the groundhog day project

Explorers opens with Ben asleep with his TV on ( War of the Worlds is on), dreaming about flying over a Tron -ish circuitboard reality. He wakes and frantically draws a piece of his dream. Then he calls up Wolfgang to talk about it. As you do. A good dream. A good movie. You gotta share with someone, gotta talk about it. Or at least I do. This blog is some of the obvious evidence. The Junior High the boys attend here is Charles M. Jones... That is, Chuck Jones, the cartoonist. Not the name of the High School where they filmed, but chosen deliberately. Because the cartoon reference matters. This is a movie about creativity and imagination and I just found out that Wolfgang's house is not far from where I'm writing right now, and I love that.           This Island Earth is the next movie we see, after some science fiction magazines and books. But, per the movie later, the island is not isolated. Like the immigrants in yesterday's An Am...

Headline from HuffPo : Did Back to the Future Originally End With 'To be Continued'? They say no. I say, fuck HuffPo , fuck whatever Mandela Effect reality you all are from, it was there on the big screen in my head, and was not some thing they added for VHS. I mean, sure we must've rented the movie to watch again at home once it was on video, and I'm sure the copy we dubbed off cable (Or maybe off the rental tape, not that I will admit that we ever did that, you know, with the bit of tape over that little indent on the one side so the machine can make a copy... Or was it breaking the tab in the indent and hoping the rental place didn't notice? I can't actually remember that bit because I have recorded things from one tape to another, entirely legally, so many times that I forgot how to do it illegally. Not that I am admitting that I ever knew how to do it illegally.) included the TO BE CONTINUED and I saw the VHS copy more than I ever saw the movie i...

A bit of a cheat, here. Technically, Escape from New York is not a fixture of my childhood the way (most of) these movies have been in this deconstruction. That is, it is not a film that I watched a lot when I was particularly young. I don't think I even saw it when it was new. I did see it on tv or cable or video when I was still quite young, but it really only became a fixture, in terms of repetition, when I was a teen. Still, it makes the list. And the reason is simple: parts of this film stuck with me. I'm saying this as the movie begins, and it has been several years probably since I last watched this thing, so I'm not 100% sure this is even the movie I'm remembering remembering. Some ugly, mutant-looking guy attacked Snake--that was a scene that stuck with me. Like, for years, I remembered one particular detail of the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland before I went on it again and fixed the rest of it in my memory; it was the wood door bending, and I had nig...

Let's see... Fox News Anchors Concerned This Wonder Woman Isn't Wearing Her Star-Spangled Underwear Why 'Wonder Woman' is less American than ever Wonder woman, feminist icon or bodacious fantasy figure? Let me echo Benesh (2011) before I get into this: ...according to Izod, after the film, "active imagination takes over and develops the recollected cinematic imagery by fusing it more completely with personal fantasy material. In the process, both are liable to change" (pp. 273-274). Thus, for viewers... An imprint remains as during the film the audience members "introject" or take in its psychic content including symbols, images, and narrative, as well as projecting individual personal concerns. After the film, if it is particularly "resonant," the process continues as the film "plays on" in the viewer's mind. A personal "edition" of the film is thus created and is assimilated into the psyche of the viewer. ...

After two new movies today-- The Gift and Southpaw --my IMDb seen it list has 4144 titles in it. And, I'm convinced there are still a whole lot of obscure movies I've seen over the years that I've neglected to add to that list. Walking home from the movie theater today, I wondered at what point I will have seen enough movies. Like there's a hole in me that I keep filling with them and at some point it will runneth over. I suppose my "edition" of each of these films (and, to be fair, a few TV series have found their way onto that list, I'm pretty sure) doesn't really take up much space. Not physical space anyway. Backtrack a moment to that "edition" line and flashback to, for example, Day 173 - who dreams of you at night , for a bit from Benesh (2011)--if you are new to this blog, Benesh wrote her doctoral dissertation on Groundhog Day and, over the course of a whole lot of days worth of blog entries, I systematically deconstructed, deba...

