If Ghost, Ghostbusters and Men in Black had a baby

Yes, I know three distinct entities cannot have a baby. But just go with me on this for the purposes of this post.

With another night gone without a call in the presidential election, and having already had a tentative celebration movie the night before, I was kind of at loose ends last night in terms of what to watch.

I started with the Amazon movie The Vast of Night, about which I've heard good things. But about six minutes of this movie told me that the distinct rhythms of its dialogue, and its tendency to compliment its audience for its ability to keep up, were just not something my mind could handle in its current state of exhaustion and distraction.

So I watched R.I.P.D. instead.

I cannot figure out any way that watching R.I.P.D. is somehow symbolic of being in the middle of an undecided election. So I'll just tell you what I did glean from it.

R.I.P.D. is a pretty hilarious example of the "elevator pitch movie," which I'm defining as a movie whose premise can be easily summarized in the time it takes to ride up in an elevator with an important studio executive. Often these use the "meets" structure. My favorite example of the "meets" structure is actually a TV show, not a movie, and googling it now, I can't even find the name of the show. But it was about a hospital in space, and I always thought it would have been pitched as "ER meets Star Trek." (Both references, I suppose, are a bit dated nowadays.) 

 "R.I.P.D. is Ghostbusters meets Men in Black," but there's a third comp you can add: Ghost.

Spoilers to follow about all four movies.

The Ghostbusters part is pretty obvious. For starters, it's about specially trained people who try to rid their city (in this case Boston, not New York) of the mischief of ghosts. They themselves are also ghosts, but that's not an important difference. They use special weapons to dispel the ghosts, and much hilarity ensues. In both instances the plot is also moving toward a big rooftop ceremony in which a much larger population of ghosts could be unleashed into the world. The clouds even part and turn into a cyclone of sorts in both movies. 

The Men in Black part is also obvious, maybe in part because Men in Black also sort of resembles Ghostbusters. We're introduced to a world behind the world we can see in which agents are defending normal people from a danger that's just out of view, and trying to make sure the normal people don't become aware of anything they are doing. The agents in both cases are a seasoned, crotchety veteran and our surrogate, who is the new recruit. They travel around the city, shake down informats, and end up having skirmishes that get out of control and threaten to blow the lid off the whole thing.

The unexpected comparison, though, is Ghost. In both movies, the protagonist is killed either directly or indirectly by a shady partner who has a shady financial scheme in mind. The ghost protagonist walks around helplessly witnessing the movements of the deceitful partner, especially as he appears to put the moves on the protagonist's grieving girlfriend/widow. The protagonist also tries to communicate with/connect with his grieving girlfriend/widow through a surrogate body, in this case that of an older Chinese man, rather than Whoopi Goldberg.

What does it all add up to?

Two stars. 

It's not great. It's not terrible. But it's probably more terrible than great.

And soon, hopefully we'll finally be saying R.I.P.D. -- rest in peace Don, at least to your presidency. 

Hey, I found the connection! 

Thirty years since I saw Ghost on the road with my mom

I didn't expect to write another remembrance of my mom today, or at least, I had a different kind of remembrance that I thought I'd write rather than this one, which will now probably come tomorrow.

In fact, after I finished writing yesterday's post, I almost went back to edit it to include the story I'm about to relate. In the end, I decided just to leave it as is.

But then Saturday night, after my wife and I watched a show together and were heading toward our separate entertainment options for the night, I hopped on our streaming service Stan, not knowing what I was going to watch. I decided to jump into the Trending Movies section, and there it was, trending for no particular reason I can think of: Ghost.

It seemed like a sure sign that there was one more film story about my mom that was left to be told.

I ended up watching Ghost, just as I did back in the summer of 1990 with my mom. That first viewing came on a road trip to see colleges. I had thought that we took the trip during the academic year, and maybe we did. But the movie came out on July 13th of that year. So either our trip was actually in the summer, or the movie was such a hit that it stayed until theaters until September or October. I guess at that time, I might not yet have been seeking out as a matter of course those hit movies that remained in theaters for four or five months.

We lived in the Boston area, but there were a handful of schools I wanted to visit in New York, in Pennsylvania, and as far away as Kenyon College in Ohio. We took a road trip that lasted five or six days. I'd say we split the driving, but I would have only just gotten my license within the past six months, possibly even less depending on when the trip actually was. So in reality, she probably did most if not all of it.

