the groundhog day project

It's 11pm as I start writing this entry. I've got an episode of That '70s Show on in the background. The house is quiet otherwise--kids are in South Carolina for a week visiting relatives. Earlier this evening, I had a nice dinner alone and then I watched Room . I'm not sure that I have much to say about the film. Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay are fantastic, and the film has several moments that are painful to watch. In case you don't know the film, the premise is that Ma (Larson) was kidnapped seven years ago, and has been living in a locked shed every since--the titular room. Five years ago, she had her son Jack (Tremblay) and now that he's five she finally explains to him that there's a world outside the room. And, they escape--that isn't really a SPOILER, the revelation of why they're in this room is plot point one and the escape is at the half way mark, and really, them learning to live outside the room is the point. The film has a great sense...

It would be difficult to talk about Star Wars: The Force Awakens without SPOILING certain elements of its story. There will be ample warning before I get to that. PART I - ON NOSTALGIA AND A LIFE WITH STAR WARS First, it must be said that Star Wars has been in my life pretty much from the beginning. While I do not specifically recall seeing the original--I was only a year old when it came out and am not actually sure when I first saw it--nor do I have specific memory of seeing The Empire Strikes Back for the first time, by the time Return of the Jedi came out, I was very familiar with the previous two, having watched them many times. And, I do remember going to the movie theater to see Return of the Jedi , I remember shopping at Toys R Us for action figures that year (I already had some), and when the Power of the Force line came out in 1985, I bought more. Through the 80s I watched all three films time and time again. I may have invented this but I remember one day home sick f...

"Dragon breath" is racist. That's 1. But then you throw a gong into the soundtrack after? That's 2, and that's 1980s casual racism. Gremlins again . Kieran's watching with me. He just made the connection between this and The Wizard of Oz . "Pointless dialogue." - what Kieran said about the mother's line about her husband's inventions not working. Because, no duh. Also, I realize, I may have been a little rude to Lynn Peltzer (Frances Lee McCain), identifying her just by her relationships to two males. Saer's also here. She just called Billy a goober for telling Gizmo to smile for the camera. Also, she might be drunk (for the record, that's a joke; she's 13). She just asked if I wrote that she called him a "stripper." I just noticed that Chekhov's race car driving is accompanied by a poster for The Road Warrior . I think Gizmo has dreams of grandeur. Kieran recognized Pete (Corey Feldman) from Stand By Me an...

Let us switch gears after that rant yesterday . Today, I saw Krampus in the theater, and first thing: I am glad for a family-oriented horror film that embraces the PG-13 rating and allows scary things to actually happen instead of just being silly. In fact, while I was wary of the... SPOILERS, of course. (Just skip the next paragraph.) While I was wary of the inevitable reset that had to come after the plot of this film--and hoped it wouldn't happen--I actually rather liked the way the reset finally came and was also countered with the apparent memory of everyone involved (including the family dog). Weta's practical monsters were amazing (as usual), and the level of violence in the film was remarkable, again, for a family-oriented film. That should be the end of the SPOILERS. I'm not interested today in a lot of words... Maybe to counter yesterday. I'm also not interested in a review of the film so much as a review of... I guess it is the holiday itself, the sens...

When I was looking up information on the USC Shoah Foundation yesterday , I happened upon an interview with Steven Spielberg from USA Today with a (mis?)quotation as its title-- 'This is what I was put on earth to do' - Steven Spielberg Maybe he said that to the interviewer, but the only line I can find in the actual text of the interview that is similar to that is this (with a little context): When young people come up to me and instead of saying they liked my last movie, they say, "My grandparents gave testimony [to the foundation] in 1995." Hearing that make me feel I was put on this earth to make a difference, not just in the lives of movies audiences. The testimonies help others hear stories that are not easy to tell or listen to. I'm not going to talk about the holocaust again today, or the whole poetry after Auschwitz thing. Let's leave Adorno behind, maybe even leave Everything Is Illuminated behind for the most part. Today is Day 729 of this ...

A couple mishaps but we just rolled with it. That’s the short description for the Day 365 party. The waffles didn’t work out, pretty much because I hadn’t used my waffle maker in a while and forgot about getting the surface oiled just right (and I probably needed to compensate for the blueberries added to the recipe with some dry ingredients). And the projector, which I had tested out twice at home—even watched Groundhog Day projected big on the living room wall last week—decided not to work when darkness fell and it came time to watch the movie. But, we crowded into my sister’s living room instead and watched the movie on DVD—the easiest way to roll with the punches is to be prepared with a DVD copy in your bag… (Well, that may not apply to all punches.) Anyway, showed off my LEGO Gobbler’s Knob, ate some good food, flapjacks made by my daughter Hayley, sticky buns, white chocolate cheesecake, fudge, and chocolate pie with almonds and marshmallow topping (thus being a Rocky Road p...

A few things: I am considering something permanent to celebrate a year of Groundhog Day . A tattoo. This would be my second. I have one small one already. I finally got these videos in a format I could use. When my kids were out of town a month ago, my son sent me these. The first is my daughter Saer (who recently wrote most of an entry for this blog) reciting a certain bit of poetry from the film… The second is my son Kieran and my daughters Saer and Hayley paraphrasing a bit of god day … My screening of Groundhog Day for today is nearly done—he’s hugging Ned right now. I spent a good portion of the day working on an unrelated short film project and a card game—making Groundhog Day The Board Game and buying the blank cards I used for it (and a good many extra because they came in a box of 500), not to mention my obsession this summer with tabletop games, got me in the mood for making games. I won’t say much because a) it’s nothing to do with Groundhog Day and b) I don’t w...

