You're Wrong About - Bonus: Groundhog Day with Josh Gondelman

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today. Josh Gondelman is here to laugh and cry with us, and to unpack the heaps of big feelings in Groundhog Day.  Subscribe to You Are Good here.Josh Gondelman can be found on Twitter and right here.Support You're Wrong About:Subscribe on Patreon (monthly bonus episodes!)Donate on PaypalBuy cute merchSupport the show

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we give you another podcast to try out. This week, I am sharing with you an episode of my other podcast, You Are Good, which you might have heard of. We are hard at work on a brand new episode of You're Wrong About that is coming out next Monday. But for now, I wanted to share with you this wonderful, wacky, fun journey into our battle with depression with Josh Gondelman talking about Groundhog Day.

And I did the math, and I'm pretty sure that if Punxsutani Phil sees his shadow and we get six more weeks of winter, winter ends on March 16th. So we're almost there. You Are Good is a feelings podcast about movies that I host with my dear friend Alex Steed. And what we often say about it is that you don't have to see the movie to enjoy it. The movie is kind of a jumping off point for people who love it to find a shared language about what it feels like to be a human, which you probably are.

This episode is about trying to find the joy and the laughter in feeling stuck, feeling depressed, feeling like you were trapped in an unbelievably long winter in which nothing will ever change. Which obviously is a very theoretical idea that none of us have any connection with right now. But if you happen to, this is a fun one. If you don't know Josh Gondelman's work, he's a comedian, he's a writer. As we learn in this episode, he is a proud pug parent, a PPP.

And one thing we like to do over You Are Good is put in an original song or a cover by our producer Carolyn Kendrick sometimes, which is always my favorite part because I don't have to listen to myself talk during it. And also because it's the music of the very angels themselves. So look out for that. If you need to know you're wrong about in your life this week, we have a wonderful episode over on Patreon with our dear friend Chelsea Weber-Smith of American Hysteria talking about their research on the Westboro Baptist Church and how people do change sometimes.

Groundhog Day for those of you who haven't seen it does have suicide as a plot element. We do talk about that in this episode. And we also get into living with depression. And I promise it's fun, but if that's not your kind of fun, then there's other fun out there. Okay, that covers it. We'll see you next week with a New Year Wrong About. And for now, here's Groundhog Day with Josh Gondelman.

Come dance the Pennsylvania Pocah. Don't forget your booties because it's cold out there today. It's cold out there every day. What is this Miami Beach? Beautiful. Josh, what do you do and how do people typically know you? What do I do and how do people know me? Okay, yeah, I mean, I would say typically most people don't know me, but the people

that do, I have a very photogenic pug, an elderly pug named Busy, my wife is very popular. Maris Kreisman has a very popular books podcast where she interviews authors called the Maris Review. I am a standup comedian, a podcast host, a writer and a producer on Deezus and Meryl on Showtime and a tell me panelist. So if you've heard this voice, it's probably from those things. I like that you started with your pug and then your wife and then your work. That's fantastic.

That's your order of priority. I feel like a lot of the time people are like, oh, you, the busy is your dog when they see me on the street. In the neighborhood, right? There's a lot of guys that look like me where I live in Brooklyn, but there's not that many stately senior fawn pugs that kind of walk through the neighborhood just like waiting for people to give them treats. That's amazing.

I would also accept treats, but people don't give them to me. We should start doing that to humans, yeah. Before Sarah lets us know what this movie is ultimately about, Josh, what is your relationship with Groundhog Day? I love this movie. I think I first saw it probably when it came to VHS, which must have been like late 1993, early 1994. I watched it with my parents, loved it as a kid, love it as an adult.

I saw the short-lived Broadway musical, which I thought was pretty great. Gosh, I forget the name of the guy who starred in it, but he was terrific. He's like a Broadway guy that I think people are like, oh, this guy's good. When's he going to be in the thing that really pops is what I heard his reputation is. I was like, maybe this is it. It's a beloved story. The music was by Tim Minchin. I thought there were a couple of really fun sequences that were staged really beautifully

that like, I was like, how are they going to put this on stage instead of on film? It was great. Just a big fan of the movie and think about it often. Fantastic. Sarah, what is Groundhog Day? What's the deal? Oh my gosh. So Groundhog Day is like both a movie and now a bigger than a movie concept that leaked

from the movie into American pop culture, like the concept of paying it forward or a bucket list, which also started off as the titles of, I think, pretty forgettable movies. This one. This is the best of those movies. Totally. Yeah. By far. I mean, actually, I can't truly say that because I haven't even seen those other two movies.

So maybe they're better than Groundhog Day, but like, I don't think so. Is Bill Murray in either of those? No. Then no. Sorry. That's true. And this was also maybe like a breakthrough role for Bill Murray. Alex, you were theorizing to me that this is Peak Depression Murray, which we first

theorized in Scrooge, Bill Murray, Depression icon. But basically, Groundhog Day is a movie about a TV weatherman named Phil Connors who is sent along with his producer Rita and his cameraman, whose name I forget, to the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where on Groundhog Day, the Groundhog will peek out of his log and whisper to Brian Doyle Murray and tell the town elders whether there's going to be six more weeks of winter. So it's like just a classic fluff news piece that we know that Bill Murray's character is really bummed to be doing for the fourth year in a row.

So he has a lackluster day and is just kind of a little bit of a dick to everyone. And if you've seen like any Bill Murray movie from the 80s, you basically know what this character is like. I'm too good for all these people, but also I know that because I hate myself. It's very familiar. As he says in this movie, I don't even like myself. I don't even like myself. And also I love it when Andy McDowell is like, my perfect man is handsome, but doesn't have

to look in a mirror all the time. And Bill Murray is like, sometimes I go months without looking in a mirror. I have a great body. It's so funny. He's so funny. There's so many great lines. Sorry, I'm interrupting, though. It's well, that's the thing.

