Screen:

...be reformed...

...Day is but a holiday for kids and Hallmark, and now that the That may be the most important lesson of these years: per- Lincoln and Washington birthdays have been lumped togethhaps some of us have seen our preferential option for the poor er as Presidents' Day, they have lost what little distinctiveness as the church's contribution to someone else's project (that of they ever possessed as festivals...

...Finally, just creating a situation in which she'll realize her unworthi- partly under the good influence of his first true love, played by ness to have him as her paying guest...

...1 1 1 1 ty;,n'e 1 Ad~tess state % CM - - - - r to X^ IL 1 I euthanasia on the Ballot...

...He is a physician at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center...

...But when Phil realizes that nothing he does is irrethe bores and dopes around him...

...of good and the bad, both their sins and their humility and courage, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, February and to do this in hopeful times and bleak times, they can tell gives us the boredom we need to recover, time enough to bethat this movement toward a church of the poor is not some come blase so that spring and Easter can wake us up...

...He is a philosopher, bioethicist, and director of the Hasting Center...

...We have seen closed-off avenues for step would be to learn something about the difference between social change as well as changes that produced little real optimism and hope...

...Valentine's empty scheme, but is motivated by real gospel charity...

...ly grudging gestures...

...Nonetheless, Groundhog Day is joyful...

...So this is It's a Wonderful Life in reverse...

...He will have to sitional shot of Phil pondering his next step, the comedy would reencounter the same bores and ineptitudes until...

...period in which Phil simply tries to understand what's happening...

...DANIEL CALLAHAN explores the consequences for society and medicine of legalizing euthanasia...

...Furthermore, it keeps him in humor...

...1994...

...California's euthanasia proposition was described as "state of the art" legislation by its proponents...

...For instance, when the director Harold Ramis cuts from a town which seems to be the capital of Nerdity...

...It is a piece of nonsense that may it is perfectly legitimate for us to define this option according haunt you...

...I believe a simwe sustain our option for and love of the poor in the face of ter- ilar challenge now faces the proponents of the church of the rible suffering, failed efforts, and continued frustration...

...That is, until he both appreciates and Scrooge for February...

...200 500 copies: $150 100 copies: $ 50 plus handling and UPS charges Single copies: $1 (Please include a 9 X 12 self-addressed envelope with 52 cents stamp) '1 t go Ne~y ofk• 15 Vutch street...

...EUTHANASIA The efforts to legalize Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide will continue...

...But when Phil, forced to reenact this scene, merely goes through the motions, shouting too enthusiastically and grinning too maniacally, like a bored actor trotting through the script of a long-running play, the young woman feels repelled and Connors loses again...

...it's a bauble made of silver, if not of gold...

...I want to support the Peace Tax Fund effort...

...Here is a man ly as an anchor or talk-show host, his adaptability being a fea- for whom each day is nothing but a rough draft...

...In the interim, it means holding fast, look that connects our efforts and concrete results will inevitably as persons and communities, to the call of God to love conlead us into pessimism...

...memory won't throw away...

...for the poor because Christ loved them and chose to redeem Can we adjust our thinking to this new context...

...In this way we began to move through our purifying moSecond, we need to purify our hearts and motives: How can ment as a parish team...

...In an early attempt on MacDowell's virtue, Phil successfully feigns boyish ebullience while building a snowman and exchanging volleys of snowballs with local urchins...

...1 1 n,ent en`~OSe 1 1'~ pay...

...We started back to work...

...Connors happens Murray learning that he won't have a future until he performs to be a local news weatherman but would serve just as happi- so virtuously that February 3 can finally dawn...

...16: 26 March 1993 Commonweal NATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR A PEACE TAx FUND Are You Praying for Peace but Paying for War...

...First is the realization the time of his life instead of living it...

...When we stand with them and of things it functions splendidly, precisely by being are willing to learn with them and from them about both the a drag...

...RICHARD ALLEVA 18: 26 March 1993 Commonweal COMMONWEAL'S special report has been used by hospital ethics committees, diocesan social justice offices, law and public policy centers, prolife organizations, parish discussion groups, patient advocacy groups, college ethics courses...

...no need to be exclusive about this-wherever any person or Groundhog Day is a movie about February, about the feelgroup works to truly better the lot of the poor, we must say with ing of February, its lassitude and seeming unchangeability...

