Movie Review

Comedy

Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby shares much in common with its main characters. On the one hand it's breezy, intelligent, and urbane; on the other, it's zany, madcap, and screwball. Because of its buoyant, lighthearted attitude, the movie is easy to enjoy time and again. I confess it does not make me laugh out loud too often, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face almost continuously every time I watch it. Its humor ages well.

Hepburn plays a feisty socialite heiress, Susan Vance, impetuous, impulsive, both brilliant and scatterbrained. The character appears to be somewhat like the young Hepburn herself, who came from a wealthy family, was known as an outdoorswoman, and was used to getting her own way.

Wearing glasses inspired by silent-film star Harold Lloyd, Grant plays a timid paleontologist, Dr. David Huxley, who is just about to be married to a fellow scientist, Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker), at the Stuyvesant Museum of Natural History. But Susan turns David's life upside down when she sets her sights on marrying him herself.

Susan and David first coincidentally meet on the golf course, where Susan ruins his car. Later, she runs into him at a night spot, where she trips him and tears his coat. These are only the beginnings of a relationship that has Susan pursuing continuously and David trying frantically to dodge out of the way.

Groundhog Day

Brilliant, quirky, good-natured, and smart are just some of the adjectives that we film critics don’t get to use often enough, but all of them apply to Groundhog Day. Director/screenwriter Harold Ramis, actor Bill Murray, and everyone else involved with this film have all been responsible for their share of dogs. But this quirky, good-natured comedy is as good as it can be. Too rarely does a clever screenplay come along to give good actors a chance.

Murray’s TV weatherman is a burnout with a bad attitude, a small fish in a small market, who affects the egotism and cynicism of all members of the press but knows that he’s second-rate. Then, in a bizarre plot turn, he is thrown into a time warp where he is forced to live the same day over and over until he gets it right -- and to learn to appreciate life’s blessings in the process.

Ramis milks the odd premise for just the right number of jokes, and funny ones. Eventually, a romance becomes viable between Murray’s reformed cynic and Andie MacDowell’s reporter, who is initially repelled by his piggishness. (Since she meets him as if for the first time each day, she is unaware of his transformation.) Murray is more disciplined than usual but as funny as ever, and MacDowell’s excellent performance is a pleasant surprise

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