Harold Ramis

  • Club Paradise (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2022) There’s a well-worn quality to Club Paradise that veers into complacency. As a comic premise, the idea of an American jumping from tourism to running a ramshackle Caribbean vacation resort despite local corruption is rich with possibilities, but the way this film goes about it smells of fumes left from an earlier era of comedy. Feeling as if it was a script from the early 1980s dusted-off in desperation, Club Paradise runs on a very lazy autopilot, with director Harold Ramis relying on the charisma of its stars (Robin Williams, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Peter O’Toole, even Twiggy) more than any sustained comic writing. It does have a few good moments—Andrea Martin gets a few laughs as an underappreciated MVP—but there’s a feeling that some of the funniest material came from on-set improv by talented comedians more than being from the script itself. It’s a bit of a shame, really, because the Caribbean setting and atmosphere feel as if they should be fertile ground for much better material. It’s even more of a disappointment considering the talent involved here—there’s a good reason why you almost never hear about Club Paradise anymore even despite its cast and director—it feels like a pale copy of better movies in the same vein.

  • Multiplicity (1996)

    Multiplicity (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, August 2019) The premise of Multiplicity sounds like a joke gone wrong: Let’s put two of my favourite actors in a single movie, and then add more of the same. That is: Let’s see Michael Keaton married with Andie MacDowell, and then let’s clone more Keatons. (Alas, there’s no cloning of MacDowell, which seems like a wasted opportunity.)  This being a Harold Ramis comedy, things are bound to get funnier, so as our overworked protagonist clones himself first to handle his job and then to handle family duties, things get complicated—especially when he inexplicably doesn’t tell his wife about it, leading to further complications. The added comic touch comes when the clones clone themselves, resulting in a dangerously stupid copy-of-a-copy that provides a lot of comic relief. This being Keaton’s show, he gets to play off four characters often interacting in the same frame (the chest-bump shot is particularly effective), playing off a base character, an exaggerated-macho version, an exaggerated-sensitive one, and a terminally stupid alter ego. The plot frequently doesn’t make sense (with clones seemingly losing knowledge of what they knew prior to their cloning), but this is a comedy meant to play with a familiar SF device, not a rigorous extrapolation. Multiplicity is amiable enough, with enough thematic depths about the multiple roles that we’re all asked to play being literalized in a silly comedy.

  • Stripes (1981)

    Stripes (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2017) I don’t yet have enough points of reference to make a definitive statement, but in-between movies such as Caddyshack, Meatballs, Police Academy, many others and now Stripes, there’s a very specific strain of early-eighties underdog comedy in which the institutions of American life (golf, summer camp, police, the military) are brought down to size by unrepentant slackers. Bill Murray leads Stripes with his early brand of nonchalant anarchism, taking a stand against the madness by defeating it with a complete lack of care. Stripes’ curiously ambiguous attitude toward military training is interesting: While its most ridiculous aspects are lampooned, it is a film made with the co-operation of the Army, and it does suggest that the end result can be incredibly rewarding for the right people. By the end, the slackers are defeating the Reds and rescuing their own. In-between, we do have a remarkable rah-rah-RAH sequence in which audiences are reminded that they are American and thus exceptional, and a weird-yet-expected shift from aimless sketch training comedy to more focused last-act suspense. The DNA match with Caddyshack is obvious with Murray and Harold Ramis sharing top billing, and Ivan Reitman handling directing duties. Stripes is messy by modern standards, but it’s not without its own charm.

  • Caddyshack (1980)

    Caddyshack (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2017) As a quintessential golf comedy, Caddyshack’s reputation precedes it in many ways. A favourite filler on golf TV channels, it seems to enjoy a consecrated reputation as something of a lowbrow classic. Taking a good look at it, however, may reveal a film weaker than expected. The plot zigs and zags in mystifying fashion, largely uninterested in the action of its putative teenage leads but all too eager to showcase comic routines by Rodney Dangerfield, Chevy Chase and Bill Murray. It makes for a clash of comic sensibilities, considering how their styles don’t necessarily belong in the same narrative. The most egregious instance of this is Dangerfield’s quasi-stand-up routine blasting the age and status of a country club members—the movie pretty much stops dead during that time. Another physical comedy bit involves nautical hijinks, while Chevy Chase has his own comic-seduction routine, and Bill Murray kind of dawdles into the movie with his own absurdist take (He’s got that going for him, which is nice) and a groundhog exists in a separate explosive movie. Very little of this actually fits together, making for a disconnected but occasionally very funny film. Caddyshack’s impact makes more sense once you find out the chaotic nature of its production and the various ways then-novice director Harold Ramis altered the film is post-production. The result is a mess, but an entertaining one—if only for seeing Chase, Dangerfield and Murray each playing up their comic persona, leaving the other aspects of the film far behind.