MOVIE: Ghost Town

Rating: Imaginative and quite funny
Viewed: Friday night, November 7, 2008 (after parent-teacher conferences, I needed laughs)
Centruy Gateway 12 (cheap ticket, expensive popcorn)
Rotten Tomato Rating: 83%
Mine: a bit less, perhaps 65 or 70%
EW: B- cag: B
Genre: Comedy
Released: 9/19/08 (7 weeks ago)
PG-13 (1 hr. 32 min.)
Directed by: David Koepp
Ricky Gervais, Tea Leoni, Greg Kinnear

I'm not sure why this was rated PG-13. I'd sure be fine with PG.

"Frank" (Kinnear) gets hit by a bus and killed, joining dozens of other ghosts that are roaming around NYC unable to pass on upward because they have unfinished business. Dressed in the clothes they died in, they are in limbo.

B. Pincus, DDS (that's what it says on the dental coat that he almost always wears) (Gervais) is a blunt, not-nice-at-all people hater. He goes into the hospital for a colonoscopy and dies for seven minutes before they bring him back. The hitch - now he can see all the ghosts. He doesn't WANT to see them, he is irritated by them and not at all sympathetic to their plights. But the forceful Frank convinces him to make a play for his widow (Tea Leoni) to stop her from marrying a save-the-world lawyer (cutie pie Billy Campbell).

Gervais is really quite homely, and his teeth certainly don't look like they belong to a dentist, which makes the love story a bit more fun to watch. And watching him turn on the charm and wit that he has underneath the mean demeanor is really fun. There's a twist at the end that I very much enjoyed, and I walked out of the theater totally entertained, having laughed out loud at least a dozen times. Not bad. Not bad at all!