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! 

The eccentric geniality of Rip Torn

Rip Torn made his name as a dramatic actor. I didn’t know many, or possibly any, of those roles.

No, I knew Rip Torn as a genial and eccentric afterlife attorney in Albert Brooks’ 1991 comedy Defending Your Life, one of my top 30 films of all time.

Whether that was his typical role or not, it became my model for the charismatic actor who left us at age 88 on Tuesday.

There’s something so adorably odd in the way Torn first greets Brooks’ Daniel Miller, who’s fresh off the boat, as it were, in the afterlife after dying in a car accident. Because of the way Bob Diamond (Torn) has progressed past his earthly incarnation to use 52% of his brain (most humans use only three), he has no way to interact with Daniel that isn’t grinningly condescending. But he doesn’t mean it to be; he just thinks that life (or, afterlife) is a hoot.

Daniel has a series of incredulous questions, but Bob answers them through frustrating non-answers, sometimes looking at him too long, sometimes pausing. It would be unnerving if you were Daniel. If you’re the audience, it’s hilarious, and it’s inimitable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another actor pull off quite the sort of affect that Torn gives us in this terrific first interview, and then throughout the rest of the movie. He’s just a blissful glad-hander who can’t really relate to a regular human, but he doesn’t mean any offense by it.

Torn brought a similar set of traits to his other most iconic role, at least as far as I am concerned, in Men in Black. As Zed, he treats Will Smith’s J with the same kind of back-clapping, condescending, paternalistic enthusiasm, which Smith finds so exasperating. There’s a whole running bit where he’s always calling J “champ” or “sport” or something of that nature. He might have used the same terms of endearment toward Daniel Miller.

Scanning his filmography, I noticed I happen to have been in Torn’s presence on screen a fair bit recently. Two of my last ten rewatches were Hercules and Marie Antoinette, in which he plays supporting roles. They’re actually similar roles as he plays King Louis XV and Zeus. Both paternalistic, both given to a fair bit of grinning and infectious enthusiasm.

In 2010 Torn took a public turn for the crazier when he was arrested after breaking into a bank after hours while carrying a gun and while extremely intoxicated. This saddened me, because it’s not what Bob Diamond or Zed would have done. I could see both guys enjoying a good drink, but they’d make merry with it. They’d wrap their arm around your shoulder and drop some kind of odd duck comment that made you laugh out loud.

Because he had such a paternalistic nature to him, and because he was already 60 years old when I first met him in Defending Your Life, I never really knew Torn as a young man. Yet I was still surprised to learn he was 88 when he died. Of course that age would make sense for him, but I think it speaks more to the fact that I hadn’t mentally prepared myself to be done with Rip Torn. Even though it had been a decade since I’d made note of any new film appearances from him, I think there was always a part of me that expected one more Bob Diamond or one more Zed to come forth from him before he left us.

R.I.P. Rip.