the groundhog day project

An odd note up front: 33 years after I first saw Suspect , and maybe a couple decades since I last saw it, I only just noticed that the murder victim, Elizabeth Rose Quinn, is the woman in the opening scene talking to the Supreme Court Justice who kills himself thereafter. I don't think I ever realized that before--mostly because we barely see her face later but also because the film wants us focused on the guy who kills himself. And my inability to notice--or the film not making a point of drawing my attention to--her face might connect in a way with what I wanted to write about the film today. The film paints an interesting picture of Washington DC. In the early establishing shots of the city, we see traffic, we see homeless, and after we are introduced to Kathleen Riley (Cher) in her car, three young men smash her windshield, yank open her doors, steal her necklace, and make a run for it. The film wants us to see DC as an urban environment with too many people and rampant ...

There will be no math today, not even 1+1-- arguably, it is 2 --because that stuff is tiring and I'm guessing at least a few of you-- I would guess a percentage but that might be construed as math-- in fact, I'm wondering now if use of the term few was mathematical --and I wouldn't want to present even the mildest appearance of impropriety --found it boring. Or inane. Or, if you really know math, you might have been thinking in the back of your mind, who is this moron, thinks he can suddenly pretend expertise in math just because he's got expertise on Groundhog Day ? Who does he think he is? To you-- and I am not going to look up what percentage of the population is good at math, or calculate/construct a Venn diagram to find the overlap between the set of people who are good at math and the set of people who read this blog-- now, that was mathematical, so I must apologize --because that would be wrong --I should apologize... except if you've been p...

Every night, by cold bricks’ glow I watch the shadow rising from this old man in the snow. At 8:02 we let it go. At 8:02 we let it go. Let’s just get on with this, already. Jedson O’Reilly is the only homeless person in Punxsutawney. He dies alone in an alley on the biggest holiday in town. The people of (film-)Punxsutawney are assholes. Evidence, you ask? In 2012, as published in the Punxsutawney Spirit , Community Action, Inc. performed a survey of “unsheltered homeless individuals” in Jefferson County, PA. The county’s total population was listed at 44,764. The survey found there to be only 8 individuals “identified as being unsheltered homeless in accordance with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) definition.” (To be fair, “The HUD defines a household as "unsheltered homeless) only when the individual or individuals are residing in a place not meant for human habitation, such as cars, parks, sidewalks, abandoned buildings or the street. It...

Les Podewell, who plays the old homeless man O'Reilly, died in 1998. He was 91. Hospitalized after a stroke, the Chicago Tribune reports, 26 November 1998, Podewell, asked the usual questions to test his coherence—who's the president? how many fingers am I holding up?—he instead, at his daughter's urging, "regaled [his doctors] with the Player's Speech, a soliloquy from Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' which he last had performed in the 1930s." The same Chicago Tribune article tells us, “Mr. Podewell's career spanned 70 years, and he had more than 100 productions to his name. In the film ‘Groundhog Day,’ Mr. Podewell played a homeless man befriended by Murray's character.” Podewell seems like he was a cool guy. Aside from that Hamlet thing, According to his daughter, he “was very unassuming; he never talked about himself--which is unusual for an actor.” In Groundhog Day , of course, he doesn’t even speak. He barely even make a sound (and the sou...

I don't like that Gregory Solman, writing for Film Comment in November 1993, calls O'Reilly a "wino." But, even more I don't like that Solman labels the old man pejoratively yet suggests that his death is undignified... as if a "wino" would have any other kind. Even worse, though, he says Phil "is doomed to witness daily" O'Reilly's death. The first two things were somewhat subjective, but that last one is not. Phil does not witness O'Reilly's death until the day he takes him to the hospital. On screen, that is only two nights before the end, which means Phil witnesses O'Reilly's death twice. Even if we assume (appropriately) that many days are not shown on screen, putting the old man's death this late in the presentation implies that it became a part of Phil's experience late in the loop. So, no, Phil is not "doomed to witness daily" the old man's death. He's not doomed to witness it at all, i...

The following is a segment from an informative speech I did a few years back regarding the the Pirahã (pee-duh-hon) (you can read the entire text here ): They have no phatic communication— hello , goodbye , thank you , I’m sorry . Daniel Everett [in his book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes ] suggests these phrases "don’t express or elicit new information about the world" and are thus hardly as useful as actions could be in expressing the same sentiment. The closest they have to what we might call a greeting translates as "I have arrived." Thank you would be "transaction acknowledged." They prefer action over words and experience over ideas… …and this brings us to our second point, two concepts specific to the Pirahã, first xibipíio [roughly pronounced ih-bih-pee-ee-oh], experiential liminality . Translated roughly as "going into or out of the limits of experience," xibipíio can be equally applied (as noun or verb) to a man going out of si...