the groundhog day project

The Room isn't even playing yet. I saw Girls Trip today--it was pretty good and very funny. But, right now, I've actually got the Critical Role panel from Comicon playing on Twitch. But, Pages is open and I'm typing because, you know, who cares what order things happen anyway? The point is not that things are organized but that things are tragic. You find a woman and you stay together for seven years, live together, and she'll betray you with your best friend. You find a man and you stay together for seven years, he will bore the shit out of you even though he's fundamentally a good guy, and you will cheat on him and he will kill himself. No matter what you do, someone will betray someone, someone will die, life will suck... except for when it doesn't. It's those moments when it doesn't suck that matter. When he brings you a new dress, or she has already ordered the pizza. As I write this I hear some lyrics from the Groundhog Day musical in my head-...

The thing about Everything Is Illuminated is it suggests--at the same time, mind you--that it's never too late to get over your past and your past will always catch up to you. If The Grey was purgatory , this is somehow both heaven and hell... or maybe just another form of purgatory... or maybe just life. The movie returns us to the idea that life is just stories , the what we choose to remember-- how we choose to remember it--matters more than the reality. Stories change over time. So do memories. Each return of a memory is affected by the previous one--that was a detail in the latest Pixar movie, Inside Out that I rather liked, in fact; positive memories turn negative, joy turns sad... and vice versa, I suppose. Bittersweet is introduced. Everything Is Illuminated is based on Jonathan Safran Foer's first published novel. It is, of course, about a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer going to the Ukraine in search of family history, specifically, the woman in a photo...

What else is left to say? I mean, identity and the presentation of self are both big throughlines in my upcoming master's thesis, but there I will probably be stuck with a lot of the prior scholarship on the topic--a little Goffman, a little Butler with a bit of Munoz maybe. Also in my thesis there's going to be some Weick, a communication theory of his that deals with sensemaking. While he applies it often to organizations, I deal with it on an individual level; it's basically how we make sense of the world around us. (There's more detail to it, but I won't bore you today.) Stories We Tell actually deals in something closer to Weick's organizational sensemaking than any individual sensemaking. The whole Polley/Buchan/Gulkin brood is re-contructing a story together because of the structure Sarah Polley has chosen. Except, they are not working together to do so. She has positioned their various stories next to each other to manufacture one larger story, but it...

I've already pointed out that in the instance that Stories We Tell reveals that a good portion of its "past" sequences are fake-- (Watcing the documentary several days in a row, the differences between the two Dianes (especially in their chins) become more obvious, and the past Harry comes across a little fake in appearance (though, to be fair, the present Harry seems a little fake... does he really think that look works?), but despite Polley's insistence to Charlie Shmidlin at The Playlist , that, "It really wasn't the intention to trick anybody," I think it has to be the point to hide the reenactments among the genuine footage so that they both seem "real." Now, I'm not saying she's lying. I don't think this is a "trick." I think it is part and parcel of the structure of this documentary, blurring the lines between versions of stories, memories of events, and reality and representations thereof. Polley specifies, We ...

“Family is undeniably inescapable. Like a silent shadow, it’s your blood, your roots, and (at times) your ball and chain.” So begins Meredith Alloway’s review of Stories We Tell for The Script Lab . In the terms of these last few blog entries (today is Day 5 with Stories We Tell ), family is those people who are telling a story that keeps weaving in and out of yours. They are the people who have a bigger investment in your story than other people do, and vice versa, you have an investment in theirs. Whether by blood or by circumstance, family is, as Anderst’s piece on the film, suggests the storytellers here are, a chorus of voices, each telling a variation on a motif of the heart of the story. I’m reminded of words outside my own language as ways to conceive of family. One you might know from Lilo & Stitch if you’ve ever seen it— ‘ohana . On that show, they liked to say that ‘ohana means family, ‘ohana means no one gets left behind. (That word might be a relatively recent...

When you are in the middle of a story, it's isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you're telling it to yourself or to someone else. --Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace With this quotation, Stories We Tell begins, Michael Polley reading it even before his "narration" begins. think of the story we are telling a twisted, amalgamated beast that eventually becomes history a history written by the winners the privileged hooks' "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" perhaps most of us knowing only a small piece of the whole many of us lack the capacity or power to substantially alter our place in the larger story some of us but for the grace of god or gods ...

I'm reminded of a line I said way back on Day 69 - i don't even have to floss --back in the Groundhog Day phase of this blog-- He isn't just an everyman because he represents each of us. He's an everyman because he represents all of us. But, I get ahead of myself by getting behind myself. What is absent from a great deal of Stories We Tell is Sarah Polley herself. She is present in the majority of scenes in the film (only absent from the past footage that is genuine) but here story is not a part of Diane's story. Now, Acts Two and Three of the this documentary turn this into a story that is very much about Sarah instead, about her parentage and what that means for the bigger story of Diane. It was the weekend of Sarah's 11th birthday that her mother died. Eleven years old, her mother dying from cancer--there is no way that Sarah cannot remember it. It is acknowledged within the film that Sarah did not know that her mother was dying when her older siblin...

So... the twist. Let us just get this out of the way on this Day Two with Stories We Tell . SPOILERS ahead, of course. Not that you would normally think of a documentary as having SPOILERS even be a possible thing. So, Stories We Tell is built of multiple interviews about Diane Polley, director Sarah Polley's mother, and a whole lot of amateur footage of her--Michael Polley explains early on that he bought a camera around the time they met and took to filming much of their lives. Before we get to the big SPOILER, I offer this critique of the film's overall structure from Harry Gulkin, who it turns out is Sarah Polley's biological father--that is not the twist, but it is a notable turn in the course of the story here. Asked what he thinks of giving equal weight to everyone's version of the story, he replies: I don't like it. I think that it takes us into... into a very wooly... You can't ever touch bottom with anything then. We're all over the place. I ...

Because I'm sure many have not heard of it, let alone seen it, I must explain: Stories We Tell is a documentary about a mother, about a family, about the way we re-create memory in the telling of it, about how we decide what is history and what is not. Future thesis-writing me (sometime this summer probably), will appreciate the following. This is a reflection of everyday life; we pick and choose the moments within our past to hold onto, we pick and choose the people in our lives that matter and those worth forgetting, we pick and choose what parts of our personalities to express and which to hide away where no one else can see it, and we pick and choose the face we put on, the clothes we wear, the words we say. In other words, we invent ourselves as an ongoing process. You do it. I do it. Life is a story we are constantly telling and retelling until, we hope, we get it right. Of course, there is no right . There's just the way it is. Right off the bat, I must say of Storie...