Ghost Town

I usually kind of can't abide Ricky Gervais, but I'm a terrible sucker for both movies about New York and screwball comedies, so I took a chance on this one. At the end, I was glad that I did.

While this movie is funny, it is not just funny. It's intelligent and a little prickly, subtly mocking the conventions of the genre while (mostly) following them. But what I liked best is that the story it tells is not a big love story. No-one gets swept off their feet and carried away to be a princess. It's a little story, the kind that happen in the city every day. (Well, maybe not with ghosts. As far as we know, anyway.)

As much as a movie love story can feel like a love story of real people, this one does. Bertram Pincus, DDS, is no prince. (Actually, he's kind of a jerk.) Gwen is an Egyptologist who works for a museum and gets really excited about mummys. (She's a geek. A beautiful geek, but... geek just the same.) They fumble and flail towards each other, foiled by any number of things (including the ghost of Gwen's husband). And when they finally do get together, it feels like they earned it, like they have actually done the work for their happy-ever-after.