A Quantum of Solace (2008) ***

It’s nice to know there are some things in this world you can count on. The James Bond formula is one of them. Start with the opening credits over some lame, mildly titillating graphics, then kick the movie off immediately with an action sequence. Then Bond reports to M for some gentle scolding about “crossing the line,” and we’re off on another disposable adventure with Agent 007 and some nifty gadgets. It took me a while to get around to this latest (and so far last) installment, but there’s really no urgency to this sort of thing. It isn’t like people I know are going to be talking about the movie and ruin the plot for me!

Truth is, it’s a waste of time to summarize the plot of a Bond film. Suffice to say that Daniel Craig is once again ruggedly handsome and sufficiently deadly as 007. I really do like his hard-edged take on Bond, and I hope he will get to do a couple more of the films. The action in “Quantum of Solace” is pretty much standard-issue Bond. There’s a car chase, boat chase, plane chase, you get the picture. They don’t waste a lot of time on fancy gadgets in this one, which is refreshing. Bond just relies on his wits, his gun, his fists, and his cellphone. For Bond girls this go-round we get Gemma Arterton, who is rather uninspiring as Strawberry Fields, although she does meet her end in a very nice homage to an earlier Bond film. Fortunately, the main Bond-babe is the amazing-looking Olga Kurylenko, who tints her skin to play a part-Latina assassin.

One disappointment about the modern-day Bond movies is the lack of memorable villains. From the Timothy Dalton movies on, I can’t name or describe a single bad guy. I generally just recall a bunch of vaguely greasy characters involved in things like terrorism, environmental degradation, or global corporate conspiracies. Yawn. Give me a one-eyed guy with a cat any day. Even better, give me Goldfinger, the best Bond villain ever.

For a while it looked like financial problems at MGM might make this the last Bond movie, at least for a while. Fortunately, a deal with Sony has resurrected the series, with the next movie release planned for 2012. Will they finally create a villain half as interesting as Daniel Craig’s Bond? We should be so lucky.

3 stars.

The Switch (2010) ***

Sometimes it pays to listen to the critics, and sometimes it pays to listen to a second opinion. I completely wrote this movie off back when I saw the trailer for it. It looked like just another lame, romantic comedy, and critics didn‘t seem to care much for it when it was in theatres. Also, the premise: a guy hijacks his female friend’s artificial insemination, seemed too similar to some Jennifer Lopez movie that was also getting advertised back then. Fast forward to the present, when this movie, and all other movies dealing with artificial insemination, have been relegated to history. The DVD section of Entertainment Weekly had a good review of the DVD, suggesting that it is an overlooked gem, so my wife convinced me to give it a try. It turns out this really is a fun, little comedy.

Jason Bateman plays Wally, basically the same likeable, slightly awkward character that Bateman always plays, maybe a little more misanthropic and neurotic this time around. He is secretly in love with his best friend, Kassie (Jennifer Aniston), but lacks the walnuts to make a move. Instead he hangs out in the “friend zone” while they both suffer through one failed relationship after another, until Kassie decides to have a baby via artificial insemination. Rather than just having the procedure done in a doctor’s office, Kassie throws a party, where everyone gets to meet the handsome, Viking-like donor, Roland (Patric Wilson). A mixture of alcohol and Xanax puts Wally in a position to “accidentally” pour out Roland’s sperm sample, then replace it with his own. Thanks to the roofie-like effect of the Xanax, Wally remembers nothing the next day.

Thinking that New York might be a tough place to raise her son, Kassie moves back to the mid-west, leaving Wally to continue his string of doomed romances. When she moves back to NYC a few years later, Wally is delighted to meet her son, whose odd quirks seem hauntingly familiar. Meanwhile, Kassie strikes up a relationship with Roland, whom she believes to be the father of her son. Hilarity ensues, along a surprisingly tasteful helping of real emotion.

While there are some good laughs in “The Switch,“ it’s the emotional side that elevates the film beyond it’s hackneyed premise. Jason Bateman may not have the greatest dramatic range, but he has a genuineness that plays really well here. His interactions with his son, Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) hinge on the fact that Sebastian is rather precocious and doesn’t like being talked down to, while Wally probably wouldn’t know how to patronize a little kid even if he needed to. Here’s one classic piece of father-son dialogue:

Wally: So, how do you like your new school?
Sebastian: How come everybody asks me that?
Wally: Because you’re a kid. There’s nothing else to talk about.