It's like hard to tell the story without starting to pick out things we admire as we've already demonstrated. So basically he has a lackluster day and then he wakes up and realizes that the same day has restarted again and wakes up the next day and realizes that it's still happening. The movie documents the stages he goes through, which is like realizing it, panicking about it, having fun with it, panicking again, trying to do a pickup artist thing with his producer Rita, who he is progressively having more and more feelings for. And then the kind of final act is he like levels with Rita and he's like, listen, I'm

stuck in a time loop. I'm going to prove to you that it's a time loop and then we're going to like have a conversation like two human beings and they actually bond this way. And then I think through that because she's the one who points out like, I don't know, this is like maybe this is a good thing. Most people, you could do something more with this than he like starts reading and learning piano and basically is like, I accept that I'm going to have the exact same day over and over and I'm going to do all that I can with it and be helpful to other people.

And that's how he gets unstuck and ends up with lovely Rita. The end. I'm your weatherman. I think this song is by Harold Reimus and it is not good. I love that song. He's like, now is my time to put my song in the movie. I might be misremembering, but it's I think it's Harold Reimus's kind of grand terreno where Clint East was just like, time for me to sing now.

So Josh, knowing that you saw this movie when it came out on VHS, I did as well. There must be, and I imagine we're around the same age, but there must be a generation of people, probably boys in particular, who grew up on Ghostbusters and then saw Bill Murray movies as a result of like that came out after this that's in like what's immediately coming to mind is Scrooge, which we talked about, which Bill Murray just walked around in a depression, that entire movie, and this movie in which Bill Murray walks around in a depression, the entire movie. And that's such a funny set of media to put in front of children who just wanted to watch

like Bill Murray be sarcastic and kick Ghostbusters like we had to like deal with existential dread at nine. Yeah, for sure, because Scrooge is it makes sense that even a kid would watch Scrooge. It's like the Christmas Carol story. He's in a depression, but it's like the classic Dickensian depression. This one, he's really like grappling with things that are bigger than himself, right? Grappling with more than like, Oh, how have I lived my my life? This movie is like, what does it mean to live?

It's like huge philosophical questions in this package of like about a small and increment of time travel as it's worthwhile to write about or that has been written about in my experience, right? In a pop cultural way. Yeah, it is very funny. I saw my first Bill Murray, I saw Ghostbusters 2 in theaters, but I must have been four years old. And it's it's one of my first two movie theater experiences for sure.

And I remember being petrified by this movie. Was the other Batman or Dick Tracy? I think it might have been Little Mermaid. My parents wouldn't take me to Batman. They went to see Batman like without me. They were like, oh, we're going to see Batman. I'm like, that sounds cool. I'm not invited, kid.

I rewatched it before, so we I could be more informed to talk about it in a more immediate sense. And I was just like, my breath was taken away by how much happens in a movie that's about one day over and over, like how repetitive it doesn't feel. The different times the day starts and the times you see it start in the same scene in the middle of the day, twice in a row, or like, how many times do we go actually hearing I got you, babe, on the clock radio and him waking up and how many times does he run into Stephen Tobolowski, Needle knows Ned, Ned the head, Ned the bull now, I go by Ned the

bull now. It's like phenomenal. But also, like you said, Alex, the emotional journey he goes through and you said kind of despair twice. But I think the first one is like medical terror, like a medical terror that you often feel when you're like, my leg hurts. Is this just what it is now? You know what I mean?

Like, I don't understand what's happening to my body. That's the first despair. And then the second despair is a full existential panic when he realizes what he says, God, what does he say? I am no longer myself or something. He said, I've killed myself so many times I no longer exist. It is fully like a movie about learning to obliterate the self. Oh my God, it's about ego death.

Yes, it is. Yeah, I mean, literally, it's about death. Yeah, physically killing himself isn't enough. He has to experience the death of the ego. Well, and what you described, Sarah, was in reconciling that he's stuck in this day. What's the most that he can do in this day, which is enlightenment, like it's like the definition of enlightenment through ego death and through like acceptance, like he reaches this like Eastern enlightenment and then is allowed to go to the next day and rent a

house with Andy McDowell. I mean, there isn't. This movie is perfect. But what if in my fan fiction version, there was a Jacob's Ladder type twist or it turns out that Chris Elliott, who serves very little purpose here, aside from as a foil, actually administered an experimental psychedelic to Bill Murray and he's just been in the news van and trafficked this entire time and he had a breakthrough. Another thing that I've heard about this movie is that in an early draft of the script

and this might be IMDbable or it might be false, but this is something someone told me and I'm going to relay without question is that in a previous draft of the script, he never escaped from Groundhog Day. That's a scary story. That's a Twilight Zone. It's like a true, it's a horror story. Yeah. Well, the thing that Sarah brought up the last time when we talked about Scrooge that

I didn't know and we confirmed since looking it up is like, you know, it's never confirmed how much time goes by. Like if you were to actually live these days consecutively. And I think in the script as Sarah brought up last time we talked about this was it's 10,000 years. Yes. And I think like they settled on three decades for some reason. They were like, even though it's not said, maybe like the studio heads were just terrified

of the idea that it was going to be 10,000 years. There was like some meme that went around a few years, maybe not meme is the right word for it. Like a little piece of trivia where someone did one of those internety things and figured out like, how long does it take to become an expert piano player? How long does it take to accomplish all these things that he does throughout the movie? And years, it's years and years and years. And it's never addressed as such.

All right. Like the kind of longest period of time, like he talks about the royal forever, you know, it'll be like, I've been doing this forever or whatever. But the specific thing, the longest period of time I think mentioned is when they're throwing cards into a hat, they're sitting on the bed and Bill Murray and Andy McDowell. And she says, I'll never be able to do this. And he goes, ah, you know, four or five months, four or five hours a day. That never occurred to me that he's saying that's how long that took for him.

But yeah, of course he is. Yeah. I love that. Oh, good. So much is done without giving the specifics. There's nothing given for like what incites Groundhog Day, right? Like you said, Sarah, we all think of Groundhog Day as an experience that keeps happening over and over again.

People have referred to like the experience of kind of pandemic doldrums as Groundhog Day, right? But before Groundhog Day, there was no like, oh, it's like a Groundhog Day situation. Obviously like time, there has been time travel, but this is the thing, as you said, for like an experience that repeats over and over again, and it happens without reason. The exit from it is there's given a reason for, right? Like you kind of see the existential release from this, but it's such a big phenomenon and such a known cultural, a known cultural experience that like 18 years later, right?

