the groundhog day project

I haven't really talked about why there are three versions of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby yet. (I'm watching Her one more time tonight, by the way.) It was written as two movies-- Him and Her . Two separate scripts that shared a few scenes (with slightly different variations between those scenes). It was only after The Weinstein Company bought the film(s) that a third, combined version was requested. Editing began with Him . It's the easier film in terms of structure, because, as editor Kristine Boden tells Indiewire , Conor is "more reactive and just want[s] to keep going." Her , on the other hand, has "introspection and gravity." Conor's energy made Him a shorter film. Eleanor, being more contemplative, has the slower burn. Still, Her is only a few minutes longer than Him . And, Them is, as you might expect, longer than either one, taking pieces of each and combining them into one film for both characters. For the separate versions of...

I really wish that the opening line from Roger Ebert's memoir Life Itself were said out loud in the film Life Itself instead of just being text on the screen because I really want to use it as the title for this entry but tradition puts only lines of dialogue (or lyrics) as the title here at the Groundhog Day Project . (And, there should have probably been a comma in that sentence somewhere.) I was born inside the movie of my life. That's the line. I would figure that my life is a movie except, well, my life is not very exciting. If my life is a movie, it's some weirdly slow indie film. I'm trying to remember Julie & Julia . I saw the movie once when it was new, and I've read Julie's book (and a whole lot of Lawrence Dai's blog entries about the film), but I'm barely remembering how Julie's story works as a visual narrative. I remember some shots of Amy Adams failing at cooking, something with lobsters, but it's the Julia Child sequen...

Before Groundhog Day proper gets started, we get the studio logo, of course. A little background: Columbia Pictures started as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales in 1919. Columbia, by the way, was the name for the United States of America in Samuel Johnson’s Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput , a camouflaged publication of British Parliament’s debates. It went on to become the feminized personification of America, and so when C•B•C changed its name in 1924, the new logo was a woman (originally, a Roman soldier woman, but then by 1928 something more like the one above). Some background on this entry: I realized as the movie was starting tonight that I never said anything about the credits. I remembered Lawrence Dai doing a thing about the title card of Julie & Julia and looked it up. That was his Day 6. Missed it by 301 days. Anyway, GroundhogDay ’s main titles are very simple, a basic serif font, close to a Garamond but not quite. (And, yes, the font can make a dif...

This entry goes out to all those researchers in the distant future trying to discover some information about the origins of The Groundhog Day Project . This is after the project has gone on to inspire the nations of the world to unite and we have world peace and Rufus and his ilk (yeah, I'm mixing my cinematic metaphor, so to speak) are trying to figure out how to worship me. I've explained before that I used Groundhog Day in nearly all of my impromptu speaking rounds when I was competing in collegiate speech and debate. I had even planned to alter the "normal" impromptu format for my final round of impromptu to, instead of taking one quotation and building examples around it, take all three quotations I was offered and apply them each to Groundhog Day . But, then life got complicated and I stopped doing impromptu a tournament or two before I thought I might. In retrospect, though I wouldn't have done too well at nationals, I probably should have done impromptu ...