Jennifer Aniston is also surprisingly good in this role. I’ve always found her quite charming, but pretty bland as an actress, but she really brings some personality to the role of Kassie.

“The Switch” is as formulaic as you might expect, and certainly not the best romantic comedy ever, but good acting saves the day. Your life won’t be missing anything if you don’t manage to rent it, but it is worth a watch if you get the chance.

3 stars out of 5

Kick-Ass (2010) ****

It’s a good question, really. With all the fans of superhero comics out there, why doesn’t anyone ever put on a costume and go out to fight crime? This is the question posed by Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), the quiet high-school student who is the protagonist of “Kick-Ass.” Sick of being preyed on by local thugs, Dave buys a colorful diving suit, a mask, and a nightstick, then proceeds to get his ass handed to him by a couple of hoodlums and a hit-and-run driver. This would discourage most people, but Dave is motivated by something that I think many of us have felt: He is sick of seeing assholes prey on the weak while everyone else turns away. He heals his wounds, puts the costume back on, and manages to bumble into a situation where he actually helps someone.

The instant celebrity of the “superhero” known as Kick-Ass inspires the populace, even though Dave has no “powers” and doesn’t even have any athletic talent or fighting skills. His only edge is that his original injuries leave him with some nerve damage that supposedly makes him impervious to most pain. Other than that, he’s just a fed-up citizen with a nightstick. His activities do, however, bring him to the attention of a pair of more capable, if less likely, masked vigilantes. The mentally unbalanced Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) wears a Batman costume and takes his 11-year-old daughter Mindy, also known as Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) along on his crime-fighting missions. Both are ridiculously bad ass experts in gung-fu, gun-fu, and everything in between, and they have no qualms about killing criminals. The pair have a grudge against a mafia boss, and Kick-Ass/Dave winds up in the middle of it.

Most action movies, and definitely most comic book movies, try to get a PG-13 rating to maximize their access to the teen audience. Not “Kick-Ass.” Between her foul mouth and her penchant for bloodshed, Hit Girl earns this film an R all by herself. Chloe Moritz is actually pretty awesome, and it will be interesting to see how she turns out as an actress. Nic Cage chews the scenery admirably in a movie that is actually suited to his bizarre talent. Aaron Johnson didn’t blow me away or anything, but he does alright in the title role.

Through a combination of sincerity and audacity, “Kick-Ass” manages to overcome its formulaic plot and genuinely entertain. I like that the movie doesn’t apologize for glorifying vigilante justice. A lot of good people would like to do exactly what Dave, Big Daddy, and Hit Girl do. I dig that this movie doesn’t do the standard, hypocritical, Hollywood thing of profiting from displays of violence, then throwing in a public service announcement about how violence is never the answer. (Batman, anyone?) You know what? Sometimes violence IS the answer. Yeah, I understand the dangers of vigilantism, but sometimes I want to watch a movie where a decent citizen who isn’t a cop or a soldier kicks the bad guys’ asses. “Kick-Ass” is that movie.

4 stars

Pierrot, le Fou (1965)** and Breathless (A Bout de Souffle, 1960)***

This week we watched this pair of films by French New Wave mastermind Jean-Luc Godard, and I‘m not yet sure what I think of them. Godard was clearly a highly influential filmmaker. As part of the ‘60’s New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), he made an effort to break with the conventions of traditional Hollywood-style filmmaking. He used hand-held cameras, long tracking shots, curious cuts between shooting angles, and long talking scenes. The effect of his experiments is to sacrifice photographic perfection in favor of intimacy with the actors. This works, which is why so many of his methods have been adopted by modern directors like Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater and others. Unfortunately, once we get intimate with his characters, we find that there isn’t much to them. In these two films, at least, Godard seems to have focused on style at the expense of character and story.

“Breathless” is the better of the two, in my opinion. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel, a small-time crook who hits the big time by killing a cop. He flees to Paris to collect some money he is owed and hook up with Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American girl with whom he is in love, to the extent that he is able to love. The film explores what it means to love someone, especially for an emotional midget like Michel. The film never manages to convince me that Michel is capable of viewing another person as more than an object to be used, but he does seem to love Patricia in that he is unable to drag himself away from her, even when staying puts him in danger of getting caught by the police. As for Patricia, I can’t really figure out what she is feeling for Michel. She allows him to make her an accessory after the fact to murder, so I suppose there is some devotion there, but in the whole affair I get the feeling that she is just watching herself from outside to see how self-destructive she might allow herself to be over a man whom she doesn’t even necessarily like. I suppose we have all been guilty of emotional confusion and delusion, and this was Godard’s way of exploring that. At the end of the day, I don’t know that Godard said anything extraordinary, but he does manage to make Jean Seberg and Paris look absolutely charming.