When Palm Springs came out as the next great repetitive time travel romcom, they had to try the thing that gets him out of Groundhog Day. So people wouldn't go like, why doesn't he just do the Groundhog Day? That's how indelible this movie is. Right. I'm also going to do the thing that is always so depressing and be like, it was 28 years later because 1993 was 28 years ago. No, you're right.

It was 28 years later. Yes. That just sucks. No, you're absolutely right. Yeah, but, but I shouldn't be right. 1993 shouldn't be 28 years ago. Does it hurt me that 1999 into 2000 is the turn of the century? Yes.

Do I think about that every day? Yes. I'm still in denial. I think what gets me most is when someone says the 1990s is if we're going to think they were alive in the 1890s. Yeah. This is the thing that I think is floating around the internet, but a friend said it to me, her high school students refer to the 90s as the late 1900s, which is absolutely

just a kick in the stomach. Yes. It's like it was the late 1900s. I was listening to the Spice Girls. Yes. Exactly. Oh my God. It was the turn of the century.

Limp Bizkit was the top of the billboard. As anytime David Brooks writes a piece, everyone is like, holy shit, David Brooks is nuts for just like looking out his window and describing what's happening. He's like the Randy Newman of opinion writers. That attack the driver. He told me what the world is like. That's Randy Newman, not David Brooks. Maybe both.

That's beautiful. There's a piece floating around right now where he's like, America's coming part of the scenes. He explained all the reasons why there's like bad behavior and not enough money being given to charity, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of the stuff he said is actually correct. He's shocking. I read a David Brooks piece and I was like, yeah, you're right.

Everything you're describing is correct. I mean, that is hard to miss, right? And he's like, why? He's like, I can't explain why. And it's like because we're in a perpetual groundhog day situation, like no one knows what is happening tomorrow. Like it used to be yesterday, today, tomorrow. Now it's like we don't know what's happening tomorrow.

This is why. And we're in the early phase of Bill Murray realizing that he's stuck in this thing. Like we haven't hit the enlightenment part yet. We're not even close to the learn how to play the piano part of it. We started with learn how to play the piano. Isn't that funny? We were initially like, yeah. Right.

We started with learn how to play the piano. Sour does. Yeah. Then we got to drinking and eating a lot of donuts. And now we're still there. I mean, I am. Oh yeah. I actually, at the beginning of the pandemic last year, I had a medical emergency because

I was eating so much rich food that I thought that I was imploding. Did you get gout? I was no. I was like from just eating like cake in scallops. Like that's all I was in drinking beer. Yeah. Like that scene where we see Bill Murray just like shove all that food in his mouth. I was like, that was me.

That was me in like April of last year. Also not to do the thing that Sarah just did, but you said at the beginning of the pandemic last year. Yeah. That was two years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Groundhog day.

Groundhog day. Groundhog day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sarah, what's your time? I don't know when you would have come into the movie.

You didn't come into it in real time. Yeah. What's your relationship with Groundhog day? My memory of first watching this movie is like so connected with TNT's programming in the Mid-Aughts, which I feel like decided a lot of what I ended up seeing multiple times. Yeah. Big Shawshank fan. Yes.

Shawshank. And then I think this in and out Dave, what a Kevin Kline in there. I talked about this with previous Your Good Guest, Chris Gethard, but there are some movies that just feel significant and become American canon because one cable network played that over and over again when you were at an age where you would just like put on TV and watch what was on. And Gethard and I were talking about for both of us, Air Heads was one of those movies. Oh, yeah.

Yes. That was on all the time. When you're like name 20 Adam Sandler movies, I bet 50% of people don't get to Air Heads. I think that is a Steve Buscemi movie. Yeah. Very Buscemi. It's a Brendan Fraser. Yeah.

Yes. Oh my God. I remember like truly the experience of like trying to watch Comedy Central in the late 90s and being like, ah, it's Air Heads again. Yep. Always Air Heads. Because I remember Groundhog Day just always being on when I was in middle school and high school.

It was probably the source of the great bond I feel with it that to me, high school was really a Groundhog Day experience. You like wake up at some in godly hour, you haven't slept enough. It's like grueling again. You're like once again grueling pace and the winter will never end and it's eight o'clock in the morning and it's dark out. And Groundhog Day, I always thought was very special for being like extremely watchable. Like it's like legally blonde when it comes on, you're just sort of taken down a beautiful

like lazy river and a tube of enjoyable scenes. And then by the end, I think there's this very accessible, very existential message, which is like, listen, there's no inherent meaning to any of this. You have to make all your own meaning in life. So like just deal with it basically and it'll be great. It's weird that this was a movie that I think actually deserved that it's going to be on in your house every third day treatment and like maybe wouldn't be such a classic. If it wasn't so rerunable, which then makes me think of the thing I just learned, which

is that this was the end of the working relationship between Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. Because Bill Murray was like, let's make it more about philosophy. And Harold Ramis was like, no, we got to play this in malls. I think they struck like an incredible balance. Yeah. I do too. The touch is so light on the philosophy stuff, right? That very lovely Andy McDowell speech when they're like cozy in bed in like a pretty

platonic scene right after they throw the cards. There's like him talking ascribing the like nihilism or you know, describing the nihilism of like, I'm going to live forever and nothing matters because I cannot die and so I don't exist. There's the scene of him being like, I am a God, not the God, I'm a God. And there's just like all these like little things where it's like theology, existentialism, nihilism, and it's all done without feeling like, oh, this is one of those movies where just like people sit and talk about philosophy for a long time and there's no real thrust.

You know, it's not like no offense to this movie, which has its own charms, but it's not waking life. I still think about waking life sometimes. I think it was right at the beginning, but the scene where I think it's Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in bed and they're talking about like, you know, like maybe when you die and your brain is dying, you experience like this long dream state. I still think about that fairly often. That's my number one takeaway from that movie because they're talking about Timothy Leary,

the way that your, your time changes. And this is the thing that that doctor who had a stroke and had like a TED talk about it eventually about like how your perception of time changes. It's very assidy. You know, you could essentially like in the last seconds of your life live what feels like 10,000 years. Yeah. I love that part of waking life.

