the groundhog day project

Phil is on his way to Punxsutawney again because it is the 2nd of the month. I am in a hotel room on a roadtrip. Unlike that fateful roadtrip made for this blog, June 2015, when I was covering Westerns for a month, this one... I was going to say that it didn't end with a broken down car, but we are not home yet. We did see some movie locations--notably Monument Valley--but nothing to do with the current run of movies from, now, 1988, in my childhood deconstruction. But, today is not even about that deconstruction, because it's Groundhog Day around here. The goal with every re-screening of Groundhog Day now, of course, is to notice something new in the film that I've not seen in the 400+ prior screenings. But, it doesn't matter if I notice something new-- (Though, as I typed that, I actually noticed a new small detail, because that's what my brain does. The old guy in the bright red hat--the one I often called the devil during the first year of this blog-...

Flash forward a decade and a half. It's 1993. It's February. I'm watching Groundhog Day on the big screen--75% sure it was at the Mann 3 in Hastings Ranch, Pasadena, California. It's opening weekend and I'm seeing a film that, well, I have no idea how important it will be for me a couple decades later. But, that's how it is for any movie, isn't it. You might have an idea of what you'll think of it before you head into the theater, or rent that video tape (or DVD... or whatever file format movies are on things like Amazon Prime nowadays), but when the lights go down and you're in that movie for that hour and a half (or longer), something changes in you. Or many things change in you. Groundhog Day that first time was not one of those films where I could divide my life easily into all the days before and all the days after, like I emerged from the darkness of the theater a completely different person. I was 17, I would graduate from high school in a ...