the groundhog day project

One of Phil's lessons--one of many that he has to learn in his time loop--is that women matter. Other people in general, but also specifically women. In his trapped life in Pittsburgh, he was a womanizer. The film doesn't make this obvious, but the ease with which he shifts into trickery mode to seduce Nancy after being in the time loop for only three days should give you a hint. Phil sees women--as he sees most people*--as sort of props in the play of his life. There to be used and forgotten. (* He calls them by nicknames more readily than he calls most of them by their given names. He calls Mrs. Lancaster "Mama" and not in a nice way like he calls O'Reilly "Pops" or "Dad." He calls the man in the hallway "Pork Chop." He calls Nancy "Rita.") For example, forget about Nancy or Rita for now. What about Mrs. Lancaster? 1. Mrs. 2. He barely knows her, she barely knows him, and he doesn't know what affect his kissing her...

First of all, hello new readers. It's that time of year when people are googling "Groundhog Day." And, well, if you're reading this, that might be you. (If you want to understand the holiday, go to this entry for the basics or this entry for a bit of melatonin science. Otherwise, stick around. Second of all, I'm watching Groundhog Day early. The usual thing for year three is that Groundhog Day falls on the 2nd of every month--and I will watch it tomorrow to be proper--but alas I had a problem. At school from 7am to 10pm, had not really thought about what movie I was watching today until I was on the ride home. I thought about watching The Paper , a little bit of Michael Keaton working at a newspaper as an echo of Spotlight , plus it would tie into the one class I am taking this quarter-- (I believe it is officially called "Constructing LA" and something about narrative. Taught by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez. Involves a lot of narrati...

Quiet... Like silence, but not really silent... Just that still sort of quiet Like the sound of a page being turned in a book, Or a pause in a walk in the woods. Quiet... Like silence, but not really silent... Just that nice kind of quiet, Like the sound when you lie upside down in your bed. Just the sound of your heart in your head... (Lyrics from the Matilda musical by none other than Tim Minchin who is purportedly working on a Groundhog Day musical) I wonder how much noise pollution there was in Punxsutawney circa 1993. I’m guessing not a lot. Except that they’ve got electricity so there would be the hum of transformers and whatnot. It’s midwinter so the crickets might not be making the noise they’re making outside right now as I write this. The rooms at the Cherry Street Inn do not all have their own TVs, so Phil probably wouldn’t hear the neighbors’ TV like I do right now, either. In the Global North, we don’t much have actual silence anymore. In Uttar Pradesh, so-called “...

There will be no math today, not even 1+1-- arguably, it is 2 --because that stuff is tiring and I'm guessing at least a few of you-- I would guess a percentage but that might be construed as math-- in fact, I'm wondering now if use of the term few was mathematical --and I wouldn't want to present even the mildest appearance of impropriety --found it boring. Or inane. Or, if you really know math, you might have been thinking in the back of your mind, who is this moron, thinks he can suddenly pretend expertise in math just because he's got expertise on Groundhog Day ? Who does he think he is? To you-- and I am not going to look up what percentage of the population is good at math, or calculate/construct a Venn diagram to find the overlap between the set of people who are good at math and the set of people who read this blog-- now, that was mathematical, so I must apologize --because that would be wrong --I should apologize... except if you've been p...

Every night, by cold bricks’ glow I watch the shadow rising from this old man in the snow. At 8:02 we let it go. At 8:02 we let it go. Let’s just get on with this, already. Jedson O’Reilly is the only homeless person in Punxsutawney. He dies alone in an alley on the biggest holiday in town. The people of (film-)Punxsutawney are assholes. Evidence, you ask? In 2012, as published in the Punxsutawney Spirit , Community Action, Inc. performed a survey of “unsheltered homeless individuals” in Jefferson County, PA. The county’s total population was listed at 44,764. The survey found there to be only 8 individuals “identified as being unsheltered homeless in accordance with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) definition.” (To be fair, “The HUD defines a household as "unsheltered homeless) only when the individual or individuals are residing in a place not meant for human habitation, such as cars, parks, sidewalks, abandoned buildings or the street. It...

So, my point was supposed to be about Punxsutawneyans' treatment of their homeless population, and I will get to that. But, first, how to narrow down 440.83 supposedly "eligible" women to Phil's 63? As I said at the end of yesterday's entry, Phil likes brunettes (Rita), redheads (Nancy), and blondes (Laraine). And, I've already narrowed down his interest range by age, based on those three: 30 to 34. In trying to narrow down the options a little more, I was reminded of an episode of This American Life --Episode 486: Valentine's Day . The opener for the show involves David Kestenbaum, a physicist attempting "to employ the power of mathematics to estimate the likelihood of finding a girlfriend." Permit an extended excerpt: David Kestenbaum So we started to do the calculation on the board and-- can you look up what the population of Boston is? Ira Glass Now David is asking me to look this up because at this point in our interview I actually made...

I was going to open with the following: The people of Punxsutawney, PA are assholes. And, this is why. They've got one homeless guy in the entire town, and they can afford to have a whole lot of groundhog banners and groundhog trashcans, not to mention that stage on Gobbler's Knob and all those Inner Circle guys' fancy suits, but they can't help out one nice old guy with a meal and a warm place to be? Then, I got sidetracked by math. To demonstrate that Punxsutawney was small enough that we can assume only the one homeless guy exists, I wanted to figure out just how populated Punxsutawney is. Mind you, I don't mean the real-world Punxsutawney but the film version. The film version of Punxsutawney is significantly smaller (in population) than the real one. I started by thinking the movie didn't tell us the population (a mistake I realized pretty quickly). So I looked up Punxsutawney's population, 5,962 as of 2010, closer to 7,000 in 1990 (the film presumab...

