Stripes, Groundhog Day

Caddyshack is quoted more often by drunken frat brothers, and Meatballs codified the slacker lifestyle a decade before the word came into use. But the hero of a generation has shined so brightly in so many films, we couldn’t begin to decide which Bill Murray film we like best. (Even his serious turn in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge was good, dammit! OK, that may be going too far.) It’s been great to see Murray keeping up his chops in recent years. If anything, his roles in hipster art flicks like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums have proven that the man can connect across generations, and that wooden-faced thing he does so well really is acting. Stripes, of course, was made at the peak of his career and market value, and captured the essence of the Murray schtick as kind-hearted cad. (Ghostbusters did too, but there he had to share precious screen time with the increasingly corpulent Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver’s moneymaker, and the underappreciated Harold Ramis). Groundhog Day, on the other hand, is a brilliant piece of writing Murray had to meet halfway, and both the film and the actor never got due credit. If there is a catechism of 80s humor, then Bill Murray has something to do with almost every article of faith. You might say he’s a Cinderella story, outta nowhere, a former greenskeeper now about to become the Master’s champion…