the groundhog day project

Willow starts a little basic--a bit of onscreen text (that is entirely superfluous) about a prophecy involving a baby that will grow up to bring down Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh). (The plot is a little like The Lord of the Rings except it's a baby instead of a ring, and Gandalf is an old woman who was cursed into the shape of a possum.) Nurse gets the baby out of the dungeon (though the mother is killed) and manages to get the baby as far as a river, where she pulls a a Moses allusion sending the baby on her way. The nurse, like the baby's mother, is also killed. The baby is Elora Danan and it occurred to me just an hour or so before turning the film on tonight that this story has a lot of female energy to its cast, despite its leads being Warwick Davis as the titular Willow and Val Kilmer as Madmartigan. In the opening scene, we've already passed the Bechdel test, and we probably don't realize it just yet but we have also passed the Mako Mori test. The main ...

That a lonely degenerate like Donavan can learn to care about three orphans or the woman he's convinced to marry him for the sake of said orphans, is a nice thought. That two incompetent fools like Amos and Theodore can not only find one another to spend time with but also manage to (somehow)... thrive seems like the wrong word, but they seem to be doing okay. And, that's a nice thought, too. Then there's the--dare I say it--gender-nonconforming stagecoach driver who... Actually this one is problematic. Over the course of the plot, she is manipulated (nicely) into a sham marriage and being a mother to three orphans because that degenerate Donavan would rather run off to gamble in New Orleans. She has to--according to the film, anyway--eventually wear a dress, and earn Donavan's appreciation, if not his love. I already suggested yesterday that one detail isn't necessarily sexist--that Donavan is a bad parent figure because he's a selfish asshole and Dusty is...

There's an echo--or whatever the opposite of an echo is--of Joe Versus the Volcano in the much briefer opening of Snowball Express . Baxter doesn't have a terminal diagnosis, of course. Rather, his great uncle (who he apparently didn't even know) died, and this is Baxter's new lease on life. Get out of the "smudge pot" of the city, the office, and go run a hotel in Colorado. I just learned this is based on a book called Chateau Bon Vivant --a true story apparently--about newlyweds Frankie and Johnny O'Rear who "arm themselves with a four-hundred-page volume entitled Theories of Hotel Management , two cases of bourbon... and a Vermont beagle" and set about a "twelve-year comedy of errors" running a ski-lodge in Quebec" (Back Cover Description, near as I can tell). Some details have been changed, of course. Frankie is Susan. Johnny is still Johnny but he left the office instead of the navy. Instead of two cases of bourbon, they...

In her review of Sing Street , Sheila O'Malley points out, "There are pitfalls everywhere in a coming-of-age period piece like this one." She argues that director John "Carney avoids them easily, keeping the film on its proper track" And, she explains how this works: "It's extremely confident: It knows what it wants to be, what story it wants to tell." And--coming back to the advice of the the other day--that's what a person needs to be, too. Gotta be confident. Gotta know what you want to be. Gotta know what story you want to tell, the story being you and how you present that self to the world. Easy to fake on the Internet. (I wrote a whole master's thesis about it.) Harder to fake in the real world. And, I mean real confidence, not the pathetic arrogance and ego-centrism that pretends to confidence online or, lately, in politics. Party lines draw people into corners where they're quicker to defend their positions out of the illusio...

I've been obsessing over the Groundhog Day musical of late. I often obsess when I get a new musical to listen to, of course; this is not unique to Groundhog Day ; it's just the latest. And, I wanted to talk about it. I have not gotten to see it live yet, of course, because it's just in New York for now and I cannot afford to just fly off to New York whenever. As much as I'd like to. (And, as I was writing this, I just got a notification about Tim Minchin's tweet about the show being nominated for seven Tony Awards.) Thing is, I cannot cover all of it in one entry. Nor would I need to. Nor would I want to. This isn't a blog about stage musicals, after all. But, there are a few details that stand out. First: Nancy. I've written about Nancy many times, of course. I swear I spent an entire entry just on her once but I cannot for the life of me find that one. But, that's almost poetic in itself--that she is just a detail in other entries. That is Nancy...

(And, to think I did not know this: Bill Murray was apparently supposed to play Bernard, but backed out to do Broken Flowers . For the thousandth time, if you're new here, note the damn title of this blog. Though I was not, like, the biggest Bill Murray fan before I watched Groundhog Day for a year, I have a tendency to obsess about people and places and ideas related to that film.) A father who signs a copy of one of his novels for his son "Best Wishes," a student who writes a short story about her vagina, a son who over-emulates his father's pretensions, a son who masturbates in public places and leaves his semen on books in a library and on a girl's locker, a mother who... Actually aside from cheating on her ass of a husband, she's not that bad. She doesn't comment on how her son can do better than his current girlfriend, doesn't invite a 20-year-old student to live with her, doesn't try to fuck that student. "This is a great family, and...

So, my point was supposed to be about Punxsutawneyans' treatment of their homeless population, and I will get to that. But, first, how to narrow down 440.83 supposedly "eligible" women to Phil's 63? As I said at the end of yesterday's entry, Phil likes brunettes (Rita), redheads (Nancy), and blondes (Laraine). And, I've already narrowed down his interest range by age, based on those three: 30 to 34. In trying to narrow down the options a little more, I was reminded of an episode of This American Life --Episode 486: Valentine's Day . The opener for the show involves David Kestenbaum, a physicist attempting "to employ the power of mathematics to estimate the likelihood of finding a girlfriend." Permit an extended excerpt: David Kestenbaum So we started to do the calculation on the board and-- can you look up what the population of Boston is? Ira Glass Now David is asking me to look this up because at this point in our interview I actually made...