Because I'm sure many have not heard of it, let alone seen it, I must explain: Stories We Tell is a documentary about a mother, about a family, about the way we re-create memory in the telling of it, about how we decide what is history and what is not. Future thesis-writing me (sometime this summer probably), will appreciate the following. This is a reflection of everyday life; we pick and choose the moments within our past to hold onto, we pick and choose the people in our lives that matter and those worth forgetting, we pick and choose what parts of our personalities to express and which to hide away where no one else can see it, and we pick and choose the face we put on, the clothes we wear, the words we say. In other words, we invent ourselves as an ongoing process. You do it. I do it. Life is a story we are constantly telling and retelling until, we hope, we get it right. Of course, there is no right . There's just the way it is. Right off the bat, I must say of Storie...

That’s from The Sandman —Morpheus sentences the guy who imprisoned him to recurring awakening. Basically, he’s constantly under the impression he has just woken from a nightmare only to find himself in a new one. It’s like Jungian false awakening (Celia Green’s version thereof, especially) taken in a very dark direction. I’ve linked Groundhog Day to dreams before , of course. I’ve had a note since working through Benesh’s (2011) dissertation on Groundhog Day to get into false awakening as a topic, but in the modern parlance, I just wasn’t feeling it. Then, today, I was watching the latest episodes of Louie and there’s this surreal quality of late, with bizarre news reports— (For example: “Ten people died in the Bronx last night due to a fire that killed ten people in the Bronx last night during a fire.”) —and just as Louie’s new relationship is about to come to an end, there’s a hurricane coming into New York City. And then, suddenly, the hurricane, and the woman, are gone. ...

If we took Benesh (2011) at face value, then we would have to assume every film in which characters have hands is somehow using those hands to mean something. I don't even think Benesh is all wrong in some of the symbolism she describes in Groundhog Day but she chooses such simplistic things--hands, snow--that the choices are more banal than meaningful. If there were closeups of hands--to be fair, there are one or two--or characters talked about hands or their hands were particularly meaningful in context of the story... except Benesh doesn't want us looking to the narrative; she advises (by way of Izod (2000) citing Hillman (1983 presumably) that we "focus on an image-oriented reading versus one that rushes, as it typical, to narrative conclusions" (p. 63). But, the problem here is when looking at images pushes us not just past the narrative but into an entirely different universe from it. She wants to look at the film in terms of Jungian psychology and dream inter...

I'm watching Meatballs again before Groundhog Day tonight. And, while I had a title in mind for today's blog, I come to the writing of it without a plan. In fact, given that I'm watching Meatballs first, I probably won't even be posting this entry until after midnight, so my prediction will be wrong. Since I'm in a pessimistic mood, I will suggest that I'm wrong about a lot of things like all the time. I thought about writing some generic stuff about spring, but that just seems wrong since Groundhog Day is all about winter. And Meatballs is set in the summer. My seasons are all confuzzled today. Timing. That's the issue. All I really want to say, in line with the title above, is this: March 21st will come just as any other day will. Time will go on. We may make new friends or lose old ones but life goes on. So anyway, Benesh (2011) says, At a given point in development, less conforming and more assertive agentic persons may cultivate a latent a...

Benesh (2011) relies on John Izod’s (2000) Journal of Analytical Psychology essay, “Active imagination and the analysis of film” in linking the viewing of film to the process of dreaming. Izod’s original piece is interesting in that he argues, “Screened fiction has… the potential to help the individual grow in self-awareness” because “Experiencing affects aroused by fictions can resemble being drawn into a rehearsal for a possible, imagined future that just might (but more likely never will) occur in the individual’s life in the real world” (p. 267). The interesting thing here is that Izod’s description here implies that dreams lead to self-awareness. I like the idea of that… and maybe it seems obvious, but, of course, there’s still the possibility that dreams are simply the random firing of synapses as the body shuts down and lets the mind have some fun… But, even if—and I’d wager that as a big if —dreams are random, the specific contents still have to come from the material we’ve g...