***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliot, and Stephen Tobolowsky
Directed by Harold Ramis & written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis
1993
101 min PG
“Morons, your bus is leaving!”
“Groundhog Day” is a terrific vehicle for Bill Murray’s self-loathing superiority complex and a fun, casual use of the supernatural. Murray plays a self-centering, self-pitying schmuck of a TV weatherman who every year has to suffer through the same publicity stunt: watch a famous groundhog poke its head out of the ground, look for its own shadow, and then determine whether or not winter is over. The small town that celebrates this stunt has little else going for it, so it surrounds the groundhog with festivities aplenty—and Murray can’t stand any of it.
This year he goes with a cute producer (MacDowell) and an obnoxious camera man (Elliot), and something strange happens: every morning he wakes up, and it’s groundhog day all over again. At first he’s confused. Then he tries killing himself, and every time he dies he comes back again, even after he and the groundhog drive off a cliff. Then he tries living like a pig, and he looks so happy puffing cigarettes with a mouth full of cake. Eventually he accepts his fate and tries not be such a jerk all the time. The romantic element between Murray and the producer isn’t exactly inspired, although it is thematically necessary. And the movie has a lot of fun with Murray getting to know exactly how everyone in the town is going to behave.
The movie is up for various numerological interpretations: on the one hand, Murray is said to go through some thousand or so identical days, and the number is significant to Hindus, but we only see 40 of them, that being the number of days Jesus spent in the desert getting his head straight, and also the basis for Lent. Very much like 2005’s “The Weather Man,” “Groundhog Day” uses weather as a metaphor for how we are often subjected to lives that we cannot control, and the best we can do is learn to face the unpredictable with a philosophical attitude, or at least strive for some measure of self-improvement. But “Groundhog Day” goes beyond that with its Yankee small town, many of whose occupants, while not cursed like Murray, feel like they’re living the same day over and over again anyway. Fellow Ghostbuster Harold Ramis’s direction is clean and conventional—and, oh yes, Murray is brilliant.
Finished Wednesday, November 16th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, and Brian Cox
Directed by Gore Verbinski & written by Ehren Kruger, based on the screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki
2002
115 min PG13
I’m not going to lie. My only real complaint about “The Ring” is that I kept getting the feeling that, somewhere deep down, there was something inherently stupid about the whole thing. I have legitimate complaints about the film which I can articulate, but mostly it is this suspicion that keeps me from a whole-hearted recommendation. Another viewing might prove me wrong.
There is plenty to admire in this film, which jazzes up and rearranges the key elements of the ghost story. Some of it could even be described as ingenuous. I also really admire how “The Ring’s” supernatural elements, like so many horror films, are used as a dark metaphor for real-life fears, and I also like that this subtext is left largely unspoken. We get threatening old houses, secrets from the past, not one but two spooky little kids, and teenage girls in plaid skirts perpetually on the edge of a lesbian moment.
In place of the nightmare, the psychic, or the dusty and long-lost old book that only a soon-to-die idiot would read, “The Ring” has a possessed video cassette. Seven days after you see it, you die. The demonic video cassette is some piece of work: threatening, ominous, symbolic, scratchy, and yet, in the words of the film’s audio-visual expert, “very student film.” In place of Mulder and Scully we have Naomi Watts, fresh from her star-making turn in “Mulholland Drive,” as a busy reporter mom, and Martin Henderson as an old boyfriend.
Individual scenes work great, but the whole explanation doesn’t really hang together from beginning to end. This normally would not sink or even damage a horror movie, but “The Ring” is a bit mouthy, and it tries too hard to tie everything together. The movie’s subtext is that TV is bad for you; Watts’ mom plants her kiddo in front of the electronic cyclops babysitter and, boy how, does she regret it.
Back to home.