the groundhog day project

(Before I get into Rent for today, a note: Once again, I am writing a blog entry on a plane--on the way to Ohio for a speech tournament--and it still amazes me that I can do this. I know my thesis I'm working on--and after this week in Ohio I'm planning on getting into the work part of it finally, going back through the more than 600 entries now and coding them for content--is ostensibly about the presentation of self, the re-creation of self through writing... through blogging, but there's something to be said for the practical part of it as well. I started this blog in a one room apartment, writing on a desktop computer while Groundhog Day ran on my tablet next to the desktop monitor. I was stuck in one place if I wanted to save time and write while the movie was one--and I did want to do that. An hour and forty-one minutes a day for that movie was a lot of time as things kept going. Writing during the film (most of the time) made things a lot easier. I graduated for ...

The film version of Rent starts with a song--"Seasons of Love A"--that doesn't come until Act Two in the stage version. On the one hand, this is because a film, even a musical, doesn't have the two act structure common to stage musicals. But, this song also serves as a sort of love letter to Rentheads who will probably be disappointed by other changes made for the film--from small stuff like Mark never actually calls Alexi Darling to quit his job (seriously, though the lines are there, he's nowhere near a phone), or Mark opening up the film (after that initial transplanted song) with dialogue rather than singing; to big stuff like cutting half of "Goodbye Love" because director Chris Columbus thought it was emotional overload. Similarly, the film never explicitly lets us know that Roger's ex-girlfriend killed herself because Columbus thought that would be "too much." It's a musical about a bunch of poverty-stricken artists, many of w...