Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/01/groundhog-day-every-day-in-o.html
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everybody knows those days were just the highlights. so the count is way off.
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there was 6 months worth of days were Phil just sat in bed flipping cards into a hat.
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Now I want to see the same thing done for Westworld.
Much as I love this movie, I can’t watch 30 minutes of this.
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While Harold Ramis himself said Phil spent about 10 years in Punxsutawney, this guy’s very thorough analysis estimates it was actually closer to 34 years !
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sure it’s funny, but since the article assumes that Phil would only play the piano 3 or 4 hours a day otherwise he would be in danger of carpal tunnel makes me think they haven’t really thought some implications through.
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Hey everyone, I made this. Yeah, the day count is simply the amount of days actually shown in the film. There are definitely thousands more we don’t see.
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Very interesting.
I think the estimate for learning French is way off, though.
a conservative estimate, based on the idea of him taking lessons everyday (he clearly really wants to impress Rita), it would have taken somewhere around 12 years to become completely fluent (though ex-pats living in Francophone countries sometimes state it takes longer even than that)
Well, “completely fluent”? He’s fluent enough to appreciate 19th-century poetry, and to recite it without butchering the language. And 19th-century poetry is definitely something he focused on, as opposed to, say, everyday conversational fluency.
I’m of course assuming there is one competent French teacher in town, but failing that, we know there is someone who studied 19th-century French poetry in college.
French is one of the easier languages for native English speakers. The US The Foreign Service Institute classifies it as “category 1”, requiring 600 hours of study, spread across 24 (that’s 25 hours per week, or 5 hours Mo-Fr), to reach “General Professional Proficiency”. That’s not native-level fluency, but if you gear things towards poetry, it’s definitely enough.
If the teacher is bad, or he’s particularly untalented, multiply that by five. That’s still less than two and a half years of dedicated studying.
But then again, I hear public opinion in America has it that learning a language is a next-to-impossible feat… so might it really take him 10 years to overcome that mental block?
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Plus he really only needed to learn one line of poetry to create the appearance of familiarity with the subject.
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Honestly, however long Bill Murray invested in learning to speak the lines reasonably well would probably have been enough. Coupla afternoons?
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The count is not off. If you bothered to actually read the description on the video (instead of mouthing off here) you would know the following: “The film shows 37 separate days from Phil’s thousands of Groundhog Days in Punxsutawney. Every frame of the movie is used from days 1-37, with the exception of a few crossfades.”
Excellent work Neil.
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sure it’s funny, but since the article assumes that Phil would only play the piano 3 or 4 hours a day otherwise he would be in danger of carpal tunnel makes me think they haven’t really thought some implications through.
Because he begins every day with a new old untrained body, RSI wouldn’t be an issue, but his fingers, doing unfamiliar motions, would not last long, every single day. Which brings up Edge of Tomorrow, where Dipshit McCruise becomes a fit badass from being a PR wimp. The movie could have worked, with his muscle memory improving even though he would have been out of breath all the time. There were other issues with that story, in that Blunt’s character should have been the hero. &tc.
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He doesn’t physically age through the daily resets. If he ate Arby’s before going to bed he wouldn’t have diarrhea the “next” morning. (He also dies a lot and comes back resurrected, but Arby’s is a funnier example.) So he could play piano all day every day without getting carpal tunnel.
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Punxsutawney is about a 90 minute commute to both Carnegie Mellon and Penn State (in opposite directions.) He could find top notch French teachers at either, I think.
It’s not established that he starts off in poor physical condition. Plenty of pencil pushers are gym rats, especially in the military.
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You’re forgetting the blizzard.
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What blizzard? All of this moisture coming up out of the Gulf is gonna push off to the east and hit Altoona.
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