In small town Pennsylvania, if you're lucky, so it's so fun. We get these like great montages, right? There's the one of all the, the hedonism, one of all the suicide, then there's the one at the end with all the philanthropy. All these sequences are so fun and it's the same stuff, like the same set pieces over and over again, reconfigured and with like a different emotional tenor. Can I give you my groundhog day overall take? Yes, please.

Alex, you were talking about like young boys, young men growing up to like watch this as kind of like a Bill Murray movie, right? And it's about depression and existentialism. I think it is a Trojan horse romcom that doesn't get talked about as a romantic comedy. That's great. Like when movies are high concept and high prestige, romcom is like a slur, you know, it's like a slight against them, a slur is too heavy. It's like a slight against them.

But like what happens is romcom-ish and it's the same as like when, when Silver Linings playbook came out and people like, this is a great movie about mental health and you're like, yeah, let's take a deep breath. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. You know, it's, it's a romantic comedy is what the like, why it plays in malls is because of that. With a scoop of something extra, but yeah, I do love that when I finally saw Silver Linings playbook a couple of years ago, I was like, I really enjoyed this movie.

And also this is literally a movie where they do a dance contest at the end. That's the end. The climax of the movie is a dance competition. And it's like, because of who directed it and who's starring in it, it's not a romcom. It's like a prestige dramedy and it's like, right. It's an Oscar movie. This has the same, not the same mechanism, but this is like a 40 dates and 40 nights mechanism.

Yeah. There's this element of repetition that like leads us to get to the inevitable, them getting together and there's like growth and learning and there's a mechanism. But I think that the reason that Silver Linings playbook ultimately worked and was confused as prestige, although I guess it was prestige when it came out is in seeing romantic endeavors on screen. I don't see dirty mentally unstable people like myself on screen ever. So you're like, what am I doing up there?

This can't possibly be a romantic comedy because this is not aspirational. No one's rich for no reason. Yeah, exactly. I think the confusing thing like about like what makes a romantic comedy in one way or another is it has to be aspirational, but like it shouldn't be. Oh, interesting. This is also not like a super aspirational movie. Right.

Like I think that's part of what's fun about it is that Bill Murray is this like Pittsburgh big city weatherman with delusions of grandeur. And he thinks his life is in a rut because he's covered the same event four years in a row. That's like a little winking thing, right? I'm like, oh, my life is over. I've done the same day four days out of four years. And then he has the same day for three years.

It's just like those little details, I think are so perfect, but these are not fancy people. They're people like everyone, except for maybe Chris Elliot, aspires to have a more prestigious station in life than they in their industry. Even then they have this isn't like people who are living the dream. This isn't like, can she have it all? It's like, can she have anything? Can we get out of this town?

I was scandalized to learn also prepping for this episode that they actually filmed this in an outer Chicago suburb. I spent my whole life thinking they had really gone to punks at times. Yeah. I grew up seeing this movie next to Maine thinking that Groundhog Day happens in New Hampshire my entire life. Are they like, they're like the woodchuck state or something, right? Isn't there some reason?

There must be some charismatic rodent. Yeah, of course there is. Who's the mayor of somewhere? Much like Adam Sandler, Chuck E. Cheese grew up in New Hampshire and went on to great show business acclaim. Charles, Charles is from New Hampshire. Yes. Charles entertainment cheese.

I mean, with a name like that, it's destiny. This made me think about our town, which I've still never seen or read, but which people reference all the time. Um, and in which I know is about repetition of time in a small town and death and stuff, Oscar was wild, but Thornton was wilder. But I feel like one of the powerful things about this concept is that it is like so dystopian and so utopian to me. And I think one of my favorite scenes is just this little moment where Bill Murray

is reading a bunch of library books in the diner and these classical music playing. And that's, I think setting us up for him deciding to learn the piano, but he's also just kind of like licks around and is like, I'm enjoying my afternoon. And like, if I had, I, I have this thought all the time. I'm like, if only I had a spare lifetime where I could like freeze time in this life and step in over there and just read, just read in a diner. I think maybe concepts are stickier if they're both depressing and fantasy wish fulfillment in that way.

It's such a happy ending. Yeah. Everybody kind of gets what they want, especially Bill Murray. He's like the most improved man. A brilliant thing about the time construct is like when you said, take this time to do like self-improvement and to do stuff that's like edifying. I think a problem that some romantic comedies face is when you make one character kind of a dickhead, you then have to like make sure they, they

do commensurate work to counteract that. And in this movie, Bill Murray does decades of self-improvement. And so, you know, it's not like, oh, I showed up with flowers, even though I cheated on you with your sister. It's like, I was rude to you for our first 12 hours as coworkers. And then I spent the next 30 years becoming a man worthy of and considering himself worthy of love. I experienced ego death.

Right. It truly like, Hey, what have you been up to? What's new? Well, I obliterated my ego. I wonder if Harold Ramis took a bunch of mushrooms or Bill Murray seems into mushrooms, right? He's got that look about him. It's wild that this movie drove them apart considering that they both

achieved their goal. Their friendship died. Right. One of the best movies of the last, when did it come out five years ago? One of the best movies the last 30 years. I can't believe I know this. When Steve Zuzu came out, I read in an entertainment weekly article, a profile on Bill Murray, I grew up loving Bill Murray, but like they talked to Harold

