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This post was originally published in July 2008, in accordance with the New York and Self-Involvement blogathons. Ghostbusters was recently released on Blu-ray in honor of the 25th anniversary of the film’s premiere.

When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.

I should note from the outset that I’m too close to Ghostbusters to know whether or not it’s an empirically “good film.” But I do know it’s empirically fun to watch, and there are definitely aspects of its construction that are, at the very least, novel for its genre. It’s essentially a horror comedy made like a musical, the kind that was, in 1984, at least twenty years out of date.

“Listen!” says Ray early in the film. “Do you smell something?” This is classic screwball dialogue, delivered in a style that’s more sing-song than realistically conversational. A couple of scenes later, Venkmam actually seems to be singing along to the orchestral score when he grabs his fifth of whiskey, puts an arm around Ray and consoles him: “Call it fate/call it luck/call it kar-maaaaa/I believe/That everything happens/For a reason!” And as Ray grabs the bottle and starts rationalizing about their “ectocontainment system,” Venkman dances in place. Later, when he catches his first glimpse of Sigourney Weaver’s Dana Barrett, he’ll do a leap over a short fence; I swear Ivan Reitman stole it from Gene Kelly.

We first meet the Ghostbusters at the psych building of an unnamed university (it looks less like NYU than Columbia). The door to the parapsychology office is emblazoned with blood red graffiti: “Venkman, Burn in Hell”––giving lie to his later insistence, “But the kids love us!” And why *would* they love him? This is a guy who falsifies his experiments in order to give nerdy boys––prototypes for himself and his friends, really––electric shocks, whilst convincing superhot girls that they have psychic powers in hopes that it’ll spread their legs. He’s a gleeful, obvious sadist. And yet there’s something charming about his complete disregard for morality––he got into an an obscure corner of academia for the chicks!

From a very young age, I subconsciously understood that Ghostbusters is not really about the supernatural threat against Manhattan––it’s about this guy conquering the supernatural threat against Manhattan. It’s a Reagan-era Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the guy most able to think for himself is impervious to the threat. Except, that as scripted by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and played by Bill Murray, this anti-hero would look like a villain if not for his fluid, inexplicable charisma. (Note that the unlovable loser as savior archetype will be recycled in future sci fi action comedies ad infinitum; Affleck and Willis aside, Armageddon is about a whole crew of Venkmans saving the world. Scary stuff.)

A good first third of the film is an extended walk-and-talk, shot on real locations in NYC. There’s something almost Godardian (or, at least, Breathless-ian) about this; you can feel the “real” city’s energy on the margins of Reitman’s deeply nostalgic mish-mash of incongruous old Hollywood genres, even though, as the most expensive comedy ever made up to that point, the production was surely crowd controlled within an inch of its life. Still, this is a film with a deep love for a New York on a never-again brink: the anarcholibertarian spirit of the rough days of the 1970s lingered, but by 1984, everyone had money. What’s more libertarian than a redneck reticence to be ruled, backed up with a full bank account?

That reading gives Murray’s first great line in the film extra meaning. Giving the ghost-stunned librarian a basic psychlogical quiz, he asks the menopause-aged woman if she’s currently menstruating. The Eric Blore clone who apparently runs the joint scrunches his face in horror over the very idea of a functional female anatomy. “What has that got to do with it?” he groans. Murray tilts his head up to the man just slightly, as he’s going to whisper. He doesn’t. “Back off man,” he says. “I’m a scientist.” It’s a threat. It’s a Dirty Harry moment––a “Do you feel lucky, punk?” for science nerds who happen to also aspire to badassness. Ghostbusters is a movie about the scum of the earth re-setting nature’s rules, and in order to do anything like set it back, the traditional power brokers have to rely on these nerds, these scientists who are too punk rock for the academy––partially because they speak the scum of the earth’s language, but partially because they’ve got nothing left to lose.

Which isn’t to say that our boys in grey (as Casey Kasem refers to them during the “rise to fame” montage) aren’t fighting for the New Manhattan. Venkman even shape-shifts into the power-tied 80s capitalist ideal just long enough to goad Ray into financing their venture (”You’re not gonna lose the house–EVERYONE has three mortgages nowadays!”) They move into an abandoned firehouse in Tribeca, a building which Egon insists “should be condemned.” “The neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone,” he warns. Cut to Dana Barrett’s luxe apartment overlooking Central Park West, which we soon learn is ground zero for the city’s supernatural invasion.

The city’s real estate heirarchy is thus upended: still-scary downtown is a safe haven from the horrors of the high-rent district. In 1984, the city was in the first throes of the gentrification that, two decades later, has rendered the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side virtually indistinguishable. Paranormal blight is a Dorian Grey thing, the manifestation of repressed wrongs. Above all else, the Ghostbusters are laying the ground work for the city to self-homogenize, one borough at a time.

