Films featuring
Bill Murray

Ghostbusters

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Ghostbusters represents such a high water mark for not only the careers of those involved, but also for comedy in general, that it’s hard to overstate the level of accomplishment on screen. It’s difficult enough to make a good movie, not just a good comedy, but to produce a comedy classic while dealing with the complications of an ambitious special effects picture has to be some kind of cinematic grand slam.

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The Darjeeling Limited

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Wes Anderson films are not set in the same world in which you and I live. If they were, every member of The Royal Tanenbaums would have been strangled by someone close to them. Even if the three brothers travelling by the Darjeeling Limited do not try our patience to the same degree, it is still hard to imagine them occupying the same physical universe as the rest of us. That is either a testament to the writer/director’s imagination or a damning statement about his grip on reality. For the moment, I will give Anderson the benefit of the doubt and endorse the former view.

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Quick Change

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Quick Change is probably the least famous of the good Bill Murray movies. This is a grown-up, more cynical version of the Murray characters from movies like Stripes and Ghostbusters. He’s Grimm, a fed-up city planner for New York City and he’s decided to get out of town with his girlfriend, Phyllis (Geena Davis), and best friend, Loomis (Randy Quaid). First, however, he’s going to rob a bank.

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Broken Flowers

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The opening credits of Broken Flowers is like porn for postal geeks, as we follow a pink envelope through virtually the entire process of it being mailed, sorted and delivered. I was oddly reminded of the little girl in the red coat from Schinder’s List as I watched this pink beacon sail through a sea of white and manila envelopes.

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The Royal Tenenbaums

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The Royal Tenebaums is a masterfully-executed, unconventional little film starring some of our best actors, all at the top of their game, all playing characters I wanted to strangle by the middle of the picture. It’s an odd feeling to so thoroughly admire the craft with which a film was made, while still hoping for a Roland Emmerich-sized catastrophe to obliterate the city in which these characters live.

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Lost in Translation

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Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation has been a frustrating little movie for those of us who have championed it. I saw this movie in the theater when it first came out and loved it. I recommended it to friends and family members, most of whom saw it on video. Their response was almost unanimous: it sucked, nothing happened, the two main characters were a couple of passive lumps who never did anything. First I checked the obvious alternatives. Either my friends and family had all seen the wrong movie or they had been replaced by alien pod people. How could such intelligent, rational people take such a passionate dislike to this little gem of a movie.

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