the groundhog day project

Some random thoughts about Phil Connors: Maybe he spoke French already and he just had to get over his impulse to laugh in that restaurant scene. Maybe he already knew how to ice sculpt, he was just such a misanthrope he had never bothered to share his talent with anyone. Maybe his father really was a piano mover... not that that necessarily made Phil a great piano player. And maybe his "six months" of card throwing didn't even happen within the time loop but when he was a teenager and had mono. Just the other day... Oh man, how long ago was it that I rambled on about the use of that phrase, " the other day in TV shows? I think that was early on in this blog, back when I was still wide-eyed and innocent. But I digress. Just the other day, 24 April to be precise, Charles Murray at Fox News was describing some scenes from Groundhog Day that he says "illustrat[e] the unplanned and bumpy trajectory that Phil's thirty or forty years [referencing Rami...

I don't like that Gregory Solman, writing for Film Comment in November 1993, calls O'Reilly a "wino." But, even more I don't like that Solman labels the old man pejoratively yet suggests that his death is undignified... as if a "wino" would have any other kind. Even worse, though, he says Phil "is doomed to witness daily" O'Reilly's death. The first two things were somewhat subjective, but that last one is not. Phil does not witness O'Reilly's death until the day he takes him to the hospital. On screen, that is only two nights before the end, which means Phil witnesses O'Reilly's death twice. Even if we assume (appropriately) that many days are not shown on screen, putting the old man's death this late in the presentation implies that it became a part of Phil's experience late in the loop. So, no, Phil is not "doomed to witness daily" the old man's death. He's not doomed to witness it at all, i...