Defending Your Life

Heaven is the most high concept place earth.

Galaxy Quest

Behind-the-scenes drama.

After Hours

Leather-bound sadists. Kidnappers. Robbers. Vigilantes. An angry mob.

Welcome to SoHo in the early 80s.

This movie is Scorcese's early career in a nutshell.

is so much more than

Groundhog Day

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Written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, Directed by Harold Ramis Release Date: February 12, 1993

The High: Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is a self-absorbed weatherman cursed to relive Groundhog Day over and over in Punxatawny, PA.

The Low: The small-town and it's in inhabitants make Phil confront his own egotism and need for human interaction.

Since its release in 1993, Groundhog Day has grown to become regarded a modern classic and perhaps most popular high-low concept comedy. It has seen multiple home video releases, the latest with extensive commentary from the filmmakers acknowledging the broad acceptance of the film not only by audiences, but among religious and a philosophical groups.

God, Complex?

We first meet a Phil Connors who is in charge of his world — looming large, blowing clouds around on a TV weather map of the Eastern Seaboard. A perfect job for a control-obsessed loner with a god complex. What makes this one of my favorite character introductions is our ability to see the blank blue screen, revealing the truth he hopes to hide: the world he controls is empty, and he inhabits it alone.




When a blizzard he prescribed for XX dumps snow on the highway back to Pittsburgh, Phil confronts a policeman and reveals his god complex:



Bill Murray Gets Out of Van In Snow Talks to Cop



Weather Prediction: This Is Pitiful




Jeopardy Scene



First Scene With Ned



Hustling Nancy Taylor




Phil Kindnaps Groundhog



Beidtime Monlogue




Final Scene With Ned








The success of the story owes much to Bill Murray's career transition from playing lovable underdogs (Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters) to lovable misanthropes (Scrooged, What About Bob?, Quick Change). We've seen him put through tortuous paces and learn important lessons in previous films. Yet in Groundhog it feels like we follow Murray into a deeper, darker hole than in previous efforts, and his emergence

Delicatessen

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Written by Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Directed by Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet Release Dates: France 1991, USA 1992

The High: Delicatessen takes place in one location, a tenement building, in a future where animals are scarce and carnivores are desperate. A brutish butcher is the landlord, and his are party to (and often victim of) his deadly measures to get fresh meat.

The Low: Our diminutive protagonist, Luison (Dominique Pinion) a circus performer mourning the death of his performing partner, a chimp called Mr. Livingstone. He answers an ad put out by the butcher seeking a handyman and is hired on the spot.

By the end of 1980's, Earth's dystopian future (or alternate present) had been presented ad nauseam in science-fiction, with films such as Planet of the Apes, Fahrenheit 451, Blade Runner and the Mad Max series. This setting even proved succuessful backdrop for comedy in Woody Allen's Sleeper. Leave it to the French to use such a setting for the back-drop to a dark romantic comedy. It's never been done successfully unless you include the director-boycotted Love Conquers All edit of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Irony aside, there's no question as to why Terry Gilliam helped introduce Delicatessen to American audiences. It's dark tone, anti-authoritarian themes and visual slapstick are blood-relatives to Gilliam's Monty Python cutout animations.

I'm looking at Delicatessen from a high/low concept standpoint, but audiences at the time had no frame of reference for this French export. It was certainly nothing like the romantic, soft-lit Merchant-Ivory fare that had become synonymous with foreign film. And the trailer didn't help; trailers are often cut to condense a film into a simple marketing statement. The theatrical preview for Delicatessen offered no handy genre labels, but presented the film's setting and comic absurdity as bait for adventurous viewers:



The opening sequence introduces the desolate location, the antagonist and sets the cartoonishly menacing tone for the film:

The opening also establishes the building's resonant plumbing, which serves to connect the lives of the colorful residents of the tenement house. A unifying location is a common element of High/Low concept stories, and many successful comedies. Like Punxatawny, PA in Groundhog Day, the location and the ensemble provide much of the charm and intrigue of this often dark film.

