the groundhog day project

There's a poster on James' (Kyle Mooney) bedroom wall in his... captive home? It says: CURIOSITY IS AN UNNATURAL EMOTION If you could ever actually convince someone of this, you would certainly be able to imprison them and control them... And, yes, that was leaning into a rant about religion or politics, but instead I wanted to concern myself with something closer to the actual text (or at least its subtext) of the film today. James has been held captive since he was a kid, but he thinks his captors his real parents, he thinks the world full of toxic air so they cannot go outside without protection. He only knows the underground bunker in the desert where they have raised him, and the worlds of Brigsby Bear , the TV show his father has produced just for him over the years--25 volumes, 736 episodes. He has these on VHS and has watched them time and time again. They are, in many ways, more real to him than his own monotonous life inside the bunker--his Groundhog Day Effect, i...

Roger Ebert ends his review of Joe Versus the Volcano with a great bit: What's strongest about the movie is that it does possess a philosophy, an idea about life. The idea is the same contained in "Moonstruck": that at night, in those corners of our minds we deny by day, magical things can happen in the moon shadows. And if they can't, a) they should, and b) we should always in any event act as if they can. First a note: Roger references Moonstruck because John Patrick Shanley wrote both and directed Joe Versus the Volcano . Second, though, I love especially that last line. That we should always act as if magical things can happen is one of those ideas that so many movies put forth--from the eternal recurrence of Groundhog Day to the hyperrealism of American Psycho , from the time travel of About Time to the deliberate fantasy of Moulin Rouge . And, yes, Moonstruck . Joe Versus the Volcano takes place in a reality where miracles can happen, where desk lamps ...

Once upon a time there was a guy named Joe Who had a very lousy job... I worked office jobs in my 20s. The opening scene of Joe Versus the Volcano is amazing in its satire (and it's awesome that both Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack (who played it relatively straight in Airplane! are in this), workers all dressed in black, trudged through a muddy parking lot, turnstile doors, a zig zag walkway, all to enter a factory that makes medical devices and leaks exhaust into the air. The lighting inside makes everyone look sickly, the hat rack doesn't even work right. It's no wonder that Joe Banks (Tom Hanks) feels like he's always sick. Effectively, he is . His job drains away his life. Or as he tells DeDe (Meg Ryan) (regarding his shoe), "I'm losing my sole."           Strictly speaking, Joe Versus the Volcano is not a bad movie. But, I'm going to end this month of bad movies with it because 1) it was one of the first movies recommended when I asked...

Marco Rubio just referred to Trump's strategy for Afghanistan, laid out in great detail in an amazing speech this evening as "good" strategy and an "excellent" speech. Which would be fine except I was lying about the great detail and the speech being amazing. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was a TelePrompTer speech so it had complete sentences and it made relative sense, but it was half Trump mansplaining the existence of ISIS, telling the same tired story about how Obama pulled out of Afghanistan too early and that's why ISIS exists, and then being really vague about what he's going to do about it. More troops. More war. No end. Last week it was nuclear war with North Korea, not a land war in Asia, next he's going to go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line. I kid because I'm tired and angry. This shit is distracting me from my movie tonight... Hell, it's making me want to draw direct comparisons. Hapless Americans pushing the...

Groundhog Day is on and I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about how watching this movie in Florida adds one more state to the list of where I've watched it (you can see that list here ). I don't want to talk about how it doesn't get old. I don't want to talk about how it is comforting to know something so well and to have it be there when I need it. I do want to talk about the message I got from Danny Rubin yesterday, but I'm not going to, because that's private. One of the critiques of autoethnography--an approach I'm using and quite readily defending in my master's thesis--is that you can never get consent from everybody involved in some story, some research, and while technically that just isn't true, certainly it might be hard to get consent for everything, from everyone, and some people may refuse. That doesn't mean you don't mean forward. That doesn't mean you leave out--and I'm just going to jump r...

Let me just say, for the record, Groundhog Day has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. I mean, the usual (if you can call 2 or 3 times “usual”) thing is to come back to this movie and tie it in to whatever the month has been. The first batch of horror films, the romantic comedies, slasher films (though I had already explained how Groundhog Day was a slasher film . Now, Thanksgiving movies, except Thanksgiving movies are not about Thanksgiving. They are about a quest for family, a quest for a past that we know is better than the present. A movie about a holiday like Thanksgiving (or as we will see in the next month, Christmas)— NEW THING ALERT: The movie already uses Mother-in-law’s tongue in the Tip Top Cafe... Mother-in-law’s Tongue is a plant. Anyway, the production already uses that plant in the Tip Top Cafe set, but as I was distracted from my mention of Christmas to just how Christmasy the decor in the Cherry Street Inn’s dining room was, I noticed something new. And, after some...