Godard worked with Jean-Paul Belmondo again in “Pierrot le Fou” (Peter the madman). Belmondo plays Ferdinand, a bored husband who casually leaves his family one night to run off with a crazy ex-girlfriend. Marianne (Anna Karina) is all mixed up with various criminal types, and she and Ferdinand wind up fleeing across France with a rifle and a suitcase full of money. This is a classic setup for a fun, action-packed, Bonnie-and-Clyde-style movie, but somehow the actors never manage to make life on the lam seem all that compelling. Any normal person would be wildly turned on to be on the run in the company of someone as sexy as Anna Karina or Jean-Paul Belmondo, but Michel and Marianne seem to be bored before the journey is even begun. I don’t think this is completely the fault of Godard’s script. Some interesting things happen to the two fugitives, but Belmondo in particular seems to be sleep-walking through most of the movie. It’s a shame, because “Pierrot, Le Fou” could be a classic example of New Wave film. There are some interesting uses of voice-over to create commentary and inner dialogue, unique cuts between camera shots, and the actors even break into song at times. The beginning of the movie has a particularly scathing scene at a high-society party, where all the conversation is in the form of commercials. (It is this party that drives Michel to run off with Marianne.)

“Pierrot, Le Fou” also showcases a general amorality that seems to be popular in French movies. In American movies, outlaws have a code of their own, and if they break that code or harm an innocent person, they are usually punished for it. In French movies, on the other hand, the stars will do truly rotten things to innocent bystanders and never be made to pay for their deeds. Some people think of the French as socialists, but judging by their movies, I think the French are naturally anarchists. Socialism may just be what it takes to keep those crazy bastards in line.

I feel bad that I wasn’t more into these movies, since Godard is considered such a master. My take on Godard so far is that he was an innovator of filmmaking style, who helped others make some truly great films. As for these two films, they are just okay.

Breathless - 3 stars
Pierrot, le Fou - 2 stars

Iron Man (2008) ***

I’m probably the last person in the free world to see “Iron Man.” It was pretty much what I expected: a slightly better-than-average comic book movie that, despite competent acting, is still mostly aimed at 14-year-old boys. I’m sure you know the basic idea behind the movie and the comic it‘s based on: Billionaire inventor Tony Stark builds himself a high-tech suit of armor that allows him to fly and shoot various weapons from his limbs.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays Stark with humor and confidence, but I was actually disappointed that the film didn’t offer up more depth to this character. In the comics, Stark has a history of alcoholism. With Robert Downey, Jr’s addiction history, it would have been interesting to see him explore this territory, but the film doesn’t go there. Likewise, the all-star supporting cast (Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s assistant, Jeff Bridges as Stark’s business mentor, and Terrence Howard as his military liaison) lend a level of class to this action flick, but they don’t really get to develop their characters. This is par for the course for an action movie, but it isn’t just explosions that take up the time. “Iron Man” spends a LOT of time with Stark in the lab, developing his suits, and while I liked seeing this side of the story, it actually got to be a bit tedious. The movie could have easily been twenty minutes shorter if they had trimmed some of these scenes. Then there’s the ridiculous plot-line involving Stark having pieces of metal shrapnel lodged in his heart, so he has to wear an electro-magnet on his chest to hold the metal in place so he doesn’t die. It’s ludicrous.

My problem with “Iron Man” is that I went into it believing the hype about how Downey’s amazing performance made this a different kind of comic-book movie. It doesn’t. This is the same old song, just played by better musicians. There’s a lot of good material available in this story, but the filmmakers don’t bother to take advantage of it. There’s that alcoholism issue, for one. The film could have also delved more into Stark’s motivations for getting out of the weapons-design business. The movie does touch on this a little, and I like where they were going. Stark believes that there is nothing wrong with designing better weapons and selling them to the “good guys,” but when he learns that his weapons are getting into the hands of our enemies, he starts to view the enterprise as futile. If everyone is getting his weapons, then he isn’t really tilting conflicts in favor of the good guys, he is just profiting off making those conflicts deadlier. He comes to believe that if he applies his genius to peaceful pursuits, clean energy production for example, then he can make more of a positive impact on the world, and possibly make some of those conflicts unnecessary. “Iron Man” suggests all of this, but I think they should have run with it. They could also have done more to explain what drives Jeff Bridges’s character. Instead the movie sticks with pretty typical hero and villain archetypes.