There may be a scientific explanation for why groundhogs (in the wild) would actually wake up midwinter. Consider this a sequel to my entry about the origins of Groundhog Day. Groundhogs are very simple animals; Stutz (2006) tells us, “They live pretty solitary lives, are good swimmers and adequate climbers, and, when not browsing on grasses, plants, and tree bark, spend the time working on their underground network of burrows. These activities take up half their lives. They spend the other half asleep. (p. 21) He goes on to explain how “winter in the northern hemisphere can mean sparse pickings” for a plant eater like the groundhog, hence they have evolved, like many other mammals, to hibernate through the colder months because that’s “better than retiring hungry every night and a lot less work than migrating”—and here’s where Stutz is just rude—“especially if you’re a lumpy creature with stubby legs.” Then Stutz provides a lengthy explanation about the hormone melatonin. Th...

Did anybody else find the name of the park where the groundhog ceremony was held funny? That's the start of a thread on IMDb regarding Groundhog Day 's Gobbler's Knob. Maybe I don't have the mind of a teenage boy but I never took it as anything more than the place's name. In fact, on the IMDb thread, I pointed out that knob is a geographical term and gobbler presumably refers to turkeys... I haven't confirmed the turkey thing as far as why the real Gobbler's Knob is called that, but my guess is once upon a time it has some wild turkeys hanging about. I never considered it as something suggestive because, if nothing else, that's the name of the actual place in Punxsutawney where they hold the groundhog ceremony. Still, people insist on thinking it's suggestive. Recall, my friend Stephanie , watching the movie for the first time--at my urging and on my iPad--suggested the name Gobbler's Knob was a sex reference... actually, she suggested it...

I wouldn’t say I make a habit of attacking people in this blog. I mean, yeah, I spent a few days on how bad Rubin’s use of voiceover was in the original script. But, mostly, I say positive things. But, I was looking at some of the links I haven’t used yet for this blog, happened upon a couple about the town of Woodstock, Illinois—the filming location for Groundhog Day . And, I just have to say that Maggie Crane of Woodstock is a liar. Ok, some context: A.V. Club did a piece about Woodstock this past July. At one point, the author points out that “the people of Woodstock are still every bit as excited about their claim to fame, many of them having witnessed firsthand its production—which was, like Punxsutawney, inescapable—and appearing as extras.” One of those people they mention specifically is Maggie Crane, “who missed much of the filming due to her job at the library, fondly recalled fetching the French poetry that Murray’s character quotes to impress Andie MacDowell.” The thing ...

I ended yesterday’s comments on Danny Rubin’s script notes with a simple justification: “…it’s appropriate that Rubin overthought it even before he wrote it because now, more than 20 years later, I’m overthinking it all over again.” Rubin’s got additional benefits to repeating the same day over—in addition to the generic “no consequences” and the “no hangovers” bit we get from Gus (and which is in Rubin’s notes): “No fear of V.D. No fear of what other people think.” Two very different benefits there. And, there’s more: Don’t have to wash clothes or dishes. Don’t have to go to bed. Always know where you left things. And, there’s a point in Rubin’s notes where he takes it farther than the script would ever go. First, there’s a note about deer hunting, noting cleverly, “All the sport could’ve gone out of that. He knows where all the deer are.” Then, there’s more killing: Macabre Twist: Since death had no consequence, (and he had grown bored with killing deer)), it’s [sic] couldn’t ...

I already mentioned how I briefly thought the quilt on Phil’s bed was a wedding ring pattern—I’m not a quilter but I my mother used to be, so I’ve heard of some stuff like this. Anyway, found online a couple spots (like this one ) where people were talking about that quilt and, well, apparently it’s an “ irish chain ” (maybe a triple irish chain) which has nothing to do with wedding symbology. But, I wanted to write about the stuff that is wedding symbology today. Not just symbology, of course, but weddings themselves. In the movie, we don’t see the Kleiser wedding, but in earlier drafts, the big party at the end was the wedding, not the Groundhog ball. Rubin includes a version of this scene (though it was not part of the original screenplay) in How to Write Groundhog Day . Debbie is still named Doris, and all Phil says he did to get her to go through with the wedding was have “a little chat.” The movie presents this better; as Phil says, “All I did was fan the flame of her passion f...

…that being said, Phil, human like the rest of us, probably still has no idea what love is (if it’s anything) at the end of his journey… Except, maybe he actually knows it better than any of us; it just isn’t isolated to romantic love anymore. Phil loves everyone. After years of repetition, after getting past his arrogance and his egocentrism and his chauvinism and his narcissism, he has become the ultimate, well, hippie I suppose. Without all the lazy stereotypes, of course. Phil’s world has become a literal microcosm of the larger world, so it may be easier, but he has come to care about, presumably, everyone in it. He doesn’t just save a kid from falling out of a tree, or save Buster from choking, or fix Felix’s back. He also changes a tire, lights a cigarette, and “fan the flame” of a young woman’s passion for her fiancé. And, so much more, I think we can assume. (In Rubin’s first revision (according to Ryan Gilbey; I haven’t seen that draft), Phil also “pump[s] the stomach of Ja...