the groundhog day project

Maxim Gorky once said of Anton Chekhov, “Beautifully simple himself, he loved everything simple, real, and sincere.” Schmidt (1997) expands on this, saying, “Simplicity was his touchstone for art. He hated pretentiousness and fuss” (p. 2). I’d wager Chekhov, like Harold Ramis, was a beloved writer who the theatergoing masses loved. Schmidt, again, tells us, All Chekhov’s plays are based on the traditional themes of middle-class melodrama: hopeless love, money, marriage, and who owns the house. In that sense, he was a playwright of his time, trying to write the kind of plays audiences wanted. It’s important to remember that in his lifetime his most popular plays, and the ones that made money, were the one-act comic “sketches” he wrote over a period of five years. These he wrote easily and quickly, because the comic sketch was the genre with which he began as a writer. (p. 3) This is not the Chekhov Phil Connors speaks of, one who “saw the bleak winter [and] saw a winter bleak and dar...

The yurodivy is a kind of "holy fool" - the person who sees what's really going on in society and has the audacity to say it, but only in a kind of code. If there's a crooked government, the holy fool will maybe perform a weird pantomime or tell a story, one that gets everyone to laugh at first; sooner or later, the more perceptive members of the yurodivy 's audience will also recognize in the fool's antics a hidden message. – ( Saint Paul Sunday ) The… article quoted above goes on to use Gogol’s Dead Souls as an example, and I loved that book (though I admit I probably didn’t get all of the nuance of its satire). Groundhog Day isn’t satire, though. Still, it comments so readily on the human condition in the modern world, repetition and inanity hitting us from all side. Yesterday, I suggested a) that Ralph and Gus were Phil’s holy fools and b) that Phil was ours. Phil’s sarcasm, his dry wit, his sardonic humor—this is all him commenting on the world, sure...

William Shakespeare never made use of the time loop. Which is unfortunate, really. And yet, I find my viewing of Much Ado About Nothing this evening bringing me back around to Groundhog Day nonetheless. Really, I suppose, at this point, everything leads me to Groundhog Day , or vice versa, or both. Groundhog Day binds me and undoes me, and I remain and I change and neither the same nor different will I be when this Project has come to its first end. Or its second end, if one does count the beginning of the line of its progress as one end, and the finish of it as its second. (Forget for now that that second end may be naught but a new beginning for a secondary phase of that which has been singular but now will expand and include much more.) I need to work on my Shakespearean writing. I think I end up just creating convoluted sentences to convey simple ideas. But, anyway, Dogberry in particular, if not the love story betwixt man and woman who come late to their attraction, brin...