Ramis about their falling out. And it was not just like a professional fall. It was like a total friendship falling out. He said something along the lines of like, Bill has a code and you don't know like what lines that code is built on. But when you transgress the line, there's no coming back. I was like, is Bill my dad? What a wild thing to observe about someone and to have printed about you in a

magazine. Right. Well, yeah. And also, I mean, I was singing this while I was thinking about this whole thing. I was like, I'm going to have to say like to Alex. I think it's weird that Bill Murray couldn't compromise more because you're the person who sees me at my least willing to compromise about literally anything and it's weird for me to be like, sometimes you need to compromise

when you're working in entertainment, but like you do. If the movie had imploded based on this fight, I would understand, or if like one person got their way and it was like, this was a purely silly sci-fi movie romance, or if it was purely a philosophical treatise, I could get the idea of like, oh, this person took the reins and changed the course, but it just feels like such a wonderful compromise between those two missions. If told the concept before you saw it, if you didn't know the reputation

of Groundhog Day, you'd think it would be one of those movies that you go, oh, that's like a fun premise, but like they didn't really, you know, I wish it had gone better places. And it's like, no, it's perfect. Right. I mean, that's part of why we're all just standing around marveling about it. Two years after it came out, 1993, just nearly a four. I guess to me, there's always something that's really a draw about a movie or a

book or any significant piece of work where you can't really see the seams. You can't see the, where, how the craftsman did it. It's like getting a jewelry box. That's a bunch of like different wood together. And you're like, I have no idea how a person would do this, but I'm holding it in my hands. Yeah. It functions so smoothly.

If you really kind of like peer at it, you can see the grain a little bit of like, oh, that's why this happens here. Right. This is the narrative function of this person. Oh, this is the moment they chose where he is not only aware that he's repeating the day, but the day he stops, watches the guy step in the puddle in front of him and then hops over the puddle, you go, Oh, he's now taking control of this. Right.

That's like the little moment that shows like he's in charge now. I don't know how you get it sanded down so smooth, but like sometimes you watch a work of fiction that when you watch it, it is so exact and makes so much sense that you go, Oh, they must have just wrote this down exactly as it happened. I love Palm Springs. I thought Palm Springs was great. You do. There are a couple other like good movies that deal with quirks in time, but this

is the most seamless as far as I can, I can imagine because you can look at any plot hole and back to the future with regards to like how time travel works. They don't fuck with any of that, which I love in this movie. They're just like, we don't even know that it's time travel. We don't know. Right. Exactly. This thing happens and we somehow did the math on all of the real possibilities

and found the most realistic and resonant ones back to back. So you never question the concept of the movie. You know the rules, right? The day resets at six a.m. If you die, you immediately, Bill Murray dies. The day resets at six a.m. Anything about the day resets, even if he just did it at five 50, it immediately resets and gets glued back together.

Nobody else has any knowledge of this or experience of it or like residual genetic encoding that these things happen, right? It only happens to this person. Nobody else knows any of it. And like those are all the rules we get. We don't know why it started. We don't until it ends know how it ends there. He's not working towards a goal, which I think is important to the movie.

He's just decided to live in groundhog day until it releases him, but he's like fully given himself over to it. So it's not in Palm Springs. They spend so much time actively working to like undo it. And they spend so much time playing with like, what if you die? Well, if you die, it's done, but if you get maimed, then you stay maimed until you die. And like, here's the point at which you spawn.

And like this is just like, it's a bed and breakfast in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. It happens every day, sunny and share. Shut up and watch, right? Like just deal with it, kids. He's fucking deal with it. Harold gave you a movie to the David Brooks piece, like into my own personal life.

I've had a tough week. I like freaked out a bit just based on like all of the responsibilities and stuff that I have. It felt like it was too much. I'm a person who like meditates and finds mindfulness really important in their life. And I'm really good at being in the moment a lot of the time. And then when I am not, it sucks.

And so like to David Brooks point to here and like with regard to like what is figured out to be the solution in this movie, a solution that this country's not going to come to because it's not in our style or DNA is like, we really do have to, when we're freaking out, learn how to like embrace and be in the moment and not freak out about not knowing what's happening tomorrow. Cause we never know what's happening tomorrow. And I love that that's what unlocks this thing to your point, Sarah, but like this either Harold Ramis did a lot of mushrooms or he was like a big

enlightenment guy or both. This is a masterpiece of a person who is trying to convey that to other people. And it's so successful. And I love that I is like a kind of depressed 14 year old was able to, I mean, I think that a lot of the reason I'm so attached to TV and to movies is because they were just always movies that could make me feel good about the world when truly nothing else did. There's an accessibility there.

This goes down so easy because it does follow a classic heroes journey as we're accustomed to receiving it. And it's just that like the thing he has to do is accept an existential lesson and he, and we see him do it. The conflict is so internal. Like he overcomes himself and all the other things he does are manifestations of him accepting that existential lesson, right? Like he becomes a better person.

Like, and it's, it's like the reason for it too, right? Like there, there's a period where he's learning about other people to manipulate them. And then there's a period where he learns about other people for the pleasure of community. You know, there's a period in the movie where like maybe he would have learned a couple of bars on the piano to impress Andy McDowell. By the time it's the end, he starts doing all these others.

He, he knows when to give someone a Heimlich maneuver. He knows when to catch a kid who's falling out of a tree. He changes a tire for three older women every day. You know that this is something that has become his daily routine is to do for others. Like he catches the kid and it's the first time we see it. And he goes, and he puts the kid down and goes, what do you say? And the kid runs away. He goes, he never thanks me over and over and over again.

And we don't have to see him catch the kid five times. That one bit of dialogue gets to like, Oh, this is my life now. I live in service of others and in pursuit of self-improvement. He kind of becomes an angel over time, which is so funny. All of the things that he used to do as a means of like manipulation or sort of gaming his experience with other people. He realizes that like, if you just go another step on that, you might actually find enjoyment in the things that you're trying to use to manipulate people.

Like you might actually like playing the piano more than a couple of arts. Like that might be good for you. This has just always been kind of funny to me how Annie McDowell says that at college, she studied 18th century, 19th century, French poetry. As if that's a major, I just love that. There is also kind of wish fulfillment in the 90s and now about having a movie with a functional small town where you can like, there's a knowable, seeable, boundary population, which also feels very Twilight Zone.

I also love that we establish early on, it's like, you can't leave town. Long distance lines are down. You're stuck here. Like there's a time limitation and there's also a very definite spatial limitation. And I think a lot of us secretly longed for that in some way. In my experience of not growing up in this town, but growing up in a town that was like very much a small town in the 90s and is now just like, still has the small town aspects, but also just has like a giant dollar store in the middle of it.

