… Day … Groundhog Day … Groundhog …

I wrote about one of my favorite movies of all time for hilobrow.com, as part of a series of 25 pieces on “the topic of ‘offbeat’ movies from the Eighties” (the decade loosely defined). Here’s how it opens:

In 1993, the year Groundhog Day hit theaters, that furry near-term Nostradamus named Punxsutawney Phil gazed into the meteorological future and saw his shadow.

Historical records of this Americana hokum date back to the late 1800s, when Groundhog Day first became an annual ritual at Gobbler’s Knob, an inland Pennsylvania town with the sort of Capraesque name that lends itself to fables mixing homespun moralizing, commercial appeal, and a smidgen of self-awareness.

Groundhog Day legend has it that if Phil sees his shadow, winter will last another six weeks. What Phil — and Phil’s handlers, and the makers of the film Groundhog Day — certainly didn’t see coming was that 1993’s elongated winter wouldn’t hold a candle to the staying power of the movie itself.

On the one hand, this may seem off-topic for me — it even did to me, for a moment. I thought about adding a tag to Disquiet.com for “off-topic” things that I may post occasionally, but then I realized that part of the crux of my description of the movie is as follows: “It’s It’s a Wonderful Life reworked for memories trained on instant replay.” Which isn’t just on-topic; it connects directly to what I wrote about just yesterday, about music-making tools that let one access the recent past through memory buffers.

Other pieces in the Hilobrow series include Annie Nocenti on After Hours, Erik Davis on Repo Man, Susannah Breslin on Man Bites Dog, Dean Haspiel on Sid and Nancy, and Carlo Rotella on Robocop. Several are already up, and others will appear in the coming weeks.