the groundhog day project

That's the Griswold's house from the original Vacation , but as it looks today. (It's got a wall, but otherwise it looks basically the same.) Like, literally today, by the way. I made a slight detour on the way home from work today. And, this is the car dealership. That's even closer to where I live. Not as good a photo, though, because I couldn't park. But also, I just noticed that the opening postcard montage melds into the establishing shot of Chicago just like the tv screen melds into the establishing shot of Pittsburgh at the start of Groundhog Day . On the one hand, I'm trying to remember if Ramis used that trick in other movies. On the other, I'm thinking of what it means. It ties into the whole fantasy thing I was talking about yesterday --this nostalgia-ish sense of a vacation as some amazing escape and adventure. Imagine if the trip had gone as Clark wanted it to go, though; it would not have been that amazing, certainly not as memorable for...

I don't know if, as a kid, I realized that Ed (Eugene Levy) was deliberately fucking with Clark (Chevy Chase) in the opening of Vacation --forcing the sale on the Wagon Queen Family Truckster. Eventually, I got it, but the first time, in the theater, I think I just thought it was an honest mistake.           And, I laughed at a line I don't think I ever found funny before. Clark tells the kids about the St. Louis Arch, "the Gateway to the West. It's over 600 feet tall and there's an elevator all the way to the top." Rusty asks, "Dad, can we go up in it?" Clark replies simply, "No." Like so many vacation details, road trips past all the interesting places because you don't have the time to stop everywhere. For example, they show the sign for Gatorworld on a postcard during the opening credits. When our speech team was in Florida my last year as coach, we drove past Gatorworld, but we weren't even there for a vacation; we were t...

There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. All you have to do is get in touch with it. Stop thinking. Let things happen and be... the ball... Find your center. Hear nothing. Feel nothing. That's Chevy Chase as Ty Webb in Caddyshack . I get the impression from quotations in articles or interview clips that Harold Ramis was a bit zen like Webb. He didn't "want to be the Buddha," though, he told Perry Garfinkel of Shambhala Sun . "I just want to admire him." Brett Martin, writing for GQ in 2009, calls Ramis a "sympathetic, though nonpracticing, Buddhist." With that one character in Caddyshack , with his own understated performance as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters , and most obviously with the entirety of his cinematic masterpiece Groundhog Day , Ramis infused his films with a relaxed sort of zaniness that makes them hold up quite well long after the fact of their releases. Despite his success, he didn't particularly buy in...