And like that ended up occupying a lot of stuff. Like this was like a romantic vision of a small town in the 90s. This is an especially romantic idea of what small towns used to be. Yeah. I think that's the part of the, the ending that rings the most out of step with reality now. Like obviously there's the, their relationship is, you can accept it or not, but the idea of like, they walk out of the bed and breakfast and they're just

like, I love it here. Let's live here now. As if the problem was Pittsburgh ever. They're fancy Pittsburgh ambition. That's no slight against Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is the Paris of Appalachia. In the same way that you can be happy in like Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York city, their idea of like, what we really need is like this small town beauty is

like a very, you know, it's an idea that feels like it's been disproven by all of American history. It's such an interesting thing to be attached to. I remember finding it when I saw three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, I was like, let's be honest. If the person who wrote this movie lived in America, this would all take place in a Walmart and it would make a lot more sense. Cause like this idea that the drama of the story is propelled partly by the

fact that people are like on a main street or a town square type deal where they can like see each other and surveil each other. Like that is increasingly going away. I mean, there's still tons of surveillance, but in a less direct, you were in my sight line all day long kind of a way. Although I will say when I was in Maine, not long ago in that form, like you're saying that almost felt like it was like a blast from 30 years ago. You mean the 1950s?

Yes, exactly the 1950s. I got a text from someone who was like, Hey, just so you know, uh, I just drove by your house and there's a couple of sheriffs there and there's a guy who looks like he's from the Hills have eyes just hanging out on your lawn. And it was like a classic, like I didn't need to be concerned of like someone new to let me know it was, it all turned out to be fine. Like someone got pulled over and they happened to be on my line. It was one of your Hills have eyes friends.

Of course, it just made sense. It was someone I knew, right? It was fine. But I was just like, Oh, this is like quaint. Like this is a really quaint situation that doesn't happen much. I don't mean to sound like a big city elitist. I mean, you can also be happy in a small town and you can enjoy life. But I think like the antidote to what ailed Bill Murray was not small town

living where everybody knows each other and everybody is just like working in a little town where there's never any friction, except for what will the groundhog say? I think that does not quite exist in the, you know, in the way that it's presented here, obviously, but it's not something that had occurred to me until you kind of brought up the nineties-ness of like, we're just going to go to a little self-contained town where nothing goes wrong, right? Or that's not even true.

Their homelessness problem is one old man. And they got a couple of guys who were unsatisfied. Yes, that's true. Those guys, a couple of guys, the proto Trump voter. Oh, boy. Like post-ghostbusters pre-operation Dumbo drop Bill Murray. Again, it's like, scrooge this and what about Bob? Like Bill Murray was doing a lot of heavy lifting and explaining to us how

fucking intense our lives were going to be psychologically. This was his mental health trilogy. Like in the Bill Murray renaissance, right? It's more, it's like the ennui years lost in translation and life aquatic. He kind of gets into that place of like, he's seen it all and nothing makes him feel anymore. The scrooge episode, you know, I was talking about talking about the ennui years as his third act and like that's been going since 98 for six years already.

It's like the Irishman, but no, you're right. When you think of like elder statesmen, weary faced Bill Murray, that's been 20 plus years. Again, we were talking about in that episode, like the myth of Bill Murray, like the Bill Murray that will sneak up on you and take a selfie or like bar myths for your children. Yeah, exactly. Or like be a guest bartender without being asked like that, all that stuff. That this feels like the birth of that myth because by the end of this movie, he

is essentially the Bill Murray that does that. Like by the end of this movie, he's the guy who surprises Michael Shannon and lover with a WrestleMania tickets. Like that's like the shit that like our new modern Bill Murray is. I've watched this movie like three times this week and I'd ever noticed that was Michael Shannon. My God. I didn't recognize that either.

Yeah. They, and he talked his fiance into marrying him. I mean, outside of just like the real experiences with Bill Murray, like this fictional Bill Murray went out into the world and now like lives in the world. Like Freddy from the post-modern nightmare and on stream of it. Oh yeah. Wes Craven's new nightmare. That's the one.

Thank you. You also earlier, he said, I think you were trying to say 41st dates and he said 40 days and nights, which makes me think of across between 41st dates and 30 days of night where Adam Sandler has to date a vampire in Alaska. I think it's 50 first dates. Oh yeah. Oh my God. Wasn't it 40 days and 40 nights with Josh Hartnett?

Yes. Oh my God. You're right. It's very confusing. There's too many numbers. It's not your fault, Alex. Too many numbers. I recently called the movie seven six.

You're close. Sarah, what stood out for you this time that you didn't catch last time? I mean, one of the ironic things about this movie, maybe, or the appropriate things is it's rewatchability. So I feel like I've seen it 50 times. I don't know. I don't think I noticed anything new this time. That doesn't mean I caught everything.

It's rare recently that I will watch the movie from start to finish. Yeah, that is unusual. Josh, anything that stood out immediately to you? One thing that I, there's less of than I remember is Stephen Tobolowski, who's scenes are so indelible to me. And he really only shows up a couple, like a few times, his initial monologue, which I love so much, his initial like introduction. He's like, I see something I want.

I grab it by the horns, Ned, the ball. That's me. And then my old roommate, Jason Marcus, and I used to watch this when we lived together and the Ned, the ball. That's me now is something that sticks. So like whenever we'll still text each other about that, like, Josh, the ball, that's me. I'm grabbing what I want.

And then the other thing, which is such a funny joke, he's like, he's like, where I went to Case Western High School. Um, I did the whistling belly button trick at the talent show. Did your sister marry bad a couple of times till you told me not to, or you told me to stop, which is like so funny. The best part of that is the follow up where Bill Murray says, did you, so did you turn pro with the whole belly button thing? The, the setup of it where they haven't left for Puxitani yet, the thing that

really stuck out, cause that's not like a super memorable part of the movie. You just kind of sets up like, here's Andy McDowell. Here's Bill Murray. He's a dick. He's a dick to her. He's a dick to Chris Elliott. When he goes like, Oh, I've done this for four years. I'm sick of this.

