) title reminds me of Raphina's line there: "You can never do anything by half." A basic enough message. You want something, you gotta go for it. What you'd expect from a romantic comedy. Or drama... I mean, movies inherently involve some protagonist going after some goal, some dream, some love, some whatever. Messages aren't going to run deep, and sometimes they're obvious, but that doesn't make them lesser. Like, I've written in this blog a few times about About Time and have a currently running podcast about that film and some of the negative reviews about it complain about its central message--to slow down and appreciate the things around you. And, yeah, that's a basic message, but if more of us followed that advice we wouldn't hear that message so much. Like this movie: don't ...

(A note before this gets perhaps a little philosophical... Was it my sister Brooke who once commented in regards to an early Groundhog Day Project entry that I had a self-help book in me? I've toyed with writing a sort of self-helpy, memoiry book out of that first year of the blog. I even wrote a good chunk of what might have been the first chapter last fall. But, I don't know if I believe it anymore, myself--that there's a self-help book in me. Or maybe I don't want there to be... That wasn't the note. The note is this: I didn't really plan out this month of feminist and/or female-centric films. I immediately had an idea of a few movies I had to include-- Thelma & Louise , 9 to 5 , 10 Things I Hate about You --for a little obviousness and a little variety. And, I wasn't sure what movie should come last, like the coda to the rest. What movie would tie things together before I returned to Groundhog Day again for a day then moved onto some new month I ...

Groundhog Day is on and I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about how watching this movie in Florida adds one more state to the list of where I've watched it (you can see that list here ). I don't want to talk about how it doesn't get old. I don't want to talk about how it is comforting to know something so well and to have it be there when I need it. I do want to talk about the message I got from Danny Rubin yesterday, but I'm not going to, because that's private. One of the critiques of autoethnography--an approach I'm using and quite readily defending in my master's thesis--is that you can never get consent from everybody involved in some story, some research, and while technically that just isn't true, certainly it might be hard to get consent for everything, from everyone, and some people may refuse. That doesn't mean you don't mean forward. That doesn't mean you leave out--and I'm just going to jump r...