the groundhog day project

I'm watching a fairly obscure little movie in the theater today-- The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet and there two moments stick out as things I want to get into here. (First of all, the movie's directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet--if you know who that is and are interested, you should know that it's an English language film (though filmed in Canada). It's about a 10-year-old-boy who heads out on the road (almost Into the Wild -style) to get from Montana to D.C. to accept an award for inventing a perpetual motion machine. There's a whole thing about guilt over the accidental death of his twin brother and an almost painfully obvious metaphor--perpetual motion for the way the family has settled into its post-tragedy life, and everything resolves itself a little too neatly. But, the visuals, including overlayed maps and diagrams (apparently the book on which the film is based includes a lot of these things) are great, a lot of train rides and countrysides (Canada posin...

“Family is undeniably inescapable. Like a silent shadow, it’s your blood, your roots, and (at times) your ball and chain.” So begins Meredith Alloway’s review of Stories We Tell for The Script Lab . In the terms of these last few blog entries (today is Day 5 with Stories We Tell ), family is those people who are telling a story that keeps weaving in and out of yours. They are the people who have a bigger investment in your story than other people do, and vice versa, you have an investment in theirs. Whether by blood or by circumstance, family is, as Anderst’s piece on the film, suggests the storytellers here are, a chorus of voices, each telling a variation on a motif of the heart of the story. I’m reminded of words outside my own language as ways to conceive of family. One you might know from Lilo & Stitch if you’ve ever seen it— ‘ohana . On that show, they liked to say that ‘ohana means family, ‘ohana means no one gets left behind. (That word might be a relatively recent...