the groundhog day project

Lest I complain too much, I will get one last detail of scientist 's piece out of the way. scientist describes the the death of Nurse Karen (Pamela Susan Shoop) like this: ...for sheer nastiness, nothing beats the hot-tub boiling of Karen Bailey. This sequence is truly ugly, with long, loving shots of Ms Karen's hideously blistered face interspersed with equally loving shots of her bare breasts--which, by the way, shouldn't be bare; when Michael enters the room, her towel is beneath her arms; when he grabs her, it's mysteriously around her waist. Also disturbing here is Michael caressing Karen before he gets to work, another action at variance with the child-man concept of the first film. Except, while you could call the shots of Karen's face "lingering" (at best), calling them "loving" suggests that scientist might have a problem. Also, there are not shots of her bare breasts while Michael is killing her. He dunks her five times into the wa...

First of all, hello new readers. It's that time of year when people are googling "Groundhog Day." And, well, if you're reading this, that might be you. (If you want to understand the holiday, go to this entry for the basics or this entry for a bit of melatonin science. Otherwise, stick around. Second of all, I'm watching Groundhog Day early. The usual thing for year three is that Groundhog Day falls on the 2nd of every month--and I will watch it tomorrow to be proper--but alas I had a problem. At school from 7am to 10pm, had not really thought about what movie I was watching today until I was on the ride home. I thought about watching The Paper , a little bit of Michael Keaton working at a newspaper as an echo of Spotlight , plus it would tie into the one class I am taking this quarter-- (I believe it is officially called "Constructing LA" and something about narrative. Taught by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez. Involves a lot of narrati...

Today was the last day I will watch Groundhog Day ... this year. But, there’s always next year. The weird thing—and I’ve got a theory to cover it—is I noticed something new just last night. Day 151 and I notice something new. At the banquet, two old ladies dancing together come up to Phil and Rita. He changed their tire earlier. And the exchange goes like this: Old Lady: It’s that nice, young man from the motor club. Thank you again. Phil: It’s nothing, ladies. Old Lady: He’s the fastest jack in Jefferson County. Then, the Old Lady does... for lack of a better description, a couple air kisses… Just look: As Rita asks, “What was that all about?”, the other Old Lady glares at the first like she said something awful. At least that’s how I saw it before. It was only last night I noticed the kisses. My theory is that, while I may not be in a time loop, I have fallen into some alternate universe that includes those kisses in the movie and they were not in there before. I was actua...

Sometimes.... no--often, lately, I've come to this blog without a plan. It's my winter break from grad school so I should be doing some of the time intensive stuff. Hell, a few days ago I did some of that; I finally did the third TV Time loop day and I watched a couple time loop movies. I don't even remember what else I did this week. I know I talked about being in a relationship with Groundhog Day , and last night I wrote The Ballad of Phil Connors . But, the days blend together... But, maybe that's the point. You may notice that, here on Blogger I don't number the entries. But, I do number the Word files, and on both my Facebook page and Twitter I number them. But, here I let them be... timeless, sort of. And, in my head I not only forget what I've done lately--I swear, for instance, that it was recent that I wrote extensively about eternal recurrence ( 39 , 40 , 41 ) and Christ-Figures ( 93 , 94 , 107 , 110 ) and deja vu ( 14 , 15 , 16 ), yet those ...

Today is brief. Well, no, today still takes 24 hours like any other day. But, today’s entry here will be brief. IMDb still hasn’t updated the goofs page for Groundhog Day with my corrections… and I say that as if it has been a long wait. It has been just under 48 hours. Perhaps I should be more patient. Anyway, today I just want to share the additions I will be making tonight to that same page, which I hope doesn’t delay the original changes. Still, these changes must be added. 1. Inside the bowling alley, we see a guy bowl a strike and he has a friend sitting at the scoring table. Cut to Phil talking, then a wide shot that includes Gus and Ralph and the bowler and his friend are gone. 2. Behind Phil as he passed the homeless old man is a girl with an upside-down “Phil” sign. On the first three days of the time loop, she has a friend walking with her. Then, her friend disappears. 3. Since Gobbler’s Knob was crowded with people all morning and it did not snow in Punxsutawney all ...

