People my age loved Harold Ramis before we even knew who he was; when we were kids, the subversive gaiety he inspired through the movies he co-wrote, directed, and acted in was everywhere. At my 4-H camp, in 1982, on a long, hot hike through the woods, our teen-age counsellors started singing 'Do Wah Diddy,' like Ramis and Bill Murray did in 'Stripes.' Soon, a small army of ten-year-olds was singing 'She looked good, she looked fine,' feeling a little naughty and not fully understanding why. At middle-school dances, the older kids always played 'Shout,' and we-sixth graders in Jams and Hard Rock Café T-shirts, or in fluorescent sweatshirts and with huge Madonna-style bows in our hair-danced like John Belushi and Tom Hulce at a toga party in a 1978 frat-house movie that most of us were too young to have seen. We were singing, doing the twist, waving our arms, yelling 'Gator!,' lying on the floor and kicking our feet in the air, as people's older siblings had after they saw 'Animal House' and had passed down to us.
When 'Ghostbusters' came out, in 1984, we were in on the joke, too: now we had our own Harold Ramis movie. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Egon Spengler (Ramis), and Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), three pseudo-scientific underdogs with an old fire station, a converted hearse, some proton packs, and a good logo, fighting ghosts and becoming heroes: this we could appreciate, and so could our parents. Murray was a slyboots ('Why worry? Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back'); Aykroyd was a know-it-all ('What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God-type stuff'); Ramis was a lovable nerd ('I collect spores, mold, and fungus'), admired by Annie Potts and mildly smoldering behind his glasses. (Ramis and Aykroyd co-wrote the screenplay.) When Sigourney Weaver's character tells Venkman, 'You're not like a scientist, you're like a game-show host,' she's articulated much of the movie's charm.
The whole thing was loose and anarchic and silly, but it put the fate of New York at stake. Murray was a lovable sleaze, sure, but hotel ballrooms and prewar apartment buildings had to be saved from ghosts, and he and the others had the jumpsuits and ray-shooters to achieve it. When the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man rose above the streets of Manhattan-part monster-movie riff, part thrilling mockery of a Pillsbury Doughboy type, part man vs. apocalypse-we felt gratitude for this movie, for its comedic daring and invention and the fun it allowed us to have. That happy awe in 'Ghostbusters' was the comedy version of what we'd experienced two summers before, watching E.T. and Elliott pedal their bike into the sky. At the end of 'Ghostbusters,' a marshmallow-covered ghostbuster yells, 'I love this town!' as New York City cheers, Bill Murray walks off with Sigourney Weaver, and the theme song plays. That glee carried us into the parking lot and lasted all summer, ready to be tapped into at any time. When you heard the 'Ghostbusters' song, which you did everywhere-on the radio, in stores, coming out of car windows-you felt it all over again. You turned it up and sang, and when Ray Parker, Jr., said, 'Bustin' makes me feel good!' you'd laugh and dance around, and so did your friends.
Ramis, of course, had a hand in much of the great comedy of the past few decades-'SCTV,' 'National Lampoon's Vacation,' 'Caddyshack,' 'Stripes,' 'Meatballs,' 'Back to School,' 'Groundhog Day,' and many others. Especially in the early years, the spirit is as exuberant as Rodney Dangerfield dancing to 'Any Way You Want It' in loud red pants on the golf course of the Bushwood Country Club. In Ramis's movies, the nutballs, the slobs, the garish, the poor, the handsomely weird, the gross, and the sleazily charming dance around, revelling in the fun to be had within the establishment, and at its expense ('You think I'd join this crummy snobatorium?'). The gopher in 'Caddyshack' dances, too, and he's not welcome at the country club, either.
There's a 2008 episode of '30 Rock' in which Liz Lemon realizes that her ex-boyfriend Floyd has dodged her by claiming to have a meeting with a co-worker named Peter Venkman. In happier times, Floyd had won her heart by joking about being attracted to the gopher in 'Caddyshack'; now look at what's become of them. 'Peter Venkman-that's from 'Ghostbusters'!' she says. 'You used 'Ghostbusters' for evil! ' Liz is right-that's betrayal. You don't take something as joyous as the comedy of Harold Ramis and use it for selfishness. It's here to make the world more fun, and it's found everywhere, not just in the many dozens of movies it's inspired but in the cult of 'Groundhog Day' among armchair philosophers, in my stepmother's joke that if my dad joined a country club it would turn out like 'Caddyshack,' and on and on. Kids were still doing the toga-party 'Shout' routine at my school twenty years after 'Animal House,' and last Halloween, my friends and their two kids were ghostbusters and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. In the immortal words of Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Au revoir, Ramis.'
Post By http://ift.tt/1kageiQ
0 comments Blogger 0 Facebook
Post a Comment