the groundhog day project

Taxi guy gets sees a woman hit by a car, takes the time to set down his stuff before he casually checks on her. Jogging Lady says they should call the police but makes no effort to do so. Taxi guy casually steals hit-and-run victim's purse and walks away. New guy drives up and, when it seems like he isn't needed, hits on Jogging Lady as the camera drifts down the street, eventually happening upon the driver who just hit that woman, his mother, as he arrives home and goes inside to light some candles at an altar of some sort and then (possibly even more evil than running down his own mother with a car or performing satanic rituals) cuts photos out of a book. He arbitrarily sets a filmstrip to running as the police arrive and we're left wondering, what are we watching? And, is that filmstrip of his mother pushing him in his toy car? Is this poetry? Is that image supposed to rhyme with him hitting her with his car? But then we wander off with a passerby, whose on his way to d...

Right away, in Slacker , the theme and structure is laid out by none other than director Linklater himself, talking to a taxi driver. Alternate realities, each choice you make fracturing reality so that every direction exists. This movie is about to drift off on tangents from each scene-- (I wrote in this blog before--I don't remember when but I think it was fairly recently--about having a story idea that follows one character for a while then switches to another, then later to another, then another and another, etcetera. For the record, I have never seen Slacker until tonight. But, Slacker seems to be doing just that sort of thing.) --with no overarching plot to tie them together, just a lot of fringe-of-society type characters going about their business. (I imagine you could operate a story like this on different levels of reality as well, like Mr. Show with Bob and David used to link its sketches or how Cloud Atlas ties its stories together. One character watches a TV sh...