THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Production Hell — Groundhog Day. 

No doubt, the movie was the very definition of “production hell,” so much so that Bill Murray ended his longtime friendship with director Harold Ramis before the shoot was even over. But whatever the hell of making it, the results showed luminously on the screen.

QED: Jonah Goldberg from 2006 on Groundhog Day: A Movie For All Time. “When I set out to write this article, I thought it’d be fun to do a quirky homage to an offbeat flick, one I think is brilliant as both comedy and moral philosophy. But while doing what I intended to be cursory research–how much reporting do you need for a review of a twelve-year-old movie that plays constantly on cable?–I discovered that I wasn’t alone in my interest. In the years since its release the film has been taken up by Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and followers of the oppressed Chinese Falun Gong movement. Meanwhile, the Internet brims with weighty philosophical treatises on the deep Platonist, Aristotelian, and existentialist themes providing the skin and bones beneath the film’s clown makeup. On National Review Online’s group blog, The Corner, I asked readers to send in their views on the film. Over 200 e-mails later I had learned that countless professors use it to teach ethics and a host of philosophical approaches. Several pastors sent me excerpts from sermons in which Groundhog Day was the central metaphor. And dozens of committed Christians of all denominations related that it was one of their most cherished movies.”