Instead of writing a lot here in the blog today, I am finally fixing the goofs page on Groundhog Day ’s IMDb page. INSERT: Clouds moving swiftly as time passes in a clichéd manner. Come back a while later—started when the movie did and right now Phil is robbing the armored truck, just for a frame of reference—and I wonder what to put here. I was going to copy and paste the corrected version of the page. But, apparently, it has to be approved by IMDb ’s editors. (Perhaps I will update this entry with the copy and paste when the page updates.) If you like, in the meantime, you can go read my post from over 100 days ago in which I checked on every goof , many with screencaps… though they were not from a nice HD copy, so maybe I should replace them. And, since there’s still a bit of movie to go today, I think I’ll wander over to Wikipedia . INSERT: Some more clouds, only a little less clichéd. My first correction is this: Eventually, Phil becomes despondent and tries more and ...

Linking Groundhog Day to impromptu quotations--as I did here , here and here & here and here & here -- yesterday and the day before and it is not going as... I guess you could say smoothly. It's not going as smoothly as other days. I'm getting bogged down in details and the picking of nits--which obviously is not like me at all. As a regular reader of this blog, you would understand that I never obsess about anything to the point of picking it apart until it dies. Seriously though, how does something get labeled as a Danish Proverb when it is neither Danish nor a Proverb? But, then there's a bigger problem; spend too much time on "random" quotations and I miss the boat on larger things I could be doing. Like spending four days revisiting eternal recurrence or deja vu, or a whole week on some other topic... perhaps deja vu. I mean, just because Carl Sagan supposedly once said, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known," does...

I might lament that there's no new things to notice on the blu-ray. Visual things I mean. But a) that puts me in Phil's position in a way and b) that's crazy talk, there's always new things to notice. Regarding "b" I did notice that one thing the other night when I was actively searching, the chocolate wrapper on the table. And, just tonight I discovered a new thing not in the movie but on the disc. There are two sets of subtitles for English. The first is the old, plain one, words across the bottom of the screen. Second one, though--that's more fun, slightly different font it seems (hard to compare properly because I've got to cycle through 16 different subtitle settings to loop around and there's a pause between just the one English set and the other), and it's doing that thing where dialogue from a character on one side of the screen is positioned on that side of the screen. I almost worked at a place that did subtitles several years back ...

Not much to say tonight. Instead, a few images as I start sorting screencaps… Actually, first, a bit of an addendum to my discussion of Time Freak two entries ago : Here’s a few shots of Stillman’s timeline diagrams… Think back on my discussion of another short film, Tango and the complexity in planning that out. And, relate that to Phil’s final day in the time loop… Here’s what I listed for that day before: his report from Gobbler’s Knob (after presumably picking up pastries and coffee again for Rita and Larry) spending some time at the Tip Top Café (remember, it’s Doris who gets him up on stage for the bachelor auction) buying a whole bunch of insurance—“whole life, term, uniflex, fire, theft, auto, dental, health with the optional death and dismemberment plan, water damage”—from Ned a piano lesson with Mary fanning the flames of Debbie’s passion for Fred finding Wrestlemania tickets somewhere in town fixing Felix’s back saving the kid (Zacchaeus) falling out of the...

To err is human. To point out someone else’s errors is, presumably, extra-human. So, let’s look at the errors in Groundhog Day . And, I don’t mean Phil’s errors in judgment or anything like that. I mean filmmaking errors. We’ll work off the IMDb goofs page for the movie and go from there. First category is “Audio/visual unsynchronized” In the last part of the movie, Phil is seen playing the piano on stage at the party. As he finishes up song before going and talking to Rita, the piano in the soundtrack is playing a glissando (running a finger rapidly down the keyboard) while Phil is still playing as he was before. Finally, at the last run, Phil's hands match the sound. Don’t have a screencap for this one (as you’ll see, I’ve got screencaps for a lot of the other “goofs” below), but I’m not seeing it—and I had two different screens going for the movie today, two different copies of the film. Aside from a possibly inaccurate use of “glissando” Phil does run his hand across the ...