Why am I quibbling about the narrative in a comic-book movie? I don’t believe we should have to settle for mediocrity in a story just because of its genre. We have always had stories about heroes and gods, beings with special powers who carry on the age-old battle between good and evil. Comics are just the modern incarnation of that tradition. Comic books and the movies made from them are targeted mostly at kids, which explains much of their shallowness, but there is nothing that says kids don’t deserve better. I think these stories deserve to be told well. “Iron Man” is better than most of the genre, but somehow it keeps the audience at a distance, and I wound up not liking it as much as, for example, the X-men movies. Like so many other action movies, and like Tony Stark himself, “Iron Man” has a problem with its heart.

3 stars

Paths of Glory (1957) ****

Kirk Douglas has played some amazing roles. It seems to me that more than most actors, he has taken on roles of men who fought heroically against tyranny and lost. My favorite of these is the character Jack Burns, in “Lonely are the Brave,” based on Edward Abbey’s novel “The Brave Cowboy”. Burns is the classic, American, rugged individualist. He is pitted against the faceless machine of progress and industrialization. Inevitably, he is beaten, but he never surrenders. In “Man Without a Star,” Douglas plays a cowboy fighting a losing fight against the fencing off of the American West. Then, of course, there is Spartacus, who attempts to lead a slave revolt against the Romans.

To this list of dissidents portrayed by Kirk Douglas can be added Colonel Dax. In Stanley Kubrick‘s “Paths of Glory,” Dax is a commander in the French army. An ambitious general orders him and his men on a hopeless attack on the Germans. When the assault inevitably fails, the embarrassed general puts some of the soldiers on trial for cowardice in the face of the enemy. Colonel Dax steps up to defend them and finds himself opposing an uncaring military machine that considers the lives of good men to be worth less than the pride of an incompetent general.

Kirk Douglas plays Dax with brilliant outrage, and the rest of the cast is excellent. I can find nothing, really, to criticize in this film. It’s a little hard, watching Douglas and several British actors speaking English, to remember that all the characters are supposed to be French, but in the end it really doesn’t matter what the nationality is. I suspect all armies are similar in how they deal with these situations.

War movies tend to be either gung-ho, like the movie “Gung-Ho,” or anti-war, like “Apocalypse Now.” As good as it is, “Paths of Glory” suffered at the box office, probably because it doesn’t have a definite place in the war-movie framework. The film doesn’t make any statements about war itself, rather it is a tale about the evil workings of large, machine-like organizations, an evil which can outstrip that of any individual person within the machine. Colonel Dax, like so many of Kirk Douglas’s other characters, represents the moral superiority of the individual over the machine. This is an excellent movie, with superior performances on all fronts. It does not really have any iconic scenes or stunning cinematography, and I cannot say that it belongs in the ranks of truly classic movies, but it is well worth watching.

4 stars

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) ***½

Some books and movies gain immortality by morphing into a cultural concept that eclipses the original work. “Catch-22” is way better known as a figure of speech than as a book or movie. “Deliverance” is a terrific film, but all most people know about it is dueling banjos and “squeal like a pig.” It’s the same way with “The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit.” The book and movie have been superseded by this cultural concept of a 1950’s company man in a non-descript suit, desperately trying to climb the corporate ladder. It’s a shame that what has been lost is actually a fairly riveting story of a man finding himself and figuring out what is important in life.

Gregory Peck stars as Tom Rath, a WWII vet with a small house in Connecticut, a desk job in Manhattan, and a lot to think about. As he rides the train to work each day in his titular, gray suit, he has plenty of time to ruminate on the war, and all he did and saw there. We gradually come to realize that Tom’s life since the war has been something of a shadow life, always under the specter of the amoral, life-and-death reality he knew in Europe and the Pacific. His wife, Betsy, regrets the change in him, and she transfers her dissatisfaction to their house. She says the place is depressing and represents giving up, but of course she is really talking about Tom. He finally takes a higher-paying job at a large, media company in an effort to appease her. There, he meets Ralph Hopkins, the president of the company, and he sees that Hopkins’s success has come at the price of a loveless marriage and a spoiled, ungrateful child. Meanwhile, Tom becomes involved in a legal dispute over his grandmother’s estate, and a ghost from the war comes back to haunt him. His and Betsy’s quiet, little life becomes anything but boring.

