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Goodbye, Harold Ramis - and thanks for everything. Thank you so much.Inevitably, I've been thinking about Ramis quite a lot since this Monday, and I've realised that what I really feel, along with the surprise and the sadness, is gratitude. Thanks for Ghostbusters and Egon Spengler. Thanks for making being a nerd with glasses in the early 1980s a little easier. Thanks for Groundhog Day and the joys of the Pennsylvania Polka. Thanks for suggesting that magic might lie behind the most overcast of skies, the most tedious of weatherman assignments. Thanks for making the case that happiness is inevitable.
Other people were involved with all of this, of course - auteur theory rarely makes much sense since most films are, ultimately, group efforts - but it's often relatively easy with movies, and with music, and with painting and literature and all the rest, to see where to direct a lot of your appreciation. Ramis co-wrote Ghostbusters, and that's always given his low-key performance as Egon, the quintessential straight man, a kind of gleeful subversiveness. Equally, according to this wonderful piece in the Guardian, although he came to Groundhog Day once a script had already been written by Danny Rubin, he then stripped it of its distracting non-linearity. He saved the movie from voguishness and made it - somewhat appropriately - timeless instead.
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