The board game is finished… barring some weird detail I might have missed. (For example, the Trading In option is something we—my kids and me—have not playtested yet, so it might be removed. At one point in the developing the way the game played, different types of cards had different point values, and this is a remnant of that idea.) Here what’s in the rule booklet: You are Phil Connors, weatherman. You are trapped in Punxsutawney, PA and every day is Groundhog Day. To escape from the time loop and the small town, you have to become a better person. You do this by collecting particular cards, representing your experiences and your growth. Contents: 1 Rule Booklet 1 Board 1 Spinner 98 Cards 18 PIANO LESSON (brown) 18 EXPERIENCE (purple) 14 SEDUCTION (red) 14 SUICIDE (blue) 14 INSURANCE (yellow) 10 REPORT (green) 10 SAVIOR (orange) Setup: Setup for this game is simple. Unfold the board. Since every turn begins at the same location—the Cherry Street Inn marked with a blue...

Change in the world comes from individuals, from the inner peace in individual hearts. Just as ripples spread out when a single pebble is dropped into water, the actions of individuals can have far-reaching effects. --Dalai Lama, Facebook , 16 May I think we ought to be personally responsible...I think if you can take care of yourself, and then maybe try to take care of someone else, that's sort of how you're supposed to live. --Bill Murray, Squawk Box (CNBC) And I have very little to say for myself today. The mood in the room right now is sedate. Two of my kids are in their rooms, minding their own business. The third is taking her last final exam of her spring semester, her first year at college. They've all got bags packed because they are heading out of town for a week to visit their grandparents and their aunt and uncle on the other side of the country. I will miss them but I am not sad. My mood is actually pretty good. I took a break from studying today. Made a g...

Today’s reason to repeat a day forever: to play games, lots of games. Life would be so very boring without them. Tonight, My kids and I played three games. The four of us played Zombie Dice , then Munchkin (but Hayley had to opt out part way through that game to work on a paper for school), then finally the Game of Life . Even Phil Connors realizes games are something worth putting effort into, as you can see in this deleted scene: My character’s name when the game began was something Hispanic—I can’t remember what because he got lost on his second turn and hit his head in a fall in the mountains and came down from the mountains calling himself The Man From the Mountain and he had three furry wives he found in a cave. They were named Dorene, Lorene and Morene. They had one daughter—Symphony—and adopted a son called Clever Boy who was caught burglarizing their lovely little home: Saer, playing as Maria… Johnson or Jackson, won the game. She had too many kids for her one car but p...

In the fall, I wrote three big papers. Two of them linked to Groundhog Day --my Christ-Figure paper and my confirmation bias paper--but the third--my rhetoric paper--did not. It was very sad. This quarter, I'm actually rewriting (and doubling in length) that rhetoric paper, and while I haven't figured out quite how to justify including a reference to Groundhog Day because there aren't really a bunch of movie examples, I did discover a quotation in one of my sources that fits into a discussion of Groundhog Day . It's a little backward, but it almost makes up for my inability to include it. (A sad sidenote: out of my three papers in this winter quarter, nary a one makes mention of Groundhog Day . I have clearly not been trying hard enough.) Anyway, the line, from Schiltz (2006): As we have seen, on the one hand, the account provided in Plato's Phaedrus makes the further move toward one in which the sensual desires are instrumentally valuable as motivation for ...

I saw About Time again today, and I was reading over my entry here about that film, and I noticed an error. POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD… Taking the protagonist’s do-each-day-twice methodology and twisting it together with Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, I suggested the following: 1) live each day as if it were the specific day you had time traveled to, as if it's the most important day you have and 2) do with that day only things you would be willing to do again and again and again. I'm certainly not suggesting that eternal recurrence is real, but it's a great way to look at the present. If something isn't worth doing again, why do it once? And, no, that’s not the mistake. I still like the idea of that now, about five weeks later. And, considering this blog (and Groundhog Day is so often about the passage of time, it’s remarkable how recent that blog entry seems to me. But, anyway, I do think the day can be so much better if you both relax into it and make the effort...

So, 2 out of 3 acts down, 6 out of 8 sequences, 4 out of 5 key moments. The screenplay breakdown of Groundhog Day continues. Where were we? Phil was changed by the second act. I mean, that thing broke him down, killed him... a few times, and then there was god day. Dyer doesn't break down the third act much. It's all "buildup to resolution" for him. More specifically, the protagonist "should now be so changed by everything that he has gone through that he can no longer be satisfied living the way he did before." I get that. This past summer, living in my tiny apartment alone, there were a lot of quiet, empty moments that demanded change. From an outward perspective, I maybe didn't change too much, either. Change doesn't need to be big to be drastic. I still watch a bit too much television sometimes. I still watch movies when I can--honestly, though, watching this one particular movie every day has put a slight damper on my spare movie time of late...

Just noticed and my mind is blown by: opening scene, Phil says he's "gonna go out on a limb" then at the end of the time loop, he saves a kid who has literally gone out on a limb... Ok, my mind wasn't really blown. But, hey, if there are more examples like that, I could certainly make an argument about the mirrored structure. In other news, a mistake--or just evidence that Phil is a fantastic performer: the news footage showing in the newsvan at the beginning of the date night sequence-- --is the same footage shown on Day 1. But, that's not what I want to talk about today. Today's business: Phil Connors may be a Christ-Figure , but that doesn't mean he's nothing else. I've spent plenty of time talking about other things Phil represents of course. Today, I wanted to get started down the road to the Bodhisattva , even though I've got a binder of articles on cinematic Christ-Figures and a paper I could be drafting about that very topic. ...