the groundhog day project

The last few weeks haven't been the best for me but I just reinvent myself each day as someone doing better. I go through the motions of work. I put up with the worst of my students, enjoy the best of them. I watch television, I watch movies--and write about them here--and I play D&D when I can. I was already in a bad mood Saturday when I got to watching I don't feel at home in this world anymore . Hours later I watched Jim & Andy ... Full title for that last one: Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond: Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton because the premise of the film is far bigger than just Jim & Andy , just Jim and Andy, Just Jim and Andy and Tony. The premise of the documentary is Jim Carrey getting so much into character as Andy Kaufman and as Tony Clifton while filming Man on the Moon that he sort of lost himself... Or found himself, I guess is the point. And, after a tough time lately in terms of my mental health, it was an...

Today is Day 1279, which means that 1278 days ago... No, that's that not true. Day 1000 , I stopped this blog. I had completed (except for a few edits required by faculty later) my master's thesis about blogging and about the presentation of identity on the Internet, and I decided a few days earlier that 1000 was a nice round number and I would finish up this thing and do something else. I tried my hand at YouTube movie reviews for a bit, tried to build a review blog , and eventually made my way back here. So, really, it was 1644 days ago that I sat down to watch Groundhog Day and write about it. Every day. For a year. And, I altered the course of my life. Now, arguably, every little decision does that. One of the points you could take from Groundhog Day . Each little decision has repercussions. I wish the shows around them were better (so I could recommend them), because Joan of Arcadia had a science fair scene and John from Cincinnati had a parking lot barbecue scene th...

I tend to like weird little movies. A couple of my favorites from last year were The Lobster and Swiss Army Man . A couple of my favorites from this year now would be Brigsby Bear and Dave Made a Maze . I'm gonna watch both of those again tonight because... Well, because I can. The year is coming to an end. It's Oscar season, the Golden Globes are just over a week away, and it's time to start putting it all together, some perspective on 2017 in movies—putting off the perspective of my childhood in movies for a few days from now (but I will get back to that)—and make some recommendations perhaps... First, there's this—when Dave Made a Maze art director Jeff White was asked by Tessa Morrison at Other Worlds , "Knowing everything you learned from this, what would you travel back in time and tell yourself on Day One of fabrication [of the cardboard sets]?": I'm not sure that there was anything I could tell myself at that point that I would have believed. ...

The dog gets my favorite line in Beginners . The full subtitle (because, of course, the dog doesn't actually speak) is: "Tell her the darkness is about to drown us unless something drastic happens now." I've been there. Felt that drowning sensation, the darkness, and had drastic things happen. (By the way, I'm not actually watching Beginners tonight. My Netflix was having some issues, so I moved on. #FirstWorldProblems) I've been diagnosed with depression, been offered prescriptions for medication to deal with it. Mostly, I've learned to deal with it on my own. I've gotten good at compartmentalizing different parts of my life, and I've learned to take time to do fun things. For example, today I went to the Renaissance Faire with friends with whom I play D&D. I also (in case some future reader hasn't noticed the jump in dates or some past reader is confused) restarted this blog, ostensibly as if nothing had changed. I picked up the ...

The last recap was Day 942 - what we got here is a little game of show and tell . Today is Day 1000. So, how about a quick reminder of where we've been lately. Day 943 - the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth took Murder in the First as its jumping off point, ended the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon month and was maybe the thematic end to this blog because that's where every movie was every other movie and the message was on repeat. Day 944 - i'm going out to punxsutawney was a thing I wrote for class about my pilgrimage to Woodstock, Illinois and meeting Danny Rubin, and Danny Rubin later sent me a lovely message about it on Facebook. Then I drifted. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them 945 946 947 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him 948 949 950 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her 951 952 953 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them 954 955 Antichrist 956 The Squid and the Whale 957 958 959 Mrs. Doubtfire 960 961 ...