There were some funny stories from that trip. One involved a tour at, I believe, The Rochester Institute of Technology, which was always an unlikely fit for me as I intended to be an English major. We sat in on a slide show before going on the tour, but I had to go #2 in the middle of the slide show. I guess I didn't know how close it was to the end, so I kind of took my sweet time on the toilet as I am sometimes wont to do. When I emerged, I realized everyone had been waiting for me so they could start the tour proper -- God, it might have been ten minutes they were waiting. Embarrassing as hell, but my mom and I were soon laughing about it. We joked that we should make sure we ask, on every future college tour, if they had bathrooms. (Weirdly, this story came up organically when talking to my wife on Saturday night, in a context completely unrelated to Ghost -- my son had had a similar thing happen when we were visiting friends earlier in the day.)

Then there was the incident on our way home, when we stopped in Western Mass for the afternoon. I had been working on a scrap book and photo album from our most recent visit to the island conference center off the coast of New Hampshire, Star Island, that was so near and dear to my heart. Wanting to spend some more time on it, I sequestered myself in a small room on the second floor of a historic library in the town where we stopped. The librarians forgot I was there and closed the library at 5 o'clock without knowing I was still inside. When I tried to leave and stepped outside the room, it triggered an alarm. The police came and everything.

But the story I want to recount today has no funny details, no Seinfeldian moments of embarrassment or misunderstanding. It was simply our chosen evening activity on one of the nights of the trip. We were in another small town, I think it was in New York, and there was a movie theater in the town. I can't remember if we had choices or if it was just one of those single-screen theaters that have since pretty much disappeared from the landscape, even before COVID but especially now. Ghost was either our only option or one of just a couple, and we went to the 9 o'clock show.

Simply put, I thought it might have been just about the greatest movie I'd ever seen.

I think there was something symbolic about the effect Ghost had on me. It was one of the first movies I remember being really moved by. I think I cried at a couple different junctures -- probably the same junctures that teared me up on Saturday night -- which would have also been a first or a near first for me. It may have been the first time that a romance touched me the way this one did.

The symbolic thing about it was that on this trip, I was planning my future. I was figuring out where I might spend the next four years of my life, after finishing my senior year that is. As it turned out, I ended up in Maine for college, but I didn't know that at the time. At the time, this was a preview of my young adulthood, and my mature emotional response to Ghost was there to usher me into it.

I don't think it's possible my mom loved Ghost as much as I did, but I do think it was a big win for her too. I remember her specifically mentioning the part at the end where the receding shape of Patrick Swayze's Sam Wheat begins intermingling with the other beings of white light, standing in a welcoming line, until he is indistinguishable from them.

I'm not a particularly religious person, but I believe in the wonder of the unknown enough to think that my mom could have had a similar experience to Sam Wheat this past Monday.

Although this might have just been a one-off nice memory for me and my mom, it ended up being something larger than that in the long-term effect on the way I watch movies. And I'm not just talking about the part of me that grew up while watching that movie, the part that, in some way, start to grapple with mortality.

No, I think our Ghost viewing became a standard that I keep trying to attain to this day. Since that day, I go out of my way to see a movie when I'm out of town, when I'm on vacation, when I'm on a business trip. There's something about seeing a movie away from home that makes you remember the experience. And I think I'm still chasing the high of that night my mom and I saw Ghost, in a small town in New York, probably at a single-screen theater, in August -- yes, August it was -- of 1990.

That was 30 years ago. And 30 years is an important number for my mom and me. My mom was almost exactly 30 years older than I am, as she was born in October of 1943 and I was born in October of 1973. Our birthdays are only a week apart.

Gone are the days that I'm 30 years younger than my mom. She's no longer aging while I continue to do so. I've already gotten closer to her age by almost a week. One day, if I'm lucky, I will surpass her 76+ years.

So she was the age I am now when she saw Ghost with me. It's kind of profound to think about. She got a bit of a head start on me in the parenting department, as she had a 16-year-old when she was 46, and my oldest turns ten in August. Who knows, maybe his birthday on August 25th was the same day we saw Ghost.

Which makes for another interesting coincidence. The last time I saw part of Ghost -- which would have been my sixth or seventh viewing, had it been completed -- was when we were in the hospital in 2010, in August, waiting to be discharged. In other words, 20 years after August of 1990. It was the movie we were halfway through on the hospital TV when the doctor finally signed on the dotted line.

The reason we were there?

The birth of that very same son who turns ten in August.

Circle of life, I tell ya.

I don't really believe in signs, but stumbling across Ghost on Stan on Saturday night may have been one.

The universe delivers you what you need, especially when you're mourning. And on Saturday night, I needed to see Sam Wheat become indistinguishable from those other beings of white light.

