Now that Harold Ramis cannot rubut, by reason of being dead, we learn that his movies are all about how bliss it was in the 1970s to be alive, and how to then vote for Ronald Reagan was very heaven.
As Chevy Chase might have put it on “Saturday Night Live,” Harold Ramis is still dead. And with him has gone the finest era of comedy: The ’70s kind.
Ramis was as close to the king of comedy as it gets, as a writer, director and occasional sidekick for “Animal House,” “Meatballs,” “Caddyshack,” “Stripes,” “Ghostbusters,” “Back to School,” “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and “Groundhog Day.”
Now Ramis, like his fellow counterculturalists John Belushi, Doug Kenney (co-writer of “Animal House” and “Caddyshack”), Richard Pryor and George Carlin, is gone. Chase just turned 70. David Letterman is 66 and Bill Murray, 63, has pretty much given up comedy, unless you count unintentionally funny projects like “Hyde Park on Hudson.”
Or unless you count Moonrise Kingdom.
But I digress. I quite like Ramis's stuff, I'm a fan, touchstones of my youth, and so on. But what he was all about was making funny movies for mass audiences.
And that is great! Groundhog Day is probably his best and certainly deftest film, and I'll call it a masterpiece, but it's a minor masterpiece, and it's content to be so. Which isn't a knock, not remotely. It's charming and assured. It doesn't try to offer much more of a Life Lesson than "don't be a dick," but it delivers that lesson wonderfully.
But then again, it doesn't offer a whole lot of jaw-dropping belly-laughs, does it? It is a funny movie, but you're not left gasping. And that is because it doesn't take any risks. You always know who you're rooting for when you watch Groundhog Day. You're not challenged.
You can have some gasping moments with Ramis, but not necessarily repeatedly. The "Stay-Puft" gag in Ghostbusters worked because it skewered genre expectations. But that kind of only works once.
And to just take the list proffered by this Post idiot, those films are hardly flawless, nor does it make much sense to call them Fuck You Power movies. I mean, honesty, hands up who doesn't think Richard Pryor wouldn't be telling this guy to shut the fuck up?
Because nothing Ramis did, big screen, was especially "counterculture."
I mean, shit, if you were moved to Political Consciousness by fucking Ghostbusters, I mean, holy shit, that's in and of itself hilarious --
Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie calls “Ghostbusters” “the most libertarian movie ever,” and Reason colleague Jesse Walker notes, “William Atherton’s EPA agent fills the space in ‘Ghostbusters’ that John Vernon’s dean does in ‘Animal House’ and Ted Knight’s old-money country-club man does in ‘Caddyshack’ . . . There isn’t even that big a shift in the targets. In the ’70s, activists on the left as well as the right regularly took aim at the regulatory state.”
My point exactly.
None of this is to say that mainstream 1970s comedies lacked highlights. 9 to 5 was pro-feminism and pro-marijuana, for instance, despite the horseshit ending.
But it is to say that if you count yourself a Foe of The Man because you enjoyed Animal House, uh, Shazam for your Bad Self? Have a biscuit?
Anyway, to sum up, Bridesmaids is entirely poop jokes and nobody dares make fun of Obama over Benghazi, and that's why we can't have the hilarious sexual assault scene from Meatballs anymore. Or something.