The narrative’s only joke about this is a minor one: that when the dead rise from the grave, they’ll inhabit the shells of wannabe old-money co-opers, who will then become indistinguishable from the homeless insane which their penthouses were supposed to protect them from. (I never realized until this viewing that Rick Moranis becomes possessed by the giant dog in the garden outside Tavern on the Green. No wonder I’ve always felt so fucking uncomfortable at those NYFF opening night parties.)

Ghostbusters makes it clear that evil is baked in to the city’s foundations, and like all gentrifiers, the Ghostbusters’ sanitation involves the erasure of history. The boys aren’t sure how to proceed with Dana, their first client, but the first thing that comes to Ray’s mind is to go to the hall of records and see if the building itself “has a history of psychic turbulence.” It, uh, does, and ultimately it’s demolished and rebuilt. Ghostbusters plays on an entire city’s anxieties that, as renters, our spaces don’t belong to us, that there’s a history to our homes that we’ll never know, and probably shouldn’t know. And anyone who’s ever had a roach problem won’t see Dana’s reaction when she finds an unwelcome visitor in her kitchen to be anything unfamiliar.

And like the unwelcome roommates crowding under fridges from the Battery to the Bronx, the threat in Ghostbusters is only scary because it’s so mundane. When the boys move down to scene of the library crime, they find a stack of books on the floor, extending upwards a couple of feet above their heads. The grand majority of mischiefs caused by ghosts in this film are completely everyday, and that’s why it works within the film’s shot-on-location realism––the easiest way to get a cynical audience to accept the fantastic is to make it unspectacular. The ghosts in Ghostbusters don’t kill––they don’t even make an attempt at violence until very close to the end of the film––they are very literally nothing but spectres, and the only threat they pose is a mostly psychological hindrance to everyday order.

Every time I watch it as an adult, I try to tap into what appealed to me about the film as a kid. What did I get, at 5 years old, out of a montage of the boys appearing on the covers of Omni and Atlantic Monthly? Most of the dialogue surely went over my head until I was in my teens. I’m not even talking about the subtle economic/social/moral/religious/and racial subtexts––what did I think was going on when Ray clearly gets a blow job from a poltergeist? How about when Dana, possessed by Zoul, lies under Peter and says, ” I want you inside me?” Was that double entendre unwound/negated completely by the next line––”Sounds like you got at least two people in there already”––or did I always know, subconsciously, that it wasn’t that simple? To watch this film is to necessarily grapple with how it warped my young mind, which is the height of self-involvement.

It’s an appropriate week for Universal to announce they’re making an adaptation of the classic Atari game Asteroids, because chances are the thing will end up opening on a 4th of July weekend. Just like Independence Day and Armageddon. Actually, as far as I can tell a movie of that arcade game could very well be a sequel to Armageddon. Except that Universal won the four-studio bidding war, and Disney did not (I’m unsure if Disney was even one of the bidders, which also included Fox and Sony). But Disney should go ahead with Armageddon 2 anyway in order to give us another summer like that of ‘98. DreamWorks can also get in the game with a Deep Impact sequel, but it’d probably have to be distributed by Disney, so that might be an issue.

I have to concentrate on when this thing will be, because focusing on what this thing will be is futile. And that’s the primary reaction to the news today: what the hell will an Asteroids movie be about that will fill up a feature-length running time? And why did four studios fight over such a simple property? Check out some of these reactions from the film blogs after the jump:

• Erik Davis at Sci-Fi Squad reminds us of why this was such a hot property:
  

  the object of the game was to navigate this space ship through an asteroid field and shoot down whatever crazy flying object got in the way. That was it — no storyline, no insane graphics — just a bunch of glowing dots on a screen. Obviously the cinematic possibilities are endless (ahem, sarcasm)

• Marc Bernardin at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch references the Armageddon connection:
  

  Couldn’t Universal — who won that four-way bidding scrum — just make a movie about noble men and women tasked with blowing up rocks from space without needing a game to base it on?

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline compares the project to another hot property of yore:
  

  Atari’s thrilling story of a triangle and its mission to clear the cosmos of flying rocks. Long considered by Hollywood’s development community as the unadaptable Benjamin Button of classic video games…

• Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever notes that people won’t have the attention span for it:
  

  The movie will be remembered fondly by children from the 80s, but they’ll get bored and switch over to the Q-Bert movie after one quarter.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff thinks the studios picked the wrong video game:
  

  I can’t help but think this is a mistake. Not the idea of making a movie based on a game of flying around shooting asteroids, but making a movie based on