the groundhog day project

From Argyle trying to keep McClane talking--and, seriously, he sits in the front of the limo and expects to be able to stay quiet?--to McClane and Powell getting to know each other over the radio, Die Hard is full of people trying to communicate. Now, I'd love to go hard into some communication theory, but I just can't tonight. I'm in a hotel room in Utah with some speech team folks--had two very good tournament days--and don't have any of my binders here. Plus, watching the movie on the tablet, typing this on my phone, there isn't much room for research on the go. So, let's just work more casually. Ellis hits on Holly when he knows her husband is on the way and it's Christmas Eve and she's got kids at home. At the party, a guy comes up to McClane and kisses him, wishes him "Merry Christmas." Takagi knows who McClane is, though he hasn't met him before. Holly and John have an awkward not-quite-hug, not-quite-kiss thing when they fir...

I want to get into talking about Deborah Tannen’s Genderlect Styles , but it’s hard to map it onto The Mirror Has Two Faces . Gregory is hardly the stereotypical male that Tannen talks about, nor really is Rose the stereotypical female that Tannen talks about. Tannen’s male wants status—meaning he wants the score that comes from having bedded a woman. Gregory is far from that, wanting anything but the score. Tannen’s female wants connection, but Rose gets the connection and wants more... Arguably. The question is—and this may just be a reiteration of my attempt to define the successful relationship the other day —does a connection include or preclude sex? Personally, I think it’s inclusive, and The Mirror Has Two Faces seems to support that idea even if Gregory and Rose have still not consummated their relationship at the end of the film. When Harry Met Sally... comes to the same conclusion (including the sex) thought it approaches it from a more stereotypical direction; that i...

Doing some last minute studying with my fellow grad students earlier this evening, I put out a hypothetical—if the Comm Theory exam gave us a question in which we picked a theory and picked what we applied it to, I was going to apply Howard Giles’ communication accommodation theory to Groundhog Day and I would copy and paste my answer as my blog entry for today. But, that was not allowed to happen, and I didn’t even use that theory in any of my answers. However, that doesn’t mean I cannot write about it now. First, let’s backtrack a little. Last fall, for a different class, we had to read and evaluate someone else’s thesis. I ended up choosing The Effects of Nonverbal Synchrony on Perceived Trust: An Extension of Communication Accommodation Theory by Judith Ann Reiten (1993). She made some of the connections I might make below, between Giles’ theory and similarity attraction theory and neurolinguistic programming , particularly to measure trust through synchrony ( mirroring ...

Day 52 - if you only had one day to live --that's an entry I've brought up several times since I wrote it. It's the one with the jelly beans. It's definitive proof I write stuff as cheesy as some of the stuff in The Fault in Our Stars --which I saw recently. Edge of Tomorrow --or Groundhog Day with guns--the other movie I saw recently, has no real sentiment to it except for one scene... SPOILERS. Tom Cruise's Cage and Emily Blunt's Rita sit in a barn well past the frontlines. We (and she) think(s) this is the first time they have made it this far. But, Cage finds some coffee and knows that Rita takes it with three sugars. She (and we) figure(s) out he has already gone through this scene. He's stalling their getting into the helicopter they have just found because he knows that every time they have tried to take the helicopter Rita ends up dead. He doesn't want to see her die again. On the next resumption, he goes to meet Rita (for the first time), but...