William Shakespeare never made use of the time loop. Which is unfortunate, really. And yet, I find my viewing of Much Ado About Nothing this evening bringing me back around to Groundhog Day nonetheless. Really, I suppose, at this point, everything leads me to Groundhog Day , or vice versa, or both. Groundhog Day binds me and undoes me, and I remain and I change and neither the same nor different will I be when this Project has come to its first end. Or its second end, if one does count the beginning of the line of its progress as one end, and the finish of it as its second. (Forget for now that that second end may be naught but a new beginning for a secondary phase of that which has been singular but now will expand and include much more.) I need to work on my Shakespearean writing. I think I end up just creating convoluted sentences to convey simple ideas. But, anyway, Dogberry in particular, if not the love story betwixt man and woman who come late to their attraction, brin...

I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over? Phil’s problem here: he thinks the day just happens to him. He doesn’t realize that while there may be a few elements here—the girl and, well, the sea otter lovin’—that aren’t things that would be on repeat. Just like the second snowman scene we see in Groundhog Day , when Phil tried to get that same girl again, he might come on just a little too strong, and she might not be interested. Or, his assumption that they might make like sea otters might be just the thing to make her unwilling. Phil, prior to being trapped in the time loop, where his choices are limited, apparently doesn’t understand free will. Phil assumes a repeating day to be the same thing again and again, even though by the time he tells the story above, it’s Day 3 and he’s already changed the way the day goes. He’...

Two things to talk about today: 1) Paul Hannam's (2008) The Magic of Groundhog Day and 2) a few more episodes of Tru Calling . For the record, I have not finished reading Hannam's book. And, I might not do so. Mostly because, somewhat appropriately, the book is fairly repetitive. Hannam made his point early on, and then he's repeated that same point in slightly different ways a few chapters since. I may sample a bit here and there in the later chapters, see if he takes it anywhere interesting. But, I've got other books I need to be reading on this summer break. How about some highlights? In the meantime, Tru Calling 's "The Getaway" is messing with time again... in the annoying way, I mean. New guy--Jason Priestly's guy whose name I haven't noticed yet for some reason--is just starting work, which would be how long after his interview in the previous episode? This is television so no interview process takes more than a week, I'm sure. But,...

Yesterday was Father’s Day, but I had people over and had to write about that . I had intended to write a companion piece to the Mother’s Day one. Today will have to do. Two things: First, Phil refers to the Old Man, Jedson O’Reilly as “father” and “dad” and “pop”—something that I have always found to be a bit, well, weird. Gilbey (2004) suggests that Phil’s use of “father” specifically, “with its religious connotations, is interesting here, though it doesn’t feature in Rubin’s first revision” (p. 74). (Note: I have never read Rubin’s first revision, just Rubin’s original and Ramis’ second revision. A quick Google search just now and I still cannot find that one online. However, I just found Ramis’ third revision, it is already printing, and I will read it soon. So, I got that going for me.) Me—I hear Phil call O’Reilly “dad” and it sounds to me like that moment in Back to the Future when Marty accidentally calls George in 1955 “dad” then awkwardly tries to cover it by calling ...

Yesterday ’s entry brings me to two questions, actually. The first—where I ended yesterday—is this: Does Phil tell Rita about the time loop after the movie ends? The necessary follow-up: When Phil does tell Rita about the time loop, how does that affect their lives? As you can see from my phrasing in that second question, I’ve got a simple answer to the first question: yes , Phil will tell Rita about the time loop. I mean, how could he not? This is the single most important thing that has ever happened to him. It has fundamentally altered his behavior and his identity. It has turned Phil in a single day—check my edited down version of the movie that shows us what Rita experiences: —from an egocentric jerk to a mindful altruist… well, sort of. It’s a drastic change, however we label it. I think of the later bits in About Time , when Tim stops using his time travel ability but just treats each day as he would when he repeated every day a second time… in one sentence, that’s...

...Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. -- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis ...you can follow Phil's lead to achieve this transformation in your own life. Like Phil, we can all wake up and discover joy rather than boredom, hope rather than emptiness, and love rather than self-absorption. -- Paul Hannam, The Magic of Groundhog Day Sometimes I watch this movie and I ...