the groundhog day project

It's the little thing, really... And not the obvious stuff like one of the clocks has Harold Lloyd hanging from it like Doc will later. I mean, stuff like the broken clock under the table when the dog food spills. The rundown movie theater is a church. The other movie theater is showing Orgy American Style . On the main square there's a sex shop, a pawn shop, a loan shark, a travel office, a psychic, a seedy motel, a couple closed down businesses, and Mayor Goldie Wilson's reelection campaign headquarters. And how weird is it that the diner became a workout gym and then turns back into a diner by 2015? (If that ain't America in a nutshell...) Marty checks out two woman in leotards and Jennifer barely seems to care--but she does notice. She deserves better than this flighty musician. Graffiti on the school says DANGEROUS BOB and I imagined some crew member was referencing the director with that one. But, really, 'Dangerous' Bob Widin was the as...

Headline from HuffPo : Did Back to the Future Originally End With 'To be Continued'? They say no. I say, fuck HuffPo , fuck whatever Mandela Effect reality you all are from, it was there on the big screen in my head, and was not some thing they added for VHS. I mean, sure we must've rented the movie to watch again at home once it was on video, and I'm sure the copy we dubbed off cable (Or maybe off the rental tape, not that I will admit that we ever did that, you know, with the bit of tape over that little indent on the one side so the machine can make a copy... Or was it breaking the tab in the indent and hoping the rental place didn't notice? I can't actually remember that bit because I have recorded things from one tape to another, entirely legally, so many times that I forgot how to do it illegally. Not that I am admitting that I ever knew how to do it illegally.) included the TO BE CONTINUED and I saw the VHS copy more than I ever saw the movie i...

The context for a given film is interesting. I mean, going back to movies I watched time and time again in my childhood is interesting because I can imagine what I thought of the movie on first blush. I mean, had I even seen any time travel movies before Back to the Future was in theaters? Time After Time came out in 1979 but it's not like I saw that in the theater. I had watched every episode of Voyagers! , but cinematically, I'm not sure. Maybe some crap low budget thing available on VHS for rental, but I can't think of what movie it might be. But, what I really wanted to talk about, looping back around to Back to the Future after drifting away from it last time, is this discussion of late I've seen online about how Marty's parents not recognizing him--looking, as he does, just like that guy Calvin who helped get them together 30 years ago--as a plot hole. (Remember, I don't like the use of that term plot hole in the first place.) A) This is not a...

I never really got around to talking about destiny yesterday . Probably because I really didn't want to. There is a bit of a deterministic streak to Back to the Future , and I've written about stuff like that before in this blog. How what we call "free will" is just a long series of tiny events leading to all the inevitable decisions you will make and actions you will take. It's both entirely plausible and entirely pointless at the same time. At the moment, I'm more interested in a couple details from the end of the film that have little to do with time travel. 1) who parked Marty's truck in the garage at that weird angle? It's impractical, and actually would have been fairly difficult. But, it shows off the truck real nice, so I guess it's good for the product placement. 2) And this is interesting because I have got to wonder if the placement is deliberate. So, the Libyans drive a blue and white VW bus. When Marty gets away in the DeLorean, ...

The opening shot of Back to the Future is almost perfect. All those clocks, the slow pan. That one clock that foreshadows the climax of the film. All of Doc Brown's morning routine--the radio and the clock, really?--and the automated machinery. Plus The plutonium is set up and gets a mini-pay off already with the end of that tracking shot. The opening scene, if you move into the next bit, with the giant amp and Marty's particular style of "rock and roll", also sets up both a defining characteristic of Marty McFly--he tends toward too much --and a particular problem in what is often considered to be a flawless film. Seriously, people study this screenplay as an ideal example of screenwriting. (Nevermind, of course, the multiple drafts it took to get to the final product.) And it is fantastic in terms of structure, in terms of setup and payoff. Every scene serves a purpose. Characters and events all interact just so. But--and I've written a bit about this, for ...

That bootstrap paradox is vital to Somewhere in Time . In another story, it would be a stranger mystery, or a misguided mistake. Here, it is fundamental to the story being told. The bootstrap paradox has two parts here... First, though, let me define it in case you are not nerdy about time travel stories. The Quantum Tunnel: Exploring Physics Fact in Science Fiction defines the bootstrap paradox as a time travel paradox in which an object or information can exist without ever being created. The object or piece of information is sent back in time where it is retrieved and to become the very object or piece of information that was brought back in the beginning. The name comes from a Heinlein story called "By His Bootstraps" Drawing on the expression about "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps", the story concerns a man who travels back in time to give his younger self a notebook of translations he has made... Except if he gives that notebook to his younger self...