This sounds like it could be some claustrophobic melodrama along the lines of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe,” but it isn’t like that at all. Tom and Betsy are so decent that it is easy to root for them, and while the plot makes you worry, it never gets too dark. The film is long for its era, 2 ½ hours, but this gives us time to really think about these characters and what they are struggling with, which is the existential question of what kind of person to be, what kind of life to live. Gregory Peck is not the most expressive actor, but in a movie this long there is time for him to develop his character slowly, and the performance actually ends up being quite satisfying. The film is helped along by some other intriguing characters, including Ralph Hopkins (Fredric March) and Judge Bernstein (Lee J. Cobb).

For me, the point of the movie is not that all those men in gray suits are mindless drones. It is that while they may look alike, they are all human beings, with stories of their own, and their own struggles over what is important in life. Tom ultimately decides that being with his family is more important than advancing his corporate career. He decides to be a “9 to 5 man,” partly because he sees how Mr. Hopkins’s devotion to his work ruined his family life. Hopkins expresses admiration for Tom’s choice, but he also makes a valid argument that without men like himself, who are driven to build great enterprises, there would be nowhere for the “9 to 5 men” to work. It is this kind of embrace of complexity that saves “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” from being a melodramatic morality play. It’s a shame that this complexity has been lost in the popular memory of the movie.

“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” is not quite a must-see classic. The film can be melodramatic at times, and Gregory Peck’s stoic acting takes a while to get used to. The movie’s slow pace and 2.5 hour length mean that it isn’t a movie to see when you are distracted. It does have moments of brilliance, however, and it’s well worth checking out. It's also worth noting, for fans of the show "Mad Men," that stoic, complicated Tom Rath is the prototype for the Don Draper character.

3.5 stars out of 5

Crazy Heart (2009) ***½

Even though Jeff Bridges won the Best Actor Oscar for “Crazy Heart” last year, it took me until just recently to see the movie. Even after the Netflix disc arrived, it sat for a while. It’s a testament to how a raunchy comedy or a big-budget action movie is easy to throw in the DVD player, but a serious drama is too easy to keep putting off. These critically acclaimed dramas just always seem like they might be a real downer, and ruin an otherwise fine evening. Of course, once we finally settled in to watch it, “Crazy Heart” was completely engrossing and not a downer at all.

The only bad thing about the film is the name of the main character, Bad Blake. It says a lot for how convincingly Jeff Bridges inhabits the role that I was able to get past what a dumb-ass name his character had chosen. Blake is a fading country music legend who is desperate to rekindle his career, or at least make enough money to keep himself in decent whiskey. What is cool about Blake is that despite how his alcoholism is ravaging his body, he never misses a show. He may show up drunk, but even when he is playing in a small-town bowling alley, he manages to give something to the fifty to a hundred people who show up to see him play. When he meets and falls for a reporter (Maggie Gyllenhaal), however, Blake has to face up to how pathetic he and his life have become. It takes a little while, but he is finally inspired to clean up his act and start writing songs and caring about life again.

Maggie Gyllenhaal really redeemed herself for me in this movie. I had most recently seen her in “The Dark Knight,” which is an excellent movie, but Gyllenhaal has a real do-nothing, damsel-in-distress role that left me feeling very unimpressed with her. In “Crazy Heart” she is considerably better as a single mom trying to figure out whether to take a chance on a bad bet like Bad Blake.

No film is so good that it doesn’t get a little better when Robert Duvall pops in. Duvall adds some class to the role of Blake’s bartender, recovering-alcoholic, best friend. His presence in this movie is especially cool for those who recall Duvall’s 1983 movie “Tender Mercies,” in which HE plays a down-and-out country singer trying to put his life together.

Another supporting character that deserves mention is the music. In addition to a background of classic country by the likes of Waylon Jennings, George Jones, and Townes Van Zandt, the film features Jeff Bridges singing some beautiful original songs by Stephen Bruton and T Bone Burnett. The creative duo deservedly brought home the Best Song Oscar for this film.

At the end of the day, though, “Crazy Heart” belongs to Jeff Bridges, and he knocks it out of the park. I’ve worked with a lot of alcoholics, and he really gets that part of the performance right. Bridges doesn’t just play Blake as a drunk, though. He plays him as a poet with a big heart and the soul of a true entertainer.