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known." - Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters Today I mostly finished a draft of my thesis. Gotta add a couple things tomorrow, check some formatting, then hand it off to my committee for comments. Officially, I turn it in in two weeks. Defend it a couple weeks after that. So, today, I was writing about how a blogger can deliberately manipulate their public identity, become the words. High Fidelity , which is really just a placeholder as I get to tomorrow--Day 1000 as well as the end of the main part of my thesis writing. It's a big day. I imagine my world without this blog and me not being a blogger. I think about labels. Online, I can label myself whatever I would like to label myself. I can play the information game and control what you know about me. I can do my research to talk about a film thoroughly, make myself look like I know what I'm talking about even when I don't. And,...

I've got a theory, one minor part of my master's thesis, that among other things I do in this blog, I reference my knowledge of and experience with other films in order to 1) yeah, increase my credibility when talking about film, 2) obviously, to make my points using basic comparison and contrast, but maybe most importantly, 3) to manipulate the reader into thinking I know what I'm talking about, whether or not I actually do. Admittedly, that's just another way of saying #1, but the thing is, there's a certain clout to just having this blog, maintaining it for hundreds of days, watching movies day in and day out, that suggests to the casual reader that I must know something. #3 is supposed to be a negative version of #1. Like, yeah, I've got plenty of film knowledge, I've seen thousands of films, gotta brag about that from time to time, but I'm still just some blogger, a bit too full of myself sometimes, desperate for attention yet often actively avoidin...

Don't read this. Day 989, so close to 1000 entries and after a depressing day punctuated by comedy (watching the end of the final season of Seinfeld ) and obsessing about finding the original version of a particular source for my master's thesis when I could just quote it indirectly, it occurs to me that 1000 is a nice round number and rounds numbers are great ends. Not that everyday me wants to finish doing this. Unless I could justify going back to writing fiction each day, I am lately again of a mind that I need these words each night to get by. It's that kind of day. And Punch-Drunk Love is on, the abrupt car accident just happened followed by the inexplicable dropping off of the... whatever kind of organ that is. Meanwhile, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler, twisting his usual comedy tendencies into a rather disturbed sort of drama) has discovered that he can get a whole lot of frequent flyer miles by buying a bunch of cheap products, and then he's met Lena Leonard (Em...

I was going to watch Hackers again but apparently my rental was only 24 hours, not 48 as most Amazon rentals have been. Anyway, I'm inclined to write in response to Everybody Wants Some!! instead, anyway, except for this: You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert. This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of the service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... And you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge, and you call us criminals. We exist without skin colour, without nationality, without...

The heart of Swingers is Mike, especially what I've been calling that scene . If you're with this somewhat depressed guy and can make it through that scene--my daughter was in the room the other day when that scene was on, and her "Oh, sweetie, no," was exactly the kind of response we should have--you're rooting for him, rooting for his life to get better. And, that's easy. Mike is not a jerk like Trent or Sue. He's not there to pad the rat pack esque group at the center of this movie, like Charles--though his "this place is dead, anyway" is amazing--or Rob--whose useful advice about life for Mike could have come from Trent and maybe worked a little better dramatically, structurally. Instead of the latter, we're barely offered up much that is positive about Trent. Sure, he's trying to get Mike out of his apartment but it's hard most of the time to really see Trent doing that for Mike, rather he's taking advantage--or so it seems...

I remember when I was in Woodstock, Illinois two years ago--that's the filming location for most of Groundhog Day , if you must know, this blog's namesake and the film I watched for 365 days in a row and still come back to at least once a month--and I imagined being stuck in that location for a repeating day, and there was a "homeless" guy--really, he was just out of work and had made his way to Woodstock from a nearby town because he knew the crowd would mean he might be able to get more handouts from sympathetic passersby--that is, more people overall, more sympathy just by playing the percentages not that he was as cynical about it as I think I just sounded in describing it--and he was a nice enough guy, but unfortunately, I couldn't give him any cash because I saw him on my third day in Woodstock and I had run out of cash--I did offer to buy him Starbucks, I think, because I had just emerged from Starbucks, which is right by where Phil Connors hugged Ned Ryers...