The ensemble and the world also provide the protagonist with varying points of view on the conflict, and provide the "why we fight" of the story. In Delicatessen the building's above-ground residents — including the butcher's daughter and lover — are resigned to their fate to as dinner. Yet beneath the surface the Troglodystes live in a darker world with a brighter outlook — we don't have to dine on our neighbor to survive.

The protagonist, Luison, helps create harmony in the brutal world he encounters. He's somewhere between Sam Lowry in Brazil and Jacques Tati; a straight-faced clown, forced into the role of rebel. And regardless of his small stature and quiet demeanor, he brings magic to the story through circus tricks and his biggest feat — optimism among the bleak surroundings.


Click the link for the "Bubble Scene."

What's a high/low comedy without a signature tune? Truly, Madly, Deeply makes great use of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio; "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paginini" is on loop in Groundhog Day. In this picture it's "Duo" (with cello and saw). A charming tune that appears during the b-story and the end to breathe love and hope into the proceedings.


Click the link for the First Date/Duet scene.

Ultimately, love and our hero win out over cynicism and carnivorous Darwinism. With the help of even smaller characters, Les Troglodistes, Luison finds courage within himself to defeat the brutish landlord Clapet and open his heart to his daughter, Julie. The final

Final Duet

Truly, Madly, Deeply

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Written/Directed by Anthony Minghella Release Dates: England 1990, USA 1991

The Low: Nina (Juliet Stevenson) can't advance beyond debilitating grief for her partner Jamie (Alan Rickman), who passed suddenly.

The High: She is overjoyed when he magically returns, before re-discovering the imperfections which existed within their relationship. This clarity, coupled with the potential romance of another (living!) suitor, allows her to move on and enjoy her most precious gift: life.

I think I first viewed this film on VHS around 1993 and it took the wind out of me. It was released the same year as Ghost and was often referred to as the English version of that weeper. The circumstances are similar, but they're two totally different movies. Where Ghost is ultimately a crime drama with comic and romantic overtones...an enjoyable weepfest with broad comic turns from Whoopi Goldberg, Truly, Madly, Deeply is a romantic dramedy, with sparkling dialogue and painfully spot-on observations on the imperfections of love and lovers. Ghost's lovers are beautiful with perfect abs and a romance captured in amber. Truly, Madly, Deeply features pale, sneezing Brits who laugh a lot and bicker more, aspiring to harmony but achieving discord or an occasional truce.

Anthony Minghella is purported to have written Truly, Madly, Deeply for Juliet Stevenson, and although I admire her dramatic chops and vulnerable portrayal, I never related to her. For me, it is Alan Rickman who makes every part of this film work. In fact, his gravitas allows the very premise to succeed. The filmmakers need never explain how Jamie has re-entered Nina's world — whether through some supernatural circumstance or psychological episode — because Rickman plays the character with such humorous entitlement; he's there because he chooses to be. Any questions? Didn't think so!

And were Minghella to try any typical ghost-story stuff — should Nina push her hand though Jamie like Ghost's green-screened wraiths — it would have been an indignity to the character and scattered the fragile vapor of the film's lesson about grief; those we love deeply and lose quickly remain painfully real to us.

As in movies musical, high/low concept storytelling frequently capitalizes on suspension of logic to let songs communicate feeling. I'm thinking of "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paginini" in Groundhog Day, or "Duo" (with cello and saw) in Delicatessen. Another odd similarity between Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply are their effective uses of sixties' pop ballads. In this celebritory moment, musicians Nina and Jamie reunite in the flesh and in song:



Minghella mines moments both high and low in the dialogue; it is in turns heartbreakingly beautiful and refreshingly mundane. The High: a gut-wrenching monologue Rickman delivers about watching parents at a playground react to a placque dedicated to a deceased child. The Low: An ongoing competition of lover's wordplay between our main characters which provides the film's title. It also gives insight to the often combatative bickering that we learn caused friction in their relationship. What would you argue about with a ghost? Heaven and hell? No! Central heating.



In high/low concept, the problems the protagnist encounters in the magical premise reveal the importance of the mundane. Nina has come down from the high of reuniting with her lost lover, and experiences the hangover of reality; she and Jamie were a bad couple, incompatible in nearly every aspect. And Jamie was imperfect, selfish and neurotic. The film's climax in this scene is so powerful because of a shift in point of view from Nina to Jamie, in which his true motives are revealed.

