the groundhog day project

My impulse for today was to write about the so-called manic pixie dream girl . Madison in Splash is perhaps an early prototype for a such-labeled character. But, then I was looking up pieces about those stereotypical cinematic women who, according the the TV Tropes definition, exist to "come along and open [the] heart [of a "soulful, brooding male hero"] to the great, wondrous adventure of life" and I realized something interesting... And not entirely unbelievable given the patriarchy's ability to self-perpetuate: the term coined by Nathan Rabin at AV Club that implied a weakness in "the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors" turned into a way to put down female characters instead of their creators. As Zoe Kazan, who starred as an all too easily labeled manic pixie dream girl who quite literally sprung from the fevered imagination of a sensitive writer in Ruby Sparks (but that character actually came from Kazan's own imagination, a...

Freddie (John Candy) is a pervert, even as a child. Allen (Tom Hanks) is more of a romantic, even as a child. As a kid, Freddie drops change on the floor to look up ladies' skirts. Allen jumps off a ferry to swim, briefly, with a mermaid girl. As adults, Allen runs Bauer Produce, Freddie... Well, Freddie is proud to have gotten a letter in Penthouse magazine. Broad strokes quickly painted, and we know these characters pretty well inside the first ten minutes of Splash . If you're unfamiliar, think The Shape of Water with the genders swapped, a less dangerous (and less stereotypical) antagonist, and... Dare I say it? More believable romance. Don't get me wrong; I liked The Shape of Water a lot. I had a problem with one particular aspect of its conclusion, but I didn't mind how it seemed to spend more time on heist details than fleshing out its central romance. Guillermo Del Toro's film has a couple clear advantages over Ron Howard's film. The obvious one is...

but I'm only on DayQuil . Still, I find myself reciting lines of dialogue along with the characters and I think I'm running some of these lines a little better than they are. Have I mentioned that Desson Howe at the Washington Post predicted back in 1993 that Groundhog Day "will never be designated a national film treasure by the Library of Congress"? He liked the movie, called it "pretty good" and said that, watching it, you'll feel like you've been through too many days yourself. With its zany daily episodes, "Groundhog" gets stuck in a non-progressive repetition. It's also headed for the usual Hollywood Life Lesson, in which Murray's moral winter must thaw. He also makes some factual errors--and I'm feeling petty as well as sick. For example, he says this: "Ned, I would love to stand here and talk with you," he tells Tobolowsky at their umpteenth chance meeting. "But I'm not going to." First,...