Nietzsche: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’”

Groundhog Day
Phil: I’m a god.
Rita: You’re God?
Phil: I’m a god. I’m not the God… I don’t think.
Rita: Because you survived a car wreck?
Phil: I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned.
Rita: Oh, really?
Phil: …and every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender… I am an immortal.

Nietzsche: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful.”

One could say that the point of Groundhog Day is that Phil Connors learns to understand the beauty of things, especially insofar as when he and Rita wake up the morning after, once the eternal recurrence has ended, he says, “It’s beautiful. Let’s live here,” showing a strong sense of amor fati.

For my students, I’ve got to pre-approve their suggestion. but I’d go with, “If you can argue it, argue it,”’ 'cause. Fun.

Ohh, if we’re doing that…

Totally do that, it’s fun and and I’m exited to know it.

I’m looking for ones where it’s an English-class ‘classic’ play but it’s a lot more fun when not narrowed.

Star Wars is The Hidden Fortress from Akira Kurosawa.

Ohh, if we’re doing that…

A Fistful of Dollars is just Yojimbo dressed up as a Western. But Yojimbo is lifted off of Dashiell Hammett, with Kurosawa himself saying he based it on The Glass Key. Which, amusingly, inspired the Coen brothers when they were making Miller’s Crossing. So there’s that fun Gordian knot.

Also, you’ll see some folks claiming that The Northman was based on Hamlet. This isn’t true. The Northman and Hamlet were both based on the legend of Amleth from Gesta Danorum. So Shakespeare and Robert Eggers were writing two very different stories from the same legend, kind of like Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory both writing King Arthur stories a few hundred years apart.

Also ha. I once created trouble by joking around about how The Stand is Watership Down is The Oydessy. (The trouble being that someone repeated it and her thesis advisor said cool.)

• Oh Brother Where Art Thou is The Odyssey
• Cruel Intentions is Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons)
• Roxanne is Cyrano de Bergerac
• O is Othello
• West Side Story is Romeo & Juliet
• Bridget Jones’s Diary is Pride & Prejudice
• RENT is La Boheme
• Apocalypse Now is Heart of Darkness
• Kurosawa’s Ran is King Lear

Thanks! I heard about 10 Things… being The Taming of the Shrew, but didn’t know about She’s the Man or Clueless.