Open your mind wide
Bertram Pincus is a dentist with no social skills. He can’t stand listening to his clients, his co-workers or anyone else that has a thought. He enjoys his life alone. After going into a routine colonoscopy, he begins to meet strange people after he wakes. Annoyed by the strange attention and confused by his sudden popularity, Bertram soon figures out that these people aren’t ordinary, they’re dead. And his routine trip to the doctor turned out to be seven minutes of literal death for him, which caused him to start seeing the dead. Lacking in social skills, he must start putting up with the dead and possibly helping them resolve their own deaths.
Ghost Town doesn’t play around with the moral of ‘helping thy neighbor’. It clearly states Pincus’ character and tries to drive home that it’s necessary for one to do the right thing and start joining the rest of the population, not avoiding them. Ricky Gervais simply plays the perfect a-hole in this drama/comedy. He brings the sarcasm, the annoyance with others to an entirely different level. He creates this character who doesn’t deserve the company of others and genuinely makes the turnaround to bad guy to good guy. He’s certainly believable, or rather he had me convinced. Like I said before the movie progresses at a no-nonsense rate, which is superb. The place where it fails is when Tea Leoni enters the scene. Her character, while important to Pincus’ development, slows down the film’s pace. You go from a very good comedy (not wacky, but solid) to a very slow drama. Leoni, who seems to get just awful writing for her characters mostly (Jurassic Park III anyone?), plays a clumsy widow who doesn’t really give off the ‘I’m trying to get over my husband, but I can’t seem to let him go’ vibe. Her character is written poorly and thankfully doesn’t end up… well… you’ll see.
Overall, I think the concept for the movie was great. I think the execution was good, even the payoff at the end is good despite how the middle drags a bit (again, this is where Leoni’s character comes in to play). The movie is certainly worthy of your attention.
A little Blu in the face with the features
I was a bit shocked that the features on the Blu-ray were the exact same ones found on the DVD. The difference? The Blu-ray version is in HD. I was hoping for something a bit extra, something to put the Blu-ray over the DVD, I mean that’s the reason for Blu-rays, right? It’s the same argument as the DVD vs. VHS, it’s simply not great to have zero actual separation between the two mediums. Anyway, the features are still great, here’s what you get:
– Commentary by David Koepp and Ricky Gervais (good stuff, really good commentary)
– Making Ghost Town
– Some People Can Do It
– Ghostly Effects
The features are still entertaining, but I would have liked to see a bit more on the Blu-ray than on the DVD. I’m not sure what determines the features, if it’s the success of the film in the theaters (I’m suspecting this is it), but there should have been just a bit more.
As for the quality of the Blu-ray, no question it’s great stuff. The audio, especially, makes this Blu-ray excel. It’s good, it comes to you in Dolby Digital and sounds gorgeous. As for the video, I’ve seen a better transfer to Blu-ray, but this is still outstanding. HD excels with Blacks/Whites and this movie has plenty to offer. If 1080p was a person I would probably just hug them and thank them for making the world beautiful again (did that sound weird? Who cares! I’m still happy with it after re-reading it).