the groundhog day project

Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes on a train outside Chicago. He sits across from a girl he doesn’t know (Michele Monaghan as Christina Warren), and she refers to him as Sean. It hadn’t occurred to me in regard to Groundhog Day being filmed nearby (and partly within the city) that Chicago is a great city to film a time loop movie—they call their train “The Loop.” Anyway, before Groundhog Day today is Source Code . Train explodes, Stevens wakes up in the dark... seems like a sensory deprivation tank... at first. Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) asks him about where he was and what he saw. Can’t be a deprivation tank because Stevens has some sort of backpack on, and there’s a video screen where he can see Goodwin. (I know where he is, but I don’t feel like SPOILING it yet.) Stevens was on the train to figure out who bombed it. He’s got 8 minutes each time. And, he’s back on the train again. Loop markers: Christina telling him she took his advice. A woman spills her co...

Many people thought I would run out of things to say about Groundhog Day long before Day 365 (another 2 weeks away). This evening, as I sit down to watch the film and write something about or inspired by it, I have an inkling not that they are right, but that I had too much other stuff to do today. Work on my card game, work on my short film, a trip to the science center with my daughter. And, I didn’t even get to revising my paper to be published or prepping lesson plans for my speech class for the fall, or even going over a lesson plan for the speech practice this Wednesday. Made dinner, got Saer to Improv class, and now here I am… sitting… with nothing particular to say. I got out my Chekhov book so I would remember to read one of his plays. I’ve got 2 outings of a sort in the next couple weeks (before the Day 365 party) for this blog, but I cannot do either of those at 10:00 P.M. on a Friday. As for topics at hand, my folder of unused Groundhog Day -related articles has a handfu...

Man, are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon. Watched Primer before Groundhog Day today. It’s a very low budget exploration into time travel and its consequences… except I don’t think it deals too well in actual (morally) bad consequences. It demonstrates a lot of the complexity Phil Connors might have to deal with, though, in repeating the same day if he wants things to seem normal. In Primer , Aaron (played by writer and director Shane Carruth) uses recordings of the original conversations through a certain day, for example, so that when he returns to that day he can keep one earbud in and follow the conversation how it is supposed to go. Tying back to yesterday’s entry about Run Lola Run , the way tiny differences can be a problem (or not) is demonstrated when Aaron has a conversation on a basketball court; he misses a shot in the resumption that he made previously, so the dialogue on the tape differs from the new reality. But, that doesn’t really lea...

Episode 5 of Day Break : "What if they're stuck?" Today I will be watching several episodes of Day Break , so I will try not to just list details about the plot with a comment on the time loop stuff here and there. Instead, I hope to comment on the larger use of the time loop and the show's themes. For example, Hopper's got a To Do list this morning, and he tells Rita that for the first time in a while "I see some daylight." The metaphor is simple; the time loop is Hopper (or Phil) in the dark, with all its complications, but there's light at the end of the tunnel (to mix metaphors). Speaking of which, I haven't commented on the title of the show itself: Day Break . On the one hand, the time loop seems to begin and end around daybreak (one word). When Hopper headed out of town a couple episodes ago, as the sun rose over the horizon-- Ehrmentraut (at the rock quarry, where this time they have Hopper and Rita): "Do you believe in deja vu?...