ghost town

I was trying to download Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town, and accidentally ended up with American director's Steven Kroepp's 2008 Ghost Town, starring Ricky Gervais, Téa Leoni and Greg Kinnear. I was skipping through the file (I admit, I mostly bit torrent stuff now, the cultural equivalent to pirating... we can talk about the pros and cons of this somewhere else..) and got SUCKED in. Ricky Gervais, who most know from the British sitcom comedy series The Office, was unrecognizable to me, both because I don't really watch The Office, and also because, according to the avid The Office watcher, James, he looks pretty different in this. It's a smart, laugh-out-loud-funny mainstream Hollywood film. I can't remember the last time I watched one of those... maybe As Good As It Gets? But Ricky Gervais is funnier than Jack Nicholson. Ghost Town features a similar hopelessly misanthropic, obsessive compulsive middle-aged man who is transformed into a begrudging samaritan by an unconventionally charming love interest. There is a spiritual twist here- apparently if any of your survivors have unfinished business with you, your ghost will be condemned to an indefinite permeable existence in the clothes you died in until that business is finished. This system is based on an expiring notion in Hollywood, as sufficiently displayed in Ghost, or Field of Dreams, and sort of in City of Angels. The kind of completely banal see-through existence of the dead is a familiar archetype- I just also thought of Will Self's London neighborhood of the dead in his collection of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. It is somehow comforting and the opposite of the horror genre that when we die, we go on with our everyday purgatory of daily mundane life, only invisible to the living.

The anti-hero, Bertram Pincus, played by Ricky Gervais, is a thoroughly anti-social dentist who dies for seven minutes during a routine colonoscopy, and comes to with the ability to see all the ghosts who inhabit Manhattan. This would be overly hokey if acted by most, but Gervais manages to act out this gimmicky premise with a mixture of deadpan skepticism and dead-on irony. Complementing him is a former couple, Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni, one dead, one alive, who needs Dr Pincus' intervention to move on, he to the sweet thereafter and the other with her life. I do wish that Gwen (Téa Leoni's character), a smart, sexy archaeologist weren't so totally defined by the men in her life, as usual, but this is written by the guy who wrote Mission: Impossible and Spider Man, after all. Taking that into account, this is a nice detour from his usual fare of testosterone driven action film.