Posts Tagged ‘Groundhog Day’

Metro In Focus: Live. Die. Repeat: Talking time loop movies

edgeoftomorrowBy Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

The tagline for Tom Cruise’s latest film is “Live. Die. Repeat.”

“How many times have we been here,” asks Rita (Emily Blunt). “For me, it’s been an eternity,” replies William (Cruise) as he relives the same day of an alien invasion over and over.

Edge of Tomorrow is a time-loop movie that can best be described as War of the Worlds meets Groundhog Day.

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray says, “Every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender. I am an immortal.” His take on a drunk, suicide-prone weatherman who discovers the beauty of life by living the same day endlessly may be the granddaddy of all

Hollywood déjà vu stories, but many other movie characters have been caught in cinematic time circles.

The DVD cover for 2006’s Salvage asks the question, “What if every day you relived your own murder?” Originally called Gruesome for the festival circuit, the movie is as grim as Bill Murray’s film is life-affirming. Called a “digital video hell — spawn of Psycho, Eyes Without a Face and Groundhog Day,” by Variety, Salvage is the story of Claire (Lauren Currie Lewis), a convenience store worker who undergoes her murder over and over. Despite its extremely low budget — star Lewis doubled as the film’s make-up artist — Salvage was an official selection of the 2006 Sundance Festival.

The horror genre lends itself to time-bending tales. Camp Slaughter is a 2005 throwback to the slasher films of the 1980s. In this one, a group of modern teens stumble across Camp Hiawatha, a dangerous place where not-so-happy-campers are trapped in 1981 and forced to re-experience the night a maniacal murderer went on a killing spree. Labelled “Groundhog Day meets Friday the 13th (part 2,3,4,5,6,7,8… every one of them!),” by one critic, it’s gory good fun.

Not into gory? The Yuletide provides a less bloody backdrop for time-looping. The title Christmas Every Day is self-explanatory but 12 Dates of Christmas is better than the name suggests. Us Weekly called this Amy Smart romantic comedy about a woman stuck in an endless Christmas Eve, a sweet “nicely woven journey.”

Finally, the aptly named Repeaters is a Canadian film written by Arne Olsen, scribe of Power Rangers: The Movie. Repeaters is about a trio of recovering addicts who find themselves in “an impossible time labyrinth” after being electrocuted in a storm. Like most time-bending films, Repeaters is about learning from your mistakes. What sets it apart from some of the others are three unlikeable leads who use their situation to raise hell and break the law. It’s only when Kyle (Dustin Milligan) realizes they could be in big trouble if time suddenly unfreezes for them that familiar time-loop themes of redemption and self-reflection arise.

CTV National News: Laughing with Harold Ramis. Monday February 24, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-02-25 at 12.11.34 PMTributes pour in for one of Hollywood’s beloved comedians. John Vennavally-Rao has more on a man who spent his life making people laugh.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Bill Murray does the mid-life crisis thing again with This is 40 By Richard Crouse Metro Canada Wednsday December 19, 2012

gal-groundhog-day-murray2Forty isn’t old, but Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd, the leads in the new Judd Apatow comedy This is 40, are confronting middle age and not always liking what they see.

Mid-life ruts have supplied the basis for many movies.

The best-known age-angst film has to be American Beauty. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey, who won a best actor Oscar for his work) has a classic case of the mid-life blues. Depressed, he allows himself to be pushed around by his employer and his wife and he’s developed an unhealthy crush on his daughter’s friend. To restart his life, he quits his job, blackmails his boss and deals with his wife’s infidelity.

“I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the past 20 years,” he says. “And I’m just now waking up.”

Things don’t work out well for Lester, but weatherman Phil Connors’s (Bill Murray) mid life crisis has a better outcome.

At the beginning of Groundhog Day he’s a drunk, suicide prone curmudgeon who sums up his outlook like this, “I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.”

When he starts living the same day over and over again, however, he begins to see the beauty of life.

Bill Murray is also forced to reflect on his existence in Broken Flowers, when he receives a mysterious letter telling him of a son he didn’t know about.

“Well, the past is gone, I know that,” he says. “The future isn’t here yet, whatever it’s going to be. So, all there is, is this. The present. That’s it.”

Mid-life crises aren’t the domain of men, however.

In The Bridges of Madison County, Meryl Streep plays Francesca, an Iowa housewife who shatters the midlife doldrums by having a brief but meaningful affair with National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid (played by Clint Eastwood). Of her affair she says, “everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.”

The best-loved mid-life movie might be Shirley Valentine, the bittersweet tale of an English housewife who leaves her humdrum existence behind for a happier life in the Greek islands.

“I used to be The Mother,” she says. “I used to be The Wife. But now I’m Shirley Valentine again.”