The “Royale With Cheese Movie Club” is a section of my blog where I finally get around to watching films that EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD has already seen. The category was named after the classic dialogue in Pulp Fiction, where Vinnie and Jules talk about what Quarter Pounders with Cheese are called in France.
Now that being said, the Royale With Cheese Movie Club has featured a whole film festival of motion pictures, as well as some television shows. And It’s even included a previous Bill Murray film (yeah, Caddyshack is on there). Essentially, if I mention to anyone that I haven’t seen X film, and I hear, “You haven’t seen THAT film? What is wrong with you? That’s such a good movie!!” If I hear that, then yeah, we’re putting it on the Royale With Cheese Movie Club schedule.
And trust me, there’s still some films I have to watch at some point in time. I’m sure if I mention that I haven’t seen Goodfellas or John Wick or the Sopranos TV series, one of you blog readers will start screaming at your computer monitor that I should go and watch this film.
Well, since it’s colder than a tin toilet in Alaska outside today, and somewhere in Western Pennsylvania the nation is deciding their collective climate change concept on whether some hedgehog has decent vision on a sunny morning … maybe it’s time to watch another Bill Murray film for the RWCMC.
Okay, here we go. Roll the trailer.
Okay, I watched the film. And … well …
Yeah. It was fun. It was inventive, and essentially Bill Murray is locked in a romantic comedy with a sci-fi time loop gimmick. Relive the day over and over and over and over until you do that one thing that stops the reset button.
And at first, Bill Murray’s weatherman character hates the time loop and wants out. Then he starts working within the time loop’s parameters, first discovering that he can’t die in the loop, and that if he wants out of the loop – as well as getting the heart of Andie MacDowell’s character – he has to change his nihilistic ways.
Honestly, the best way to describe this film, for me, is it’s a Bill Murray film that doesn’t feel like you’re being FORCED to watch a Bill Murray film. He’s having fun with this. Or at least as the film progresses, he’s buying more and more into the concept.
And honestly, if he wanted to break the time loop, all he had to do was be nice to the insurance policy guy, and he would have broken the time loop that instant. But NOOOOO, he didn’t listen to me, did he? 😀
And on a cold day like today, maybe it would be advantageous to fire up one of the streaming services and see if there’s another RWCMC film I could watch. I mean, the last time I really enjoyed a Bill Murray film, he was shooting nuclear proton energy at the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, so maybe if I can find Meatballs or Lost In Translation or some other film of his …
We shall see.
Chuck The Writer 
We rewatched Groundhog Day a few years ago with the kids. Felt like it didn’t hold up to the memory. Not sure Meatballs would hold up either.
I probably fall into the minority, but I made it through 4 seasons of the The Sopranos and didn’t bother to watch the rest. I didn’t think it was very good. I think they are 10 episode seasons. Couldn’t see dedicating another 20 hours to it.
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I stumbled onto this from a guy named Adam Huberty, which is consistent with what I had read:
The problem was, when Ramis wrote Groundhog Day, he saw it as yet another comedy.
When Murray read it, however, he disagreed. He believed that it should actually be understood as a drama with extremely serious moral and spiritual implications and that it was one of the most, if not the most, spiritually significant films of all time.
That’s when they started arguing about it. And since both of them really did have their hearts in the right place, it turned vicious.
Murray tried to convince Ramis that they needed to tone down the comedy and focus on the important spiritual and religious message of the film.
Ramis, however, wasn’t moved. He’d written the film, after all. And he was directing it. And even if he agreed with Murray that it had a religious and philosophical message, to him it was still just another “Harold Ramis comedy.”
This absolutely drove Murray nuts.
He was convinced Ramis was ruining what was essentially a sacred text by turning it into a joke and there was nothing he could do to change Ramis’ mind.
And when the film came out and the theatrical release demonstrated just how far Ramis had leaned into comedy and just how little of Murray’s input had been taken seriously, that was the end for Murray.
He simply never forgave Ramis for it and a beautiful partnership came to an end.
https://www.quora.com/What-did-Bill-Murray-remember-most-fondly-about-the-late-Harold-Ramis-director-of-his-most-well-known-film-Groundhog-Day
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