Harold Ramis

Where Stuart Saves His Family had scored with critics and bombed with the masses, Ramis' next film, the Michael Keaton \comedy Multiplicity, did almost the exact opposite. Generally regarded as only a mediocre effort by the press, audiences seemed to enjoy the idea of multiple Keatons and the film performed fairly well at the box office. It seemed that Ramis was a director in need of balancing critical and mass reception, and with his next film he seemed to do just that. An inventive \comedy that paired Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal as a troubled mob boss and his tentative psychiatrist respectively, Analyze This seemed to get a fair shake from just about everybody. As one of DeNiro's first straight \comedies, audiences had a cathartic blast watching him gleefully deconstruct the hardened, fearsome persona he had been perfecting since the early days of his career. Ramis next stepped behind the camera for Bedazzled - a remake of the beloved Dudley Moore/Peter Cooke \comedy classic. Unfortunately the film proved to be one of the director's biggest failures to date. Opting next to stick with more familiar, but again not altogether original ground, Ramis headed up the sequel to Analyze This - amusingly titled Analyze That - in 2002. Though it may not have been the most necessary sequel in the history of film, fans were generally pleased and the film proved a moderate success.
Sure all of Ramis' work as a director left little time for other endeavors, but the busy filmmaker somehow found time to serve as a producer on many of his own projects (in addition to such non-Ramis directed films as The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest) as well as step in front of the camera for such efforts as As Good As It Gets (1997) and Orange County (2002). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide