Bill Murray wished a public farewell to old friend Harold Ramis at this year’s Oscars
SEE IT BIG! COMEDIES
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, March 30, free with museum admission, 2:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
At this year’s Oscars, after he and Amy Adams presented the nominees for Best Cinematography, Bill Murray said, “Oh, we forgot one: Harold Ramis for Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, and Groundhog Day.” Ramis, the Chicago-born writer, director, and actor who initially gained fame as a member of SCTV, had passed away six days earlier at the age of sixty-nine. While Ramis did not make or appear in the kinds of films that the academy tends to honor, he was part of some of the most entertaining films of the past thirty-plus years. He directed Caddyshack, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Groundhog Day, and Analyze This, wrote or cowrote National Lampoon’s Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Back to School, and Analyze This, and appeared in Stripes, Ghostbusters, and As Good as It Gets, among others. (Now’s not the time to talk about Stuart Saves His Family, Bedazzled, or Club Paradise.) His work might not have always shown a great deal of depth, but the man knew funny. The Museum of the Moving Image is honoring Ramis with a triple feature on Sunday, March 30, as part of its “See It Big! Comedies” series. The mini-festival begins at 2:00 with one of the most riotous films ever made, Animal House, which gave a whole new view of the college experience while establishing John Belushi’s place in film history forever. Ramis cowrote Animal House, which was directed by John Landis, with Chris Miller and Doug Kenney, who plays Stork (“What the hell are we supposed to do, you moron?”). Amid all the sexual innuendos and gross-out humor are some smart social statements about class, society, power, and the education system.
Neurologist Harold Ramis has some news for weatherman Phil Connors in GROUNDHOG DAY
Animal House is followed at 4:30 by Ramis’s best film as a director, 1993’s Groundhog Day, in which Murray stars as a bitter and cynical local television weatherman who finds himself waking up on the same day over and over, but with the ability to change things, learning how the smallest shift can impact so many people. Despite being very, very funny, the endlessly clever film, which Ramis cowrote with Danny Rubin and in which he appears as a neurologist, also has a sweet love story (with Andie MacDowell). Like its plotline, Groundhog Day can be watched over and over and over again, offering something new with each viewing. The three-pack concludes at 7:00 with the dark caper comedy The Ice Harvest, which Ramis directed from a script by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, based on the novel by Scott Phillips. The 2005 film features John Cusack, Connie Nielsen, and Billy Bob Thornton as characters involved in a mob heist that goes wrong. In a statement shortly following Ramis’s death, Murray, who had had a long falling-out with Ramis, said, “He earned his keep on this planet.” As this triple feature shows, indeed he did.
In his 2011 Sundance award-winning Like Crazy, Drake Doremus intimately explored the intense relationship between a British exchange student (Felicity Jones) and an American classmate (Anton Yelchin) who meet at an L.A. college. Director Doremus, cowriter Ben York Jones, and Felicity Jones have teamed up again for another poignant love story, Breathe In. This time Jones (The Invisible Woman) stars as high school senior and pianist Sophie Williams, who comes to upstate New York as part of a semester abroad program. She is staying with the Reynolds family — Keith (Guy Pearce), a music teacher and part-time cellist who dreams of getting a chair at the symphony; his devoted wife, Megan (Amy Ryan), who collects cookie jars; and their daughter, high school senior Lauren (Mackenzie Davis). It doesn’t take long before a serious attraction develops between Keith and Sophie, one that builds slowly and organically while threatening to upend what had apparently been a stable, happy family. Doremus handles his purposely clichéd setup with a tender intelligence that prevents Breathe In from turning into what could have been yet another film about a frustrated older man risking everything to get in bed with a much younger woman. Doremus builds believable situations in the sensitively drawn story, in which the actors often improvise as their characters search for their place in life. Jones is alluring as the complex Sophie, Davis is impressive in her film debut, and Ryan makes the most of a relatively one-note part, but the film belongs to Pearce (The Hurt Locker, L.A. Confidential, Prometheus), an underrated actor who reinvents himself once again, playing Keith with a brittle hesitancy and understated vulnerability that intimately evoke the inner struggles and temptations we all experience. Breathe In is a poignant family drama that feels like a slice of real life.
By their very nature, street photographers take pictures of anonymous individuals, capturing a moment in time in which viewers can fill in their own details. In the wonderful documentary Finding Vivian Maier, codirectors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel turn the lens around on a street photographer herself, attempting to fill in the details of the curious life and times of Vivian Maier, about whom very little was known. “I find the mystery of it more interesting than her work itself,” says one woman for whom Vivian Maier served as a nanny decades earlier. “I’d love to know more about this person, and I don’t think you can do that through her work.” In 2007, while looking for historical photos for a book on the Portage Park section of Chicago, Maloof purchased a box of negatives at an auction. Upon discovering that they were high-quality, museum-worthy photographs, he set off on a mission to learn more about the photographer. Playing detective — while also developing hundreds of rolls of film, with thousands more to go — Maloof meets with men and women who knew Maier as an oddball, hoarding nanny who went everywhere with her camera and shared little, if anything, about her personal life. “I’m the mystery woman,” Maier says in a color home movie. Her former employers and charges, including talk-show host Phil Donahue, debate her background, the spelling and pronunciation of her name, her accent, and how she might have felt about a documentary delving into her secretive life.