The working title for Truly, Madly, Deeply was 'Cello', a reference not only to the instrument Rickman plays within the film, but also to the Italian word for heaven. And after the scene above, we recognize Jamie not as a ghost, but an angel, more akin to Damiel of Wim Wender's Wings Of Desire than Sam in Ghost.

And like many high/low concept films, we see that the magic of the premise is a MacGuffin. Neither film is about an encounter with the afterlife, they're about the importance of loving in this life. And whereas Ghost has a very American revenge sub-plot, in which the death of the new lover/antagonist provides closure, Truly, Madly, Deeply views Nina's new romance as a return to the world of the living.

Minghella passed suddenly himself in 2008 after a short but deeply impactful feature film career. Here Alan Rickman is asked about working with the filmmaker and the longevity of Truly, Madly, Deeply.

Sample

View on IMDB Watch on iTunes Buy from Amazon

Written by Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Directed by Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet Release Dates: France 1991, USA 1992

The High: Delicatessen takes place in one location, a tenement building, in a future where animals are scarce and carnivores are desperate. A brutish butcher is the landlord, and his are party to (and often victim of) his deadly measures to get fresh meat.

The Low: Our diminutive protagonist, Luison (Dominique Pinion) a circus performer mourning the death of his performing partner, a chimp called Mr. Livingstone. He answers an ad put out by the butcher seeking a handyman and is hired on the spot.

By the end of 1980's, Earth's dystopian future (or alternate present) had been presented ad nauseam in science-fiction, with films such as Planet of the Apes, Fahrenheit 451, Blade Runner and the Mad Max series. This setting even proved succuessful backdrop for comedy in Woody Allen's Sleeper. Leave it to the French to use such a setting for the back-drop to a dark romantic comedy. It's never been done successfully unless you include the director-boycotted Love Conquers All edit of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Irony aside, there's no question as to why Terry Gilliam helped introduce Delicatessen to American audiences. It's dark tone, anti-authoritarian themes and visual slapstick are blood-relatives to Gilliam's Monty Python cutout animations.

I'm looking at Delicatessen from a high/low concept standpoint, but audiences at the time had no frame of reference for this French export. It was certainly nothing like the romantic, soft-lit Merchant-Ivory fare that had become synonymous with foreign film. And the trailer didn't help; trailers are often cut to condense a film into a simple marketing statement. The theatrical preview for Delicatessen offered no handy genre labels, but presented the film's setting and comic absurdity as bait for adventurous viewers:



The opening sequence introduces the desolate location, the antagonist and sets the cartoonishly menacing tone for the film:



The opening also establishes the building's resonant plumbing, which serves to connect the lives of the colorful residents of the tenement house. A unifying location is a common element of High/Low concept stories, and many successful comedies. Like Punxatawny, PA in Groundhog Day, the location and the ensemble provide much of the charm and intrigue of this often dark film.

The ensemble and the world also provide the protagonist with varying points of view on the conflict, and provide the "why we fight" of the story. In Delicatessen the building's above-ground residents — including the butcher's daughter and lover — are resigned to their fate to as dinner. Yet beneath the surface the Troglodystes live in a darker world with a brighter outlook — we don't have to dine on our neighbor to survive.

The protagonist, Luison, helps create harmony in the brutal world he encounters. He's somewhere between Sam Lowry in Brazil and Jacques Tati; a straight-faced clown, forced into the role of rebel. And regardless of his small stature and quiet demeanor, he brings magic to the story through circus tricks and his biggest feat — optimism among the bleak surroundings.


Click the link for the "Bubble Scene."

What's a high/low comedy without a signature tune? Truly, Madly, Deeply makes great use of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio; "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paginini" is on loop in Groundhog Day. In this picture it's "Duo" (with cello and saw). A charming tune that appears during the b-story and the end to breathe love and hope into the procedings.


Click the link for the First Date/Duet scene.


Cello/Saw Duet



Final Duet