the groundhog day project

...Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. -- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis ...you can follow Phil's lead to achieve this transformation in your own life. Like Phil, we can all wake up and discover joy rather than boredom, hope rather than emptiness, and love rather than self-absorption. -- Paul Hannam, The Magic of Groundhog Day Sometimes I watch this movie and I ...

(An aside before I get going today: today in my Intercultural Communication class, we watched Gung Ho and Rick Overton, Ralph in Groundhog Day had a small but briefly important role in it. He’s 7 years younger and they barely say his character’s name but once or twice so while I noticed his name on the IMDb page, I didn’t recognize him until a good way into the film. He doesn’t have any great thematically central dialogue like “That about sums it up for me” but his getting injured on the assembly line does make for a key moment in the themes of that movie.) Today, February 12, is the anniversary of Groundhog Day ’s original release. So, let’s look back. Jerry Adler and Ray Sawhill—apparently, it took two authors to review one movie—at Newsweek , 8 March 1993*, for example, note the importance of Bill Murray’s casting in the film. “Acting a scene, Murray’s face registers a sequence of emotions as precisely as a galvanometer,” they tell us. They continue: Between expressions the...