3.5 stars

Vampire Killers (2009) ***

The original title of this movie was “Lesbian Vampire Killers,” which tells you half of what you need to know about it. The other half is that it stars the brilliant James Corden and Mathew Horne, who played Smithy and Gavin in the hilarious BBC series “Gavin and Stacey.” What’s that? You haven’t seen “Gavin and Stacey?” My friend, it is urgent that you immediately go to Amazon.com and either download this series or order it on DVD. Watch it twice, because half the jokes pass you by the first time due to the characters’ heavy Essex and Welsh accents. Even if you do miss half the jokes, the show is still twice as funny as most everything else on TV.

I had just finished watching the “Gavin and Stacey” series, and was itching to see more of those characters. The creators of “Vampire Killers” basically read my mind and created a movie specifically for me by taking a couple of the “Gavin and Stacey” guys and putting them in a movie with a bunch of sexy girls who make out with each other and show their boobs. Genius! Corden and Horne play Fletch and Jimmy, a couple of characters pretty much identical to their “Gavin and Stacey” roles. On a hiking trip they wind up in a little town that, due to an ancient vampire curse, is ruled by hot, lesbian vampires. These gals feed on anyone passing through town, turning the women into fellow vampires, and feeding on the men. The boys battle this curse with the help of a Dutch babe (MyAnna Buring), an intense local priest, and a few pints of beer.

“Vampire Killers” is every bit as silly and exploitative as it sounds. It spoofs vampire movies, much like “Shaun of the Dead” spoofed zombie flicks, although perhaps not with the same level of cleverness. James Corden is an absolute comic genius, reminding me in some ways of Ricky Gervais. Paul McGann is quite good as the local vicar, who is hilariously oblivious to the fact that all of his supposedly arcane knowledge about how to kill vampires has been widely disseminated through pop culture. This won’t be on anyone’s list of “Best Satires,” but if you liked the “Gavin and Stacey” characters, and/or if you like to see girls kiss and get their tits out, then “Vampire Killers” is a guaranteed good time.

3 stars out of 5

Ghost Busters (1984) **

The thing about “Ghostbusters” is that it was an absolute meg-hit. There’s nothing you can say about this movie that will change the fact that it is a defining piece of 1980’s pop-culture. Every English-speaking person of a certain age knows what you mean if you say “Cross the streams,” or “I am the Gatekeeper; are you the Keymaster?” I am honestly curious, however, if the movie holds any relevance at all for people outside my generation. The question is, should people who are now in their teens and twenties be renting and watching this film? Having recently re-watched it, I can’t really think of a reason that they should.

The basic plot is that a few guys start a ghost-catching business right when paranormal activity in New York city is going through the roof due to the impending resurrection of some Sumerian god of destruction named Gozer. They wind up doing battle with Gozer to save the earth, or at least New York (That part is never made perfectly clear.) What the film is really about, however, is Bill Murray’s dry humor, which is an unfortunate fit for an action comedy. The actor who was so brilliant in “Quick Change” and “Groundhog Day” is actually just kind of annoying in “Ghost Busters.” He is meant to be full of rakish, anti-authoritarian charm, but there is no depth to his character. He starts out as a complete fraud, milking the field of the paranormal for money and chicks, and he winds up saving humanity. There is never any moment of transformation, though, no personal crisis. His actions as the hero and the romantic lead feel contrived and inevitable, as does the whole film, barreling along as it does from action sequence to comic interlude and back again. There is no time, of course, to develop the characters played by Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis, or Ernie Hudson, the other ghostbusters. They serve merely to bolster Murray’s character as he woos Sigourney Weaver and, you know, does that saving the earth thing.

Sigourney Weaver, thank God, provides one of the few bright lights in the film, supplying a character with a modicum of real humanity, and serving as the emotional center of the movie. As the comic center of “Ghost Busters” I would nominate not Bill Murray or Dan Akroyd, but Rick Moranis. Moranis takes his biggest role up to that time and runs with it as Sigourney Weaver’s nerdy across-the-hall neighbor.

Those two good performances aside, my experience of re-watching “Ghost Busters” did not live up to my memories of the film. That should be no surprise. I first saw it in theatres, as a teenager. Of course, there are movies that I loved then that I still love, like the first Indiana Jones movie, “Die Hard,” and “The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonsai.” It isn’t that I couldn’t appreciate something good back then, I just had more tolerance for lazy, formulaic crap at that age. These days I know that with almost 100 years of film to choose from, there is no reason to settle for crap.

2 stars