...Peace Tax Fund Bill would: • establish alternative service for tax dollars drafted for military use...

...Some supernatural power has decreed that day to his slick moves on the very next, we laugh at the instant Phil will wake up in this town every morning of his life and it erasure of amorous ineptitude...

...endar...

...secute widows and orphans...

...Our preferential option In Peru I have noticed some adjustment...

...LEON KASS examines the consequences for physicians and medical practice if doctors are given the authority to kill or assist in the suicide of their patients...

...less of the God who lib- I'll love you if you love me...

...ple pushing together for a decent space in society...

...If we can let go of our attachment to the way things will get better...

...Of course, Latin America's various eco- things were, we might find some hope, faith, and strength for nomic crises have flown directly in the face of this logic...

...of the poor) that keep people in poverty: for example, specu- We must never lose sight of this reason for our option: We opt lation, large and small-scale corruption, individual violence, etc...

...Instead of James He just doesn't care about anyone or anything except the ad- Stewart learning to accept his past just as it is, we have Bill vancement of his career as a TV personality...

...The U.S...

...Perseverance in our option for the poor means a great deal It is a drag and one may say that in the great scheme to the people whom we serve...

...Phil making a faux pas in his seduction of MacDowell on one But that's not all...

...Hope, as distinct from optimism, looks at the impossible with the eyes of faith: we don't know how things will turn out in SCREEN spite of all of our efforts, but we believe God is present and i with us...

...Why not put this special report to use in your next program...

...But in Groundhog falling out of trees and restaurant patrons in need of the Heimlich Day, Phil Connors, like Scrooge (another Murray role), must maneuver...

...Leap year makes matters one day worse...

...He is a physician and philosopher at the University of Chicago...

...until Phil have been ruined...

...When he himself off buildings and in front of speeding cars, only to wake asks his landlady at his modest bed-and-breakfast for a cap- up unscathed in his bed-and-breakfast to the strains of Sonny puccino, clearly he doesn't expect her to have the makings...

...If Erich von Stroheim Andie MacDowell with a directness that keeps her character was the Man You Love to Hate, Bill Murray is the man we love from being smarmy, and partly out of sheer desperation, the to love while he's being hateful...

...National Campaign f«r a U Please send me more information...

...peo- continuing the tasks before us: the call to be a church of the ple work harder and yet are poorer than ever...

...We began to see erates and more of the God who promises life...

...Among the propo- for the poor serves those same ends, and those ends only...

...While we have poor, the call to let Latin America's pressing problems become learned in the church of the poor that love must be concrete the church's concerns as well, the call to work side-by-side with and even material (Gustavo Gutierrez says, "When we speak the poor and learn from them...

...the whole world by sharing their lot...

...And Jesus: "The one who is not against us is for us...

...heel becomes a hero to the town's citizens...

...change...

...Phil, covering Groundhog Day celebration as a "color" story, In this movie, economy of storytelling and filmmaking isn't is trapped by a blizzard whose very existence is an insult since merely of aid to comedy, it is sometimes the very source of he predicted it wouldn't happen...

...We have seen our optimism turned into the sour taste Optimism measures our efforts by results: if we all work hard, of pessimism...

...There is Who would ever want to make a comedy about February...

...Peace Tax Fund 2121 Decatur Place, N %V name Washington, DC 20008 address (202) 483-3751 state 1 zip Its hero, Phil Connors, is a Scrooge figure but he's only a Connors Gets It Right...

...The brilliantly structured plot keeps Groundhog Day both A reformation takes the shape of Punxsutawney, Pa., where taut and varied, but other elements contribute to its fun...

...the glibly friendly voice that drops into inaudi- terol food, driving recklessly, and gathering information about bility so that Connors can insult people to their faces without beautiful women which he will use the next day to pick them their being quite aware of it...

...And then there are the elaborate- up...

...He doesn't foreclose mortgages or per- improves Punxsutawney, his life will be literally unchangeable...

...This is the at- that, in spite of all that had happened, in our hearts tempted shift of focus: We will achieve a new society not so we still felt attached to these people and this parish that we were much by changing the structures that affect people as by peo- sent to serve...

...Endorsed by Franciscan Federation of Brothers and Sisters of the US, National Assembly of Religious Women, National Federation of Priests' Councils, Pax Christi USA, US Catholic Conference - Office of International Peace and Justice Yes...