I'm over this. I'm going on to bigger things and everyone makes fun of him. And it's like the rut he thought his life was in, I think establishing the scale of it, of like, I've been at this job for four years being like a Pittsburgh weatherman, and that being, he's cultivated this disdain for his colleagues and his work and still can perform, right? Like you see him on camera and he does a good job, like pretending to blow the clouds across the screen, the scale of like, of like, God, my, my life is just

stalled out of doing the same job for four years is like such a fun little thing to establish that, that is just like such a short timeframe compared to the eternity that he's up against. Like he's not near the end of his career. He's not like, I'm burnt. I can't believe I'm still doing this. Life has passed me by. He's not like an, an up and coming go getter.

I know he's just like a guy with a job. I'm so contemptuous of my life after this four year stint in Pittsburgh. I'm just realizing that so many classic Bill Murray movies begin with him sort of just hating his job, right? Like off the top of my head, we have stripes. We have ghost busters. We have lost in translation. Okay.

Those are the ones I can think of, but there have to be more. Alex, you said this before, like being the face of on we, well, okay. What do you do? What do you do with this on we? That's part of our human condition. It's so interchangeable with regard to like what you are dealing with. Well, I'm saying it for two experiences. One is being stuck in a rut about just like how to be in the world and figuring

it out over time through trial and error and ideally doing it by embracing the moment and actually like embracing your space in a community. But the others is being stuck in a depression. I find this relatable in a huge way where it's like, no matter what you do for the first long time, there's nothing that can be done. There's obviously things that can be done, but there's nothing that feels like hugely impactful and you feel stuck for a long, long period of time until you know, something else happens.

And so I see, I see the read there in a really substantial way. Like this, this movie feels like a good companion for both of those phenomena. Or what I appreciate about the on we here, more than the on we of a lost in translation, even by the time of lost in translation, Bill Murray is kind of a more wise and appearing figure, right? He's older. His character has like passed his prime professionally, substantially, right? He's like in Japan, doing these ads, his career is kind of like, he's tasted

all the flavors of the world, there's nothing left to sample. And in this, I think we're catching him numb already. And I think there's something about that that's more relatable where it's not like there's this big star, it's like, you're, you could see your local weatherman at the grocery store, you know, or even like a big city weatherman. This guy isn't, he's not wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. It's not the kind of the malaise of someone who has spent five, six decades indulging in all the experiences of the world.

This guy's just like, fuck you, I'm going to be a weatherman in Philadelphia. Basically, right? He'll never make it. Never make their batteries at him. What's keeping him out of the community isn't his celebrity. It's his perception of himself as better than others and a false perception where he's like, he could be a beloved regionally famous figure, but instead he believes himself to be like a temporarily disgraced Al Roker.

An unintentional pivot, but we rarely talk about the people who made the movie. And I think sometimes people get frustrated about that, but that's not what the show is about. But have you, either of you seen the new Ghostbusters movie? I assume probably not because you're adults. No, but I want you to talk about how depressing you found it. Okay. If you're, if you're psyched to watch the new Ghostbusters movie tune

out for like maybe two minutes, but they bring Harold Ramis back as a ghost. And for the record, Harold Ramis, the person is dead. So dead. And I'm looking at you both responding to that with your faces. It is upsetting. Wait, wait, did Kanye do this for Kim Kardashian's birthday? He's like, Kim, it's your favorite filmmaker, Harold Ramis. In the beginning, it's kind of excusable because we see a character who we

know to be elder, Harold Ramis, but he's in the shadows and stuff. And you're like, okay, I get it. Like we're setting up that like, this is Egon Spangler's estate. We get, I get it. And then he shows up as a ghost and busts ghosts with the guys as a ghost. Like it's a conflict of interest. Kind of a turn ghost. Fucking scab.

Yeah. There were so many good things about the movie that they couldn't get out of their own way on cause they were so, they were like, you like Gozer. Here's Gozer in the same exact set that was in the ghost legs. There's so much fan service and that was part of the whole criticism. And I was like just gritting my teeth until we had Harold Ramis as a ghost. I was like, fuck, I can't fuck this. This is, this is a bad time because Harold Ramis, like, I love Harold Ramis.

I love everything he made. I love his, his impact on people that pre-existed my life. Like I love everything about him and it was jarring. This may be controversial. I think Groundhog Day is better than Ghostbusters. Yeah. I think so too. I think you're right.

Well, yeah. I mean, Ghostbusters is like a fun movie that I could not possibly tell you what the theme of it might even be. Fuck the EPA. Yeah. Fuck these dickless government workers who want to tell you how to run your ghost business. Yeah.

Deregulate Ghostbusters. This is timeless. This movie is timeless, but for specific, be like, my, my wife, watch, I, we've talked about this in the past, but like my wife, who produces the show, watch Ghostbusters and Carolyn was like, these guys are just mean. Yeah. You get a little bit of like Bill Murray is funny when he's being mean at the beginning, right?

We're like, when he says, did you go pro with the belly button with slang? It's not nice, but him being mean to the people at the, excuse me, the bed and breakfast on his original run through Groundhog Day, where they go, uh, you think we're going to get an early spray and he goes, yeah, I've got a peg for March 21st and, uh, you just mean sarcastic and withering. And like there's that, but it's, that's not the joy and the comedy of the movie. It's like watching him process these feelings and this kind of character based like despair and delusions of grandeur at this like theological level.

And that's like, what's fun and funny about it. And it's not just like, uh, hey, Dick knows, get out of my way. Which is when I had this problem, we rewatched cheers. There were some parts that I thought were so delightful, but like the way people talk about cheers as like just the classic era of joke writing. And there's just a lot of like, Hey, rat face, I'm trying to work over here. Okay. I'm like, there are some amazing jokes and the characters are incredible, but like,

I just found like coming to it with the weight of history, which is kind of the way you watch Ghostbusters now. Right? Like people being like, this new Ghostbusters ruined my childhood. And it's like your childhood was one movie that holds up fine. Someone on foot on the other day was like, I tried to listen to your podcast, but your voice makes me want to off myself. And I was like, really? You have nothing else going on.

