Groundhog Day

 I recently rewatched this movie, and it was an interesting experience because there are films that I can rewatch again and again and never get tired of them, but this is not one of them.  It's kind of surprising because I remember watching this movie and having my mind blown by the great premise of it. The movie is 30 years old, so I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say that it's about a man who gets trapped in a time loop and eventually escapes the time Loop. The man is played, I don't want to say wonderfully, by Bill Murray, but aptly by Bill Murray. He acts like Bill Murray.  Bill Murray never acts. Maybe he acts in a few movies, but this is not a movie where he's really acting.  Here he's just playing the typical deadpan Bill Murray character. There are some great comedic moments where he's trying to commit suicide, and he takes the ground hog with him, and he's just talking like a wild man, so there are parts that are great. I have kind of a real knit picky criticism, Andy McDowell plays the love interest in this film, and she's presented at one point with this really soft out of focus lighting and when streaming it on Netflix you can really tell, like the quality of our modern streaming services shows what they're doing and when you're watching the film you might notice that subconsciously in the theater at the time, but it wouldn't be so obvious but now it was so glaringly obvious what they were doing like oh look she's so beautiful.  She's not unattractive, but does she really need that much help to look good? It wasn't about making her look good, it was like making her look angelic right, and I did not like that at all. I thought it was very manipulative, but I think that's probably not the filmmaker's fault, it's more the fault of technology catching up to tricks like that. The other problem that the film faces is not connected to the film itself. It's for lack of a better term, The Matrix effect, so the Matrix is a very influential move to be with a mind-blowing, really high sci-fi, concept. So influential in fact that you can say I think we're living in The Matrix and people immediately know what you're talking about, and Ground hog Day is the same way. If I say I feel like I'm living in Ground hog Day you don't think about the holiday on February 2nd you think about the movie.  This is the epitome of a Time Loop movie, perhaps there were time Loop movies before and certainly there have been time Loop movies after, but this is the one that everybody thinks about. This is the one that's so influential and because it's so influential when you actually watch it you're kind of underwhelmed, and it's strange because there's nothing bad about the movie in fact it's really good that's why it's so influential. It's just that there have been so many reiterations and so many movies playing upon this idea after, and it's such a part of culture now, that it feels a little bit underwhelming. For example, I think my favorite time loop movie would have to be Happy Death Day, so it takes the idea of being stuck in a time loop and actually gives stakes to it so the problem and kind of the philosophical dilemma of Ground hog Day is that there are no stakes. He can't live, he can't die, so what are you doing in that situation where you are just stuck in one place? I think it's definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it before, but again if you're a certain age you probably have watched this, and it might not bear rewatching.  I did introduce it to my children recently, and I wouldn't say that they enjoyed it because that would be a little bit of a stretch, but they did watch it and afterwards separately both of them asked me very deep questions about time and what they would do in that situation, so it clearly still has an impact on people is still influential.