Let's get it right, people

You might have noticed a change in the right column of this blog.

Actually, of course you didn't, because the thing that changed is so ridiculous that no one but me would notice it. Because, for one thing, it's in a part of the blog I abandoned long ago.

What it is is: A change has occurred in my top 20 films on Flickchart.

Only because I forced it to, though, really.

I wouldn't blame you if you stopped looking at that top 20 list long ago. Not only has it not changed in something like two years, maybe longer, but the bigger problem is this:

It's not really reflective of what I think my top 20 should look like. Not entirely, anyway.

It may be fitting that the film that dropped a notch on the list is the one that would probably earn me the most flak: Ghost. Clearly, I love Ghost and think it's a movie worth defending, but my 13th favorite movie of all time? That may be a stretch.

Well, now it's #14, thanks to Donnie Darko beating it.

I'll tell you what happened, but first I've got to tell you a little bit about Flickchart, if you don't know.

Flickchart (www.flickchart.com) is a social media movie website that allows you to rank films against each other with the aim of comprising a list of your favorite films of all time. Actually, you don't just get your favorite films -- you get your favorite all the way down to your least favorite. That's what I've been doing in my year-end movie ranking lists since the mid-1990s, so it was no surprise I was drawn to the format. How do you do it? You engage in a limitless set of duels between a pair of movies, simply deciding which one you like better. Flickchart tabulates it and gives you a list of your movies from your favorite to your least favorite, which gets more accurate the more duels you complete. Every time one lower movie beats a higher movie, it jumps up to that spot and pushes the loser of the duel down one spot. In about six months I'll have been using the site for five years.

The problem is, when I reloaded my rankings from scratch a couple years ago, to get a more accurate list than the one I had at that time, the results of that reload seemed sacrosanct to me. After that I wanted only to duel films in the Your Movies -> Your Whole Chart filter, so my #2 movie of all time might just as likely come up against my #3 movie as my #2875 movie.

This, however, is not a productive way to get any movement. If I wanted to shake up the top 20 that came out of that reload project -- a top 20 that was a product of how I was feeling about those movies at that moment -- I'd have to wait not only until two movies in my top 20 came up against each other, but until they were the right two movies to have a lower one defeat a higher one, and therefore take its place. It might take forever.

But my rigid, pure sense that I needed to rank only in the Your Movies -> Your Whole Chart filter, so that any moving of films on my list would be completely organic and not engineered by me, was holding me back. It was permitting me to continue assigning artificial holiness to a group of 20 films that may not really represent me, the movie fan I am right now, in 2014.

So I'm changing the filter.

Now as I rank, I'm ranking in gradually more specific filters until I get all the way to that hallowed top 20. First I rank in the Top 3000 filter. When I get a change there, then I rank the Top 2000 filter. Change there, then it's Top 1000. Change there, then it's Top 500. And so on through 250, 100, 50 and finally top 20.

Now, movies like Ghost will have to prove they truly belong by beating some hungry competition.

Having a list of wrong movies up there only because I'm structured and uptight about the purity of my lists is really not serving anyone. Plus it's telling people that only one of my top 20 films of all time was made before 1975, and that's just not the case. (At least I hope it isn't. It's what I aim to find out as I continue forward.)

So ingrained am I in my ways, though, that I was sure ranking in the Top 20 filter would yield no changes. When you're so familiar with what goes where, it can be hard to conduct a duel based solely on the quality of the films. You know what's currently ranked higher, and you know you can maintain the status quo just by clicking that movie to win.

What's different now, though, is that I'm sick of the status quo.

And lo and behold, after about ten duels without a change, Donnie Darko came up against Ghost. And I said "By golly, Ghost does not deserve to be one spot higher than Donnie Darko." (The duel screen doesn't show you current rankings, but I knew them by heart.) Now, it no longer is.

Is my goal to keep pushing Ghost downward until its out of my top 20? It's hard to say. It's hard to say what my intentions are, in fact, except to force myself to revisit these decisions I made a couple years ago, and decide if I'd make them the same way again today.

And there will be the opportunity for other movies to jump into that top 20, as well, which is probably the most exciting part. Not while I'm dueling in the Top 20 filter, mind you, because all those duels are between films that are already in my top 20. But when I'm dueling my top 50 or my top 100, a film in the top 20 could easily come up against a lower film that's gunning for it mightily. It'll be up to that top 20 movie to prove it really deserves to occupy such rarified territory on my list.

All I can do is try to get it right, people. So I say, let's do just that.