the groundhog day project

It isn’t that Greg wants something that’s impossible. I mean, plenty of people spend their lives without sex, without physical intimacy. Of course, plenty of people probably live without companionship as well. We just can’t all have all the good things in life. Regular companionship would be nice, even if there weren’t sex. Not that I would go for Greg’s notion of excluding it outright. A personal anecdote—you know, because that’s so rare for me: being married doesn’t guarantee either of those things, sex or companionship. Long before we separated, my wife and I had our moments of one or the other, or neither. Unlike Groundhog Day ’s Phil Connors (pre- and early-loop anyway), I never really wanted casual sex. But, unlike The Mirror Has Two Faces ’ Greg Larkin, I also don’t want companionship without. I broke down the successful relationship yesterday into four parts: sexual, intellectual, spiritual and emotional. Those last two are so close together the way I see it, I’m not sure why...

The Mirror Has Two Faces plays like a regular romantic comedy—guy meets girl, guy like girls (or girl likes guy), some manufactured obstacle shows up, but eventually they find each other anyway and all is wonderful. But, it does its darnedest to deconstruct the genre along the way just enough to stand out from the crowd. Still, even as Greg is expressing antiromantic sentiment, scenes play out, visually especially, just like they would in any romantic comedy. Take the proposal scene for instance. Greg and Rose are walking in the park, he’s got something to ask her, so they sit on a bench. They are framed close together on the screen and if not for the exact wording of his proposal and her briefly negative reaction, it looks like any proposal scene in a romantic comedy might look. At the start of the movie, as I mentioned yesterday , Rose is involved in her sister’s wedding. Meanwhile, Greg’s ex hits him up for some relatively meaningless sex before she sees her new boyfriend again. ...

This entry will be short, probably. First night with a new movie, I want to watch it before I really write about it. Plus, if you need a lot of words, read yesterday’s entry again. I’ve only ever seen The Mirror Has Two Faces once all the way through. One of my sisters loves it, and made me watch it. I didn’t die. Of course, to be fair, I think I’ve said before I will watch most any movie at least once. But, sometimes I see a film because of someone else, something I wouldn’t have seen otherwise... Hell, sometimes I do things I wouldn’t do if not for someone else. That’s life. That’s married life, especially. That last line wasn’t supposed to sound negative. In fact, it’s probably far more positive than negative. Being in a relationship, being married—you do plenty of stuff that single people probably wouldn’t be bothered with. The Mirror Has Two Faces presents marriage like an obstacle to... not love, exactly, but certainly romance. Marriage is often presented as the culminat...

Roger Ebert’s (2003) review and summary. Rita Kempley’s (1988) review for the Washington Post . Louis Virtel’s (2013) 10 reasons why Moonstruck might be the best movie ever. pop u list ‘s paragraph-long bit about Moonstruck in a series on memorable movie breakfast scenes. William Day’s (2003) essay “ Moonstruck , or How to Ruin Everything.” Jean Paul Russo’s (1995) essay on “Italian American Filmmakers.” Thomas A. Shaffer’s (2005/2006) essay, “The Democratic Virtues, Our Common Life and the Common School: Trust in Democracy: Anabaptists, Italian Americans, and Solidarity.” Anthony Giardina’s (2009) essay “Wild Dreams and Italianness.” Richard Hornby’s (1994) essay “Albee and Pinter” (which connects to Moonstruck in some way or another I cannot remember even though I found it less than a week ago. These are pieces I found, printed and have in my 7th Groundhog Day Project binder. These are pieces I have neglected all this week when I should have read them days ago. These are piece...

Today, some complaints. Or nitpicks, I suppose. One is simply an issue with the time (in terms of setting) of the film, the other deals with character motivations. Both relate to time. The La Boheme performance is Monday, November 15. The poster we see being put up at the start of the film says as much. The problem is this: November 15 was not a Monday. Moonstruck was filmed in December 1986 and released in December 1987. November 15 in ‘86 was a Saturday, ‘87 was a Sunday. 1988 was a leap year, so November 15 was a Tuesday. Thing is, because of that leap year, the last time November 15 was a Monday was in 1982 and the next would be 1993. It’s a minor detail but you’d think someone in the prop department would check when the film was set. This only bugged me because I was thinking about the timing of the film. Johnny proposes to Loretta on Saturday night, then she drives him to the airport, stops at the store for champagne—where the husband and wife running the place seem about t...

I suppose my problem, having watched La Boheme and seeing which scene they feature in Moonstruck , is that the two don’t actually play well together. On the one hand, you can take the experience of the opera as the thing that turns the heart of Loretta—even though that turn is inevitable from the start because it’s a romantic comedy... (Come to think of it, the use of Casablanca in When Harry Met Sally —something I never mentioned last week—makes more sense if you consider the original ending in which Harry and Sally remain just friends.) The turn may be inevitable, but it still needs a catalyst. Ronny’s persistence isn’t enough. But, the romance of the opera works. It’s simplistic. We don’t know—generally—what’s going on in that scene from La Boheme , but maybe we’ve got a vague idea that La Boheme involves love and romance, or maybe we just assume that the opera includes those things. There’s actually some room for discussion of class in this film, though I’m not sure I part...

There’s commentary playing. Moonstruck ‘s commentary, unfortunately, is three people (Cher, writer John Patrick Shanley and director Norman Jewison) recorded separately. It’s not a nice back-and-forth, though already, just a minute or so in, it seems like Jewison at least is responding specifically to what’s said in Shanley’s track. The Grand Ticino, a real restaurant, didn’t want to stop serving customers for filming. So the interior was a construct. Cher was nervous about being Italian, holding the accent for the entire film. Jewison guesses that Shanley writes quickly and doesn’t like rewrites. I get that. I write quickly and I hate rewriting things. Rewriting feels dishonest to me... Early title: The Bride and the Wolf . Shanley points out the practical nature of Loretta’s decision to marry a man she doesn’t love—Johnny. But, he says, life isn’t practical. It’s “a project” in which you end up dead. So, there’s no reason to live by common sense but rather something more visc...