The holiday Groundhog Day, which is today, was once just a simple little tradition where a small town in Pennsylvania pulled a groundhog from its burrow to determine how much longer the winter would last. Totally normal. But thanks to the 1993 film starring Bill Murray, Groundhog Day has become shorthand for feeling like you’re in a nightmarish, Sisyphean loop and can’t get out of it.
If you didn’t already know, that’s pretty much the movie’s plot: Phil (Murray), a TV newscaster, is begrudgingly sent to cover the emergence of the rodent, and suddenly finds himself living the same day over and over and over again.
The Parkway Theatre is screening the movie tonight and has been teasing it in a very meta way. For whatever it’s worth, Punxsutawney Phil, the actual groundhog, saw his shadow this morning, meaning we’re in for six more weeks of winter.
7:30 p.m., The Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave., mdfilmfest.com, $10.