Twelve Monkeys starts with some lame text-exposition-- "...5 BILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM A DEADLY VIRUS IN 1997... THE SURVIVORS WILL ABANDON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET... ONCE AGAIN THE ANIMALS WILL RULE THE WORLD..." --but then makes it awesome by tagging it as "Excerpts from interview with clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, April 12, 1990 - Baltimore County Hospital." Great counter to get us going. The movie doesn't really leave much room for James Cole (Bruce Willis) to actually be insane--far too much detail (as one might expect in a Terry Gilliam film) in the future opening and later future scenes. But, as long as we can understand that Cole might question his reality later, the drama works fine in that regard. Meanwhile, we get what is probably the best time travel movie ever, or high on the list certainly. Like Timecrimes , Twelve Monkeys never contradicts its time travel. It doesn't play with time and the ability to alter the past. I...

“Everybody dies sooner or later. Don’t worry about your death. Worry about your life. Take charge of your life for as long as it lasts.” – Littlefinger, Games of Thrones Inevitably, a) yes, everyone’s going to die and b) even scoundrels like Littlefinger get something right. There was, at least once, a day in which “saying that ‘ Groundhog Day demonstrates the wonder of living each moment as a totally new event’ seem[ed] both trite and tired.” There was a day once when Groundhog Day was a brand new thing for me, sitting in a dark movie theater. I knew Bill Murray from the likes of Meatballs and Stripes and Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II and Caddyshack and Scrooged and Little Shop of Horrors and What About Bob? — (That last one, for example, I watched at the house of a girl I had a thing for in high school. She was two years older than and one year ahead of me. We’d gone out once, saw Scent of a Woman . Then, she invited me over to her house and we watched What About B...

I saw About Time again today, and I was reading over my entry here about that film, and I noticed an error. POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD… Taking the protagonist’s do-each-day-twice methodology and twisting it together with Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, I suggested the following: 1) live each day as if it were the specific day you had time traveled to, as if it's the most important day you have and 2) do with that day only things you would be willing to do again and again and again. I'm certainly not suggesting that eternal recurrence is real, but it's a great way to look at the present. If something isn't worth doing again, why do it once? And, no, that’s not the mistake. I still like the idea of that now, about five weeks later. And, considering this blog (and Groundhog Day is so often about the passage of time, it’s remarkable how recent that blog entry seems to me. But, anyway, I do think the day can be so much better if you both relax into it and make the effort...

Today, I finally saw About Time , which at least one IMDb user called a combination of The Butterfly Effect and Groundhog Day . Billed as being from the creator of Love Actually , Notting Hill , and Four Weddings and a Funeral , the description on IMDb goes like this: At the age of 21, Tim discovers he can travel in time and change what happens and has happened in his own life. His decision to make his world a better place by getting a girlfriend turns out not to be as easy as you might think. Actually--and SPOILERS minor and major may be coming, so if you've an urge to see the film, go see it before reading any further--"getting" the girlfriend is fairly easy, but there is a lot more going on afterward, which is what pushes About Time , in my opinion far above many a romantic comedy. Hell, like Four Weddings and a Funeral (which stars Andie MacDowell, coincidentally), About Time has some quiet somber moments and a couple rather painful decisions on the part of it...

In their essay, “Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture," Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis give us a slightly different take on Phil’s experience than Daughton’s (1996) notion that “Phil’s situation… parallels that of the economically disenfranchised, the Other”; Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis tell us “what comes under attack” in the film “is a particular manifestation of cyclical temporality that actually exists in capitalist societies.” One essay’s take on the “cyclical temporality” implicit in Ralph’s line, “That about sums it up for me” matches up with another’s take on Phil’s trap linking to him the disenfranchised, which arguably includes Ralph. That “arguably” of mine is a key point where many might disagree, though. Usually, we would only use “economically disenfranchised” to describe people living, say, below the poverty line, people without many options in their lives, people stuck… well, see, I’m already blurring the definition just enough to be sure I can include the likes of Ralph,...