the groundhog day project

Thumbsucker does not have the voiceover (and accompanying cutaways) that make Mills' Beginners and 20th Century Women what they are. That necessarily makes the film a little less charming. (I wonder if the original script had that stuff, and Mills didn't have the clout to get away with it yet.) It's good, but it's not as... Yeah, charming was probably the right word. Or maybe the problem is that focusing so much on the teen here means there isn't the more experienced perspective of Beginners or 20th Century Women . Or maybe I just don't buy Keanu Reeves as a dentist.           There is a sort of cutaway, but played more like slightly odd establishing shots. Closeups on name tags, for example. And, maybe it's not fair to judge this film for its focus on the teen. The point of this film seems to be that the adults are just as unsure of things, just as undeveloped, just as incomplete as Justin is. His mother wants to win a date with an actor. H...

Porky's begins on the morning of April 12, 1954. Pee Wee's radio tells us so. The thing is that day was "the most boring day in history" (actually, since 1900 but who's nitpicking?). Apparently, William Tunstall-Pedoe, a computer scientist at Cambridge, pronounced it as such. He's got a search engine (sort of) called True Knowledge (which also includes Evi, Siri's competition, perhaps) that, as a sideline searched for boring days. Geek.com tells us, Tunstall-Pedoe fed "300 million news facts, including people, places, and events" into the program and April 12, 1954 (though the Telegraph says it's April 11, but that's probably just a British thing, time zone differences and whatnot) came out as the most boring day. Telegraph describes the "complex algorithms" involved, "such as how much one piece of information was linked to others." Geek quotes Tunstall-Pedoe, saying: Nobody significant died that day, no major ev...