Groundhog Day - Location Tour

This past Sunday, Jenna and I traveled to the quaint town of Woodstock, Illinois, to celebrate Groundhog Day...and to begin our series of movie location tours. The list is quite extensive, consisting mostly of childhood favorites, such as Back to the Future, The Goonies, Rocky, and The Princess Bride, to name a few.

The first, however, was close by, and the experience was, to say the least, a lot of fun.

Groundhog Day (1993) remains one of my favorite comedies of the 90s, balancing good humor with a lot of heart and emotion. Bill Murray is fantastic, and we catch an early glimpse of some of the great acting skills he'd commit to film later in his career. In addition, the script compliments Murray's acting style, affording him chances to be funny and sad, sarcastic and romantic, sometimes even within the same scene. Murray isn't the only one who shines here, though; the supporting cast is also quite good, and flesh out the film nicely.

However, for this blog, I'm focusing primarily on the backdrop of the film: Woodstock.

I don't have much to write here, as Jenna and I created a video of our experiences Sunday, which I've posted below (Jenna also wrote a wonderful blog about the experience for the NIU web site, which can be found here). If you have eight minutes and enjoyed the film, why not give it a watch? If you've never seen it, consider renting it this weekend. As I said, it's one of those few comedies that manage to hit all cylinders. And if you enjoy our little video, be on the lookout for our next one, as we visit the UW Madison campus for our location tour of Back to School!

***Please excuse the quality of the above video. I had to lower the quality quite a bit to have it fit onto the the blog.