Sunday, May 19, 2013

Flogging a Dead Groundhog

As I said before, I don’t think that Groundhog Day, the 1993 stuck-in-time movie starring Bill Murray, is a romantic comedy.  Yes, it’s a film both side-splitting and thought-provoking, but I think that the romantic story thread — Murray’s character pursues Andie MacDowell — is a mere subplot, with MacDowell not given enough screentime or scenes without Murray to rise to the level of romantic co-lead.  However, not that many people seem to agree with me.  If multitudes of moviegoers have no trouble affixing the rom-com label to My Big Fat Greek Wedding (it’s not — the romance is a subplot that’s resolved less than halfway through the running time), they have even less of a problem depositing the hard-to-categorize Groundhog Day in the same pigeonhole.  

But if Groundhog Day were a full-fledged romantic comedy — in other words, a kind of movie where the couple coming together was the story’s central concern — it would bear a closer resemblance to the trailer below, a forthcoming film from popular culture’s new chronicler of courtship and auteur of awkwardness, Richard Curtis:



Okay, I admit it!  This whole post was just an excuse to put another image of the mesmerizingly magnificent Rachel McAdams on my blog.

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