And also that's the tipping point. Are you sure this isn't about something else? I have more power than I ever knew. It's like, Hey man, have you considered climate change? You're going to lose your shit. To your point about that version of Bill Murray, like from meatballs to that, to this part of Bill Murray's career, like Bill Murray being a disaffected dick is funny, is like, is very funny when it lends.

But now thinking about, again, thinking about the, the existential depression trilogy, this is the last movie I can think of where he is that character in anyway, after this, he's in Operation Dumbledrop for sure. But then he's in his third act of the career at this point. He's certainly a dick by way of his demeanor. He's always Bill Murray, but like he's a dick that knows that, that things are deep and he's in over his head in one way or another. Like this is the last like cocksure shit head, Bill Murray.

In life aquatic, even when he's lashing out, you see the wounds that that's covering where he's not like wounded in Ghostbusters. He's just like, Hey, I'm fucking Bill Murray. It's like, what a cool guy. Yeah. I feel like this is the point at which the movie stops agreeing with his character's demeanor. Yes.

What a great way to put it. It might be the fulcrum, right? Like of that. I think that is why it is maybe my favorite. You get the joy of seeing him be like a smug prick at, which is fun. It's funny to watch someone say funny things. And then you get the kind of like heartwarming multiplex pleasure of like watching him learn this existential lesson.

He gets less funny as the movie goes on, right? Like I was clocking that today. That's something I noticed is that like he still is like doing, he's like doing nice zingers by the end. He does the Heimlich maneuver, uh, buddy in the, in the restaurant. And he goes, uh, Hey, next time you have a steak, maybe get some sharper teeth. And it's like, not a good joke, but it's structured the same as when he's being funny, right?

The additional layer on that joke of this is Bill Murray nice, making a Bill Murray joke is very funny. Yes. It's like a dad joke version. Typically we wrap our episode by identifying who a father is, but who is the daddy. And, uh, I don't think that groundhog day has a father outside of time. Sure.

Kind of a helicopter parent in this movie. Yeah. Can I pitch? Of course. I think Bill Murray starts out as a daddy and becomes a father. Wow. Tell us more about that. So he is the kind of like swaggering masculine authority, not necessarily

authority, but like celebrity figure, you know, at small C celebrity, even though he says, I'm a silly, he's on the phone, right? With the emergency hotline. He says, don't you have something for emergencies or celebrities? I'm both I'm a celebrity and emergency. He's not really, but he's like, he's kind of the swing in dude of the beginning of the movie and that doesn't serve him especially well in the long term, even though he eats a lot of sticky buns and has, has sex with at least one, maybe

two or more members of the community. And then he becomes, I mean, the movie is him learning to nurture. Like I think he is a father by the end. Like, uh, spiritually, he's protecting the children of the town and he's respecting his elders and doing them favors. And it's very fatherly to me in like a very sweet way, the things he does the, at the end of the movie, he's, you know, reading good night stories, like very father stuff.

Oh man. That's fantastic. I think that's the answer also to me, something that saves this from being one of those movies where like some guy is a real shithead and then he meets a woman and he's like, I must seduce you. I'm going to become slightly better, but only like just enough to get you to like me and I never would have thought to do it without you. To me, there's something meaningful about him actually falling for Andy

McDowell's character who I also love that she's named Rita. He talks about the fact that she's such a kind person. This comes up multiple times and that this is what he's inspired to actually practice. A thought that I've had since becoming so pandemic housebound is that like, I just managed to avoid really thinking about housework for a lot of my life. Like I would just sort of live like a slovenly bachelor and I still basically do. I mean, Alex, you know this, but like I'm trying to be civilized. I think a lot about the fact that the real work of our lives is like housework

and housework maybe trains us to do this where it's like, you just have to, like every good thing that you do or care about you have to do constantly. And this idea of doing some big thing one time and being done with it is very illusory. A beautiful thing about this movie isn't that it's not that he does the thing to, to be with her, right? Like it's not like he, his change is inspired by being with her. Like he doesn't take up the piano when she says, I like a guy that, that

knows an instrument, right? When she says like, you know, if I were you, I would just live. Like this is a gift. Like you have all this time to do all this stuff that you never thought you would get to do. And so it's not like a gesture to win her over or win her back. It is what he does inspired by her goodness and like taking cues from the way she lives and wanting to be, as you said, Sarah, more like her, right?

A kinder person because he has so much ability to trick people. And you see that it kind of doesn't work on her because she just sees through like what he's doing as an attempt to seduce her. And then it, it's not like I'm going to get with her. And that's the goal of all this time I spend in a loop. His goal is like, I want to live in line with what this wonderful person, the philosophy, this wonderful person laid out before me that I hadn't considered. Mitch David Brooks also wrote a book about.

It's called Mary and Millennial. I am a weather man, my finger to the wind, watching storms blow out and in, I know the future, I know the forecast, I know the skies like the back of my hand and I thought there'd be rain for days. I thought I knew everything until I woke up today. Oh, I've never seen the sky so blue, never seen the sky so blue. You are incredible like marble on a pedestal, like an early coming of spring, but I'm like the winter, thicker than bitter, but seasons are meant to change and I thought there'd

be rain for days. I thought I knew everything until I saw your face. Oh, I've never seen the sky so blue, I've never wanted anything like how you are. I've never felt so nice, I've never felt like everything's gonna work out alright. I am a weather man, my finger to the wind, watching the storms roll out and in again. Thank you so much for listening. If you like this, there are about 70, 75 more episodes for you to check out at You Are Good.

And if you want to hear a lovely bonus episode that we just made, you should go over to patreon.com slash you're wrong about where I have a conversation with the irreplaceable Chelsea Weber Smith of American Hysteria about their research on the Westboro Baptist Church. The song you just heard was Weatherman from our producer Carolyn Kendrick, who often writes songs for the show. You can find more music she's recorded for You Are Good at carolinkendrick.bankamp.com. Thank you again for listening, thank you for being here, and we'll have a brand new episode for you in a week.