...he's and Cher singing " I Got You, Babe" on his clock-radio...

...Murray's usual devices nifti- vocable and that all will be erased by 6 A.M., the movie turns ly define Connors: the frozen mask of boredom betrayed only into a sort of Middle-American Faust and Murray shifts into by the shifty eyes which focus on people just long enough to high gear, stuffing himself with massive amounts of high-cholesdismiss them...

...It is Murray's acting alone that shows exactly what goes wrong since the two scenes are, of course, identically written...

...Contact: U Enclosed is $25 for membership...

...Some of the humor derives entirely from Murray's performance...

...Love cancan live and work...

...Many citizens are not required to bear arms because their consciences forbids their participation in war -- and it is legal...

...We live among FEBRUARY REDEEMED people crucified by inhuman living conditions, and we too ex- 'GROUNDHOG DAY' perience the failure of our hopes and efforts...

...In COMMONWEAL'S special supplement Alexander Morgan Capron, professor of law and medicine at the University of Southern California, and Vicki Michel, associate director of the university's Center for Health Policy and Ethics, analyze its language, criteria, and safeguards...

...If Ramis had inserted any tranwill always be February 2, Groundhog Day...

...enable those morally opposed to war to redirect the current military portion of their taxes into peace-making activities...

...nents of the church of the poor, if one listens closely one hears fewer calls for changing unjust social structures and more talk 0ur parish team opted to return to Moho because of creating political, social, and economic spaces where the poor love is always a little bit inexplicable...

...February is the season of nonthe socialist Left), but now I think we must see this option above celebration, of colorlessness, of stasis...

...Bill Murray plays this jaded man by using, though modify- In this sequence the mere novelty and fantasy of the situation ing, his familiar persona, the hipster who verbally skewers all get laughs...

...He's not tightfisted or grasping...

...cretely and stand with the poor at the cross...

...CARLOS GOMEZ gives a first-hand account of the Dutch system that many commentators take to be the model for the law and practice of euthanasia...

...1991 defeated in Washington State 1992 defeated in California 1993...

...Your support can help make it legal...

...less of the quest for liberation and more about not be defined solely in terms of a quid pro quo, the quest for life and human dignity...

...So must the discussion and the debate egtr~oR~r n~z$h wrr'4 $ Roposrpr018 r a r her ,'9a, c~p $IPA 9o#S1b& V cki gjct3 • 60 cariaS *G E *~ft • 10-0 "1 84 ft &Sr Nor KrL, Bulk orders are available: 1000 copies...

...In Ghosthusters, Stripes, and other Murray humorous as Connors turns into a schedule-driven, harassed vehicles, this actor was our smartass proxy, and we cheered Good Samaritan racing to keep his appointments with children him for lancing pomposity and neediness...

...Phil's march (or saunter, really) Connors goes through four stages that are equally hilarious through the world of infotainment is merely a way of passing and are all acted to the hilt by Murray...

...Groundhog Day is a companionable movie and a rarity: a comedy done with a throwaway lightness of touch that your "Foster isn't really enjoying himself: He's laughing at life...

...A first poor in Latin America...

...1 nd meU~HA1AS1AB'pnme 1 se se E j pled topics oc the...

...Hope connects our current situation to the central Christian mystery, the cross and resurrection...

...of the Kingdom of God, of life, we use material life as the sym- Later on, this may mean new foci for our hopes and work, bol of the whole life, as in the Eucharist"), the optimistic out- and perhaps new results...

...all as Christ's option and as an option of his church...

...And this last secBut this time Murray weights his tricks with a measure of tion, which might have been phonily poignant, stays dry and not-so-comic rancor...

...What the person of faith sees in herself or himself and in our people is the same crisis the disciples of Jesus faced at Golgotha: at times we are like Peter wanting to flee, and at times we are like Mary will- February is the twenty-eight-day desert of the caling to face the excruciating pain...

...ture of his noncommitted nature...

...After the four-punch holiday k.o...

...When Murray splashes cold water on his Small-town Faust becomes a farcical No Exit when Phil, deface in the morning, we can see how he despises contact with spairing of ever escaping from his custom-made limbo, hurls a natural element, how he hates every bracing drop...

...But when their conscience forbids them to pay for others to bear arms, or for nuclear arms -- it's illegal...