February 2, 2006 @ 10:46 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
So my Mr. Putty post got a trackback today from our neighbor, Steve the Llama Butcher (and thank you very much, Steve), and naturally I popped over to his site (which I visit regularly) to see his whole post. Which I must say amused me mightily. Someday Mrs. Llama Butcher and I will have to get our husbands out of their respective basements to volley political barbs over a pizza. But I digress.
I noticed that the post right above that one is about a movie Scott and I are enormous fans of: Groundhog Day. And this review Steve shares, I’ve got to pass it along too.
When I set out to write this article, I thought it’d be fun to do a quirky homage to an offbeat flick, one I think is brilliant as both comedy and moral philosophy. But while doing what I intended to be cursory research — how much reporting do you need for a review of a twelve-year-old movie that plays constantly on cable? — I discovered that I wasn’t alone in my interest. In the years since its release the film has been taken up by Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and followers of the oppressed Chinese Falun Gong movement. Meanwhile, the Internet brims with weighty philosophical treatises on the deep Platonist, Aristotelian, and existentialist themes providing the skin and bones beneath the film’s clown makeup. On National Review Online’s group blog, The Corner, I asked readers to send in their views on the film. Over 200 e-mails later I had learned that countless professors use it to teach ethics and a host of philosophical approaches. Several pastors sent me excerpts from sermons in which Groundhog Day was the central metaphor. And dozens of committed Christians of all denominations related that it was one of their most cherished movies.
When the Museum of Modern Art in New York debuted a film series on “The Hidden God: Film and Faith” two years ago, it opened with Groundhog Day. The rest of the films were drawn from the ranks of turgid and bleak intellectual cinema, including standards from Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. According to the New York Times, curators of the series were stunned to discover that so many of the 35 leading literary and religious scholars who had been polled to pick the series entries had chosen Groundhog Day that a spat had broken out among the scholars over who would get to write about the film for the catalogue. In a wonderful essay for the Christian magazine Touchstone, theology professor Michael P. Foley wrote that Groundhog Day is “a stunning allegory of moral, intellectual, and even religious excellence in the face of postmodern decay, a sort of Christian-Aristotelian Pilgrim’s Progress for those lost in the contemporary cosmos.” Charles Murray, author of Human Accomplishment, has cited Groundhog Day more than once as one of the few cultural achievements of recent times that will be remembered centuries from now. He was quoted in The New Yorker declaring, “It is a brilliant moral fable offering an Aristotelian view of the world.”
I know what you’re thinking: We’re talking about the movie in which Bill Murray tells a big rat sitting on his lap, “Don’t drive angry,” right? Yep, that’s the one.
Read the rest right here. And thanks for this, too, Steve.
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Thanks! This must be the year 2006, because I was awoken by my darling The Dear One with a sort of cuffing to the head delivered together with the announcement that you had linked to my Bill Murray post.
And hopefully Scott and I can find grounds of agreement over Pizza (Sals = eh; Crozet Pizza = what do you mean I need a reservation for takeout?; Dr. Ho’s = sweet!)
Posted on February 3rd, 2006 at 6:47 amGreat review of a great movie! One of my favorites, in fact. The remaking and redemption of Phil is a thing of beauty to behold. I love Bill Murray — fell in love with him when he tried so valiantly to make the beautiful “The Razor’s Edge” work on film. (It didn’t work so well … read the book and picture Bill Murray as Larry.) I was going to post about this movie, too, but didn’t have time. Now, I have a great post to refer to. Thanks.
Posted on February 4th, 2006 at 6:17 am