Tag: ghost

Ghost

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Everyone has seen Ghost before they’ve seen Ghost. We all know the iconic scene where Demi Moore shapes pottery while Patrick Swayze sits behind her as The Everly Brothers “Unchained Melody” plays in the background. It’s been parodied everywhere, from Family Guy to Two and a Half Men to The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (David Zucker, 1991). There’s a good reason it has been parodied. It’s a good scene. Cheesy, but memorable; a portrait of love that has transcended the ages.

But these parodies give a false expectation of what Ghost is actually about, which is less concerned with the transcendent power of love than a mishmash of different genres that cannot master any of them. While a huge success upon its release, winning Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards and making a mind-bending $505.7 million worldwide, the rest of the film barely shapes up to that one iconic scene.

The film is split into two key parts: before and after Sam Wheat’s death. This first part is far more engaging, with the young yuppie couple seemingly having it all yet afraid that their love is transient. Sam watches a plane crash on the TV, and states that he shouldn’t fly to LA as these things always come in threes — a false flag intended to tease those well aware of the film’s premise.

The point is that death can take us any time, and that the love we have on earth is special. Their communication at this time is tentative; with Sam — played with typical stunted machoism by Swayze — unable to tell Molly how much he truly loves her. Unpolished and unvarnished, these feel like real people. When the classic scene comes, it’s his way of saying that he cares about her, their joint caresses of the pottery wheel a symbol of the life that they want to share together.

This all changes after Sam is killed by a criminal on the street. Ghost quick jumps us through unnecessary narrative hoops instead of giving us the time to feel the immense loss that Molly must be feeling. Sam is not only literally a ghost but metaphorically too. Likewise Molly is half-formed, still waiting to be shaped at the pottery wheel.

In fact, Ghost doesn’t really get into the nature of grief at all. Instead this shaggy dog story — part comedy, part conspiracy theory, part exploration of purgatory, part action thriller — launches into a convoluted plot-line involving murder and illicit bank transactions. Therefore, Sam is not forced to try and get Molly to notice him for his own sake (which might be more moving) but to stop further crimes from being committed.

Ghost

Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar for her brilliant supporting role (only the second black woman to do so) as a spiritualist who can talk to Sam, but her character is kind of shortchanged too. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his initial review about the classic kiss scene where Sam kisses Molly through her body: “this should involve us seeing Goldberg kissing Moore, but of course the movie compromises and shows us Swayze holding her — too bad, because the logical version would actually have been more spiritual and moving.” While the former move would’ve been a better representation of the power of love to transcend anything, the second is just another classic example of Ghost changing the rules of the game for the sake of the screenplay.

This is a film completely unconcerned with logic. One moment he can’t touch anything, then he figures out that he actually can; initially she can’t hear him, then right at the end she can. These kind of manipulations take us out of the emotional journey of the characters, which ends with a typically Hollywood action climax which must’ve satisfied denizens of the Box Office back in 1990 but ruins the film’s potential as a genuinely moving work of art.

Jerry Zucker, known previously for his far wackier works as part of the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team such as Police Squad (1982) and Airplane! (1979), felt like the wrong director for the work, which might’ve succeeded far better as pure comedy. Anthony Minghella‘s Truly Madly Deeply (1991), released just a year later and containing a very similar premise, is the far more moving and humorous work, able to track the multi-varied emotions associated with grief with actual nuance and depth. I recommend you watch that instead.

The 30th anniversary edition of Ghost is in cinemas on Friday, February 14th.

Ghost Stories

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is a sceptic who hosts a TV show named Psychic Cheats. Any paranormal activity can be explained away, as he demonstrates time and time again to his studio audience. But then, out of the blue, he receives a strange package containing an audio cassette recorded by his former mentor Charles Cameron who mysteriously disappeared some years ago. The latter’s rationalist world view was profoundly shaken after he encountered three paranormal episodes he couldn’t explain away, so he points the former in their direction.

Thus the good professor sets off in pursuit of three separate ghost stories, convinced he’ll be able to debunk them. But each of the three episodes defies explanation outside of the paranormal. In the first, night watchman Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse) of a supposedly unoccupied warehouse comes up against an unearthly presence. In the second, young man Simon Rifkind (rising star Alex Lawther) has some unnerving experiences in his car in a forest in the middle of the night. In the third, city trader Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman) experiences the terrors of becoming a father. And then there are matters relating to Philip Goodman himself and an enigmatic, hooded figure…

This movie began life as a theatre play inspired by writers Dyson and Nyman’s love of portmanteau horror movies, three men on stools telling scary stories to a live audience. It proved a huge hit so the offers to film it rolled in. The writer-director duo had other ideas, however, and have made it themselves, retaining a down-at-heel British sensibility to the proceedings. More impressively, while the original worked on the stage, the pair have taken their material, stripped it down to its essentials then rebuilt everything from scratch for the moving picture medium.

Adaptation can so easily be a recipe for disaster. Your scribe has lost count of the number of movies he’s seen adapted from great plays or books which fall flat in screen adaptation because they’re exactly that: filmed books or filmed theatre. Happily, Ghost Stories avoids that common pitfall to prove highly effective as a cinematic outing. Parts of it will creep you out even as it delivers its fair share of effective shocks and surprises. In short, it does everything it claims on the tin. The casting is spot on and you’ll find yourself completely caught up in the three stories and the elements that link them together. Don’t miss.

Ghost Stories is out in the UK on Friday, April 6th. It’s on all major VoD platforms on Monday, August 20th.

