![]() Comedically-speaking, it mostly works, vaguely arrogant as it is. Early on, and especially here, Murray’s aloofness is more like an impenetrable shell. It wasn’t until his slightly melancholy interior began to seep through his blasé exterior and humanized the whole that he developed the range we know and love him for now. “It’s just not that cute anymore,” John’s girlfriend tells him.Ĭarefully maintained insouciance has been Bill Murray’s calling card basically since the beginning of his career, but he was still limited as an actor at this stage. Murray’s model girlfriend, played by Roberta Leighton, shows up just long enough to walk around their apartment topless (most of the reason female characters exist in this movie) before breaking up with John on account of he’s too much of an incorrigible slacker. Stripes stars Murray and Ramis as John and Russell, two buddies living in New York City, working as a cab driver and an English-as-a-second-language teacher, respectively. For me it’s a bit of both sometimes it feels like they were onto something, other times it just feels like they were just on something. It’s of a piece with boomer comedy touchstones like Animal House and Caddyshack : whether you find them subversively anarchic or just sort of half-assed is sort of in the eye of the beholder. The project was rejiggered for Murray and Ramis, who don’t especially seem like weed guys, though the finished product retains in many ways the feel of a loosey-goosey stoner comedy. According to Reitman, the script for Stripes began as an idea for “Cheech and Chong Join The Army.” Reitman sold it as such, but Cheech and Chong themselves ended up wanting too much creative control. In Stripes, Murray was famous, but still more of a “star in the making.” Initially, it wasn’t even written as a Murray vehicle. Thompson mythos that probably came out a decade too early. Before that, his cinematic output was decidedly mixed, with movies like Meatballs in 1978 (barely watchable today) and Where The Buffalo Roam in 1980, Murray’s weird, bad take on the Hunter S. Ghostbusters was probably the turning point, with Murray fully coming into his own in the late 80s/early 90s, with the string of Scrooged (1988), What About Bob? (1991), and Groundhog Day (1993). But is it more than a boob movie?īill Murray and Harold Ramis headlined in an era before Bill Murray had fully emerged as a movie star. ![]() Certainly, it’s a classic boob movie for boys of a certain era. ![]() Under the circumstances, rewatching Stripes in 2021 is at least partly an anthropological endeavor. Stripes existed more for me as a “boob movie” than a comedy, joining Revenge Of The Nerds on the list of “VHS tapes to put on when the parents were distracted” and emblematic of an era when comedy and full frontal nudity were strangely inextricable (almost certainly the legacy of the National Lampoon, the dominant comedic force of the era). ![]() It’s been eclipsed in the cultural memory even by its SNL-vehicle peers of the same era - Animal House (1978), Caddyshack (1980), Blues Brothers (1980) National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), and Ghostbusters (1984). Ivan Reitman’s Stripes recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with a limited run in select theaters, which was my initial excuse for a rewatch, though it turned out to be relevant in other ways.Īdmittedly, Stripes isn’t a movie that I’ve thought about much in the four decades since its release. ![]()
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