Andre has a really nice speech about that same thing in “My Dinner with Andre.” I couldn’t find the precise language, but basically he says that the “variety” of a succession of relationships is actually the emotionally safer path because it has such a predictable arc: the chase, the submission, the exhilaration of infatuation, the waning of excitement, the breakup.

But actually committing to intimacy and the true exploration of the complexities of another person–that’s the adventure that has no map, no pattern, and no end, full of risk and uncertain reward.

It’s always been my favorite speech in the movie.

Well, Shakespeare is fiction, but a lot of people have “derived eternal truths” from it. Actually, I wouldn’t use the word “derive.” I’d say “discern eternal truths” or perhaps “recognize eternal truths.”

Of course, “Groundhog Day” isn’t Shakespeare. But all fiction, if well done, can help us see things that could be considered eternal truths. Fiction is certainly not the only way to get there, but it’s a way that speaks to a lot of people, or can speak to a lot of people. This makes fiction, and “Groundhog Day,” not “only entertainment,” depending on the viewer. To you, it may be mere entertainment. That’s fine. But to an awful lot of people—including a great many clergymen—“Groundhog Day” is a good deal more.

For some examples, I offer this, this, and this:

Since its debut a decade ago, the film has become a curious favorite of religious leaders of many faiths, who all see in ”Groundhog Day” a reflection of their own spiritual messages. Curators of the series, polling some 35 critics in the literary, religious and film worlds to suggest films with religious interpretations, found that ”Groundhog Day” came up so many times that there was actually a squabble over who would write about it in the retrospective’s catalog.

Harold Ramis, the director of the film and one of its writers, said last week that since it came out he has heard from Jesuit priests, rabbis and Buddhists, and that the letters keep coming. ”At first I would get mail saying, ‘Oh, you must be a Christian, because the movie so beautifully expresses Christian belief,’ ” Mr. Ramis said during a conversation on his mobile phone as he was walking the streets of Los Angeles. ”Then rabbis started calling from all over, saying they were preaching the film as their next sermon. And the Buddhists! Well, I knew they loved it, because my mother-in-law has lived in a Buddhist meditation center for 30 years and my wife lived there for 5 years.”

Sedona AZ was the site for many early Western films that supposedly took place in other locations all over the West. Some of the stories in the museums there are quite funny, about how the directors had to mask either too-prominent landmarks, or modern telephone wires and plane contrails.

Another one dealing with Seattle is they often film in Vancouver, BC which is cheaper because of various goodies the BC gov’t gives producers but the show/movie is set in Seattle. Vancouver and Seattle have vastly different skylines and it is very obvious to anybody slightly familiar with either.

In the good ole days Seattle used to have a real inferiority complex (southeast Alaska and all) and this stuff would really tick people off. Now it seems like half the people here have come in the last ten years and have no sense of the history of the area.

Griffin: I rather took offense when they filmed a “Howard the Duck” scene in my San Francisco neighborhood, since the film was supposed to be in Cleveland.

Yeah you always have to take a pause when a movie is set in an area you know well. In ‘Sleepless In Seattle’ Tom Hanks goes off in his little kayak on a long and probably dangerous journey from lakes to locks to the Sound and across the major port shipping channel all while somehow Meg Ryan follows him in her car.