the groundhog day project

Yesterday, I watched Somewhere in Time before watching Groundhog Day . I managed to write the entirety of the entry before Groundhog Day really got going. Today, I watched Run Lola Run ( Lola Rennt ) and am now watching Groundhog Day . Subtitles and a much faster pace than Somewhere in Time kept me from typing anything until now, ten minutes into Groundhog Day . I say this to point out how little things affect bigger things. That's a major element of Run Lola Run , which doesn't involve a time loop, per se, but does involve just over 20 minutes of time repeating twice. The big thing hidden in the smaller moments of the film is that tiny changes in our interactions can lead to big changes in the lives of others--chaos theory, the butterfly effect, whatever you want to call it. The basic premise: Lola's boyfriend Manni just lost 100,000 Deutsch Marks he's supposed to be handing off to a guy named Ronnie--something to do with organized crime and diamonds--who will ...

At his darkest, Phil Connors certainly paints a gloomy picture: “I’ll give you a winter prediction,” he says. “It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be gray, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” But, I’m not sure he ever has it as bad as Evan Treborn in The Butterfly Effect . Of course, Evan’s plight is not a time loop, per se. Instead, it’s a regular rewriting of his own history (damaging his brain as he goes) to set things “right.” It’s like Quantum Leap if Sam Beckett had a really fucked up childhood and was leaping into himself in every episode, not just “The Leap Home.” SPOILERS ahead, obviously. Ashton Kutcher’s Evan deals with murderous adolescents, pedophile fathers, baby-killing explosives, burning dogs, and in the original ending (now available with the Director’s Cut), he eventually strangles himself with his umbilical cord in the womb. So, it’s not really a light-hearted film, and certainly not a comedy like Groundhog Day . Still, there’s a certain similarity in t...

Groundhog Day is about life. Your life. My life. Life. Except, in one draft of the script, there was a reason for Phil’s plight. It wasn’t just the human condition. It involves a woman named Stephanie who Phil’s dated a few times and a book entitled 101 Curses, Spells and Enchantments You Can Do at Home . But, more on that for another day (after I’ve had a chance to read that “second revision” of the screenplay in more detail). In the version we see on screen, there is no first cause , just a situation out of control. It’s like an atheist's dream, the inherent meaningless of life in the face of a universe we cannot control. But, we do what we can. If all of this is just happening , then Phil Connors’ escape from the repetition has no logic to it. It’s like the hair dryer in that early episode of Quantum Leap ; Ziggy did some calculations but it’s all math that is far beyond any of us. So, the question is, given the way we take the film—put simply, Phil gets out because he learns...