Daguerrotype (Le Secret de la Chambre Noire)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In a large house in a rural French town, contemporary photographer Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet) employs 19th century daguerreotype photographic plate techniques involving lengthy exposures. (The “chambre noire” of the title is the French term for both “darkroom” and “camera obscura”.) Subjects must remain utterly motionless for 20 minutes at a time in order for their image to be captured without becoming blurred. Stéphane attaches his models to metal rigs designed to hold them in place for the duration, an experience both uncomfortable and sometimes painful for them. He makes a living from fashion shoots set up by his colleague Vincent (Mathieu Amalric).

In between paid gigs, Stéphane obsessively photographs on a larger plate camera life-sized images of his 22-year-old daughter Marie (Constance Rousseau) just as while she was still alive he previously lensed his late wife Denise (Valérie Sibilia). Exposing his daughter for longer and longer periods of time of around 60 minutes, he sometimes has her drink liquid compounds to help her keep still.

Marie is concerned that the mercury-laden chemicals required for her father’s work, spillages and seepages of which can kill vegetation, are stored near the greenhouse in which she’s grown rare plants since she was a child. She wants to study botany and gets accepted on a course in Toulouse. This would mean moving away from home. She’s deeply unhappy about the father-daughter relationship and her father’s new assistant Jean (Tahar Rahim), talking to estate agent Thomas (Malik Zidi), hatches a plan to convince Stéphane of Marie’s death so that he will sell the house at a low price enabling Jean and Marie to make a fast buck by reselling at market value. It’s the sort of plot from which Hitchcock or Chabrol might have made a terrific suspense thriller.

“He’s confused photography and reality for so long he can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead”, Marie confides to Jean. A few minutes in, when neither Jean nor the audience have been introduced to Marie, he spots her as a silent apparition in a blue, nineteenth century dress moving slowly up a staircase to be briefly framed like a pictorial subject in the circular landing above. Have we just seen a ghost?

Occasional creaks, blackouts and apparitions recall classic ghost stories like The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) or The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963). There’s a scene when Marie emerges from a bedroom that recalls the a similar scene in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and there are echoes in the father’s moulding his daughter into her departed mother which recall Obsession (Brian DePalma. 1976), itself a reworking of Vertigo. The heavily melancholic/ romantic score by Grégoire Hetzel, while light years away from Bernard Herrmann’s work for Vertigo and Obsession, has a similar effect.

However, those expecting a shocker like Kurosawa’s own Pulse/Kairo (2001) or Creepy (2016) are likely to be disappointed. Admittedly, an unexpected fall down some stairs proves as unnerving as anything in Pulse/Kairo and unsettling corridor lighting cues recall rival J-horror ghost outing Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002). Yet the film largely eschews J-horror shock tactics to deliver a far more meditative, languorous and fluid experience to dreamlike, ethereal effect – as you might expect from a film based around the slow processes of nineteenth century photography.

Despite the French cast, crew, locations and architecture, this feels every inch a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film with numerous echoes of his other, Japanese-shot work. Opening exteriors recall the house that opens Before We Vanish (2017) and in almost every scene, there’s a clean feel to the composition familiar from those other films. Away from his native Japan, Kurosawa has imposed his own unique visual sensibilities on French culture and come up with something at once recognisably French and at the same time strangely alien to that culture.

(A note on spelling: the photographic plate is referred to as a ‘Daguerreotype’ after its inventor Louis Daguerre, while the film’s title drops the second ‘e’, presumably to make the English title’s pronunciation easier for a popular audience.)

Daguerrotype is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection. And don’t forget to check our interview with Kurosawa!

A Ghost Story

Posted on by mjbstaging

A couple lives in a house. He dies and returns as a ghost (a person with a sheet over his head) she can’t see. She stays for a bit then moves out. Other people come and go. He stays, he waits.

Initially M (Rooney Mara) wants to move somewhere else, but C (Casey Affleck) rather likes the house and wants to stay. After his death, she identifies his body in the morgue then spends some time with his mortal remains. Later, his corpse gets up matter of factly, sheet and all, and leaves. To return to their house. Before moving out, she scribbles a note on a small piece of paper, folds it in to a tiny square and pushes it into a door frame. He tries repeatedly to extract this note to see what it says. We want to know, too.

Time moves on but C doesn’t. He attempts to scare a resident mum and her children by hurling kitchen plates at them in an uncharacteristic loss of self-control. He listens to a man at a party pontificate on the meaning of life in terms of what we leave behind. He waves at the (person under a floral patterned sheet) ghost in the house next door. Eventually the houses are demolished and the site is built upon. He goes back in time to watch the settlers who built the first house.

Some very long takes include one of the bereaved M violently stuffing herself with a pie then throwing up. The 4:3 frame with rounded edges throughout recalls projected photographic slides and home movies of yesteryear. Odder still are the noises off which M and the pre-ghost C get out of bed to investigate although they can find nothing. We’re never quite sure what we’re doing in this house or why we’re watching this couple in their very private, home space. We might be some strange, unearthly presence. Such as a ghost.

All of which is thoroughly compelling to experience or just to watch. As M drops out of the film, you’ll find yourself wondering what C’s ghost is still doing there, why hasn’t he just vanished at death or gone on to whatever place we go to when we die. If the film ponders such questions, it never attempts to impose easy answers. That lends it an incredible power.

C’s death is violent but we see only its peaceful aftermath. There is violence however in both their lives: M’s violent eating reflects C’s when we eventually see him eat in flashback. His violent outburst with the kitchen plates suggests something latent in his character but elsewhere he seems relaxed. The violence expresses a pent up frustration lurking beneath. What matters in life? What happens if it’s suddenly cut short? What exactly do we leave behind us?

A Ghost Story was out in cinemas in August 11th, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on all major VoD platforms in February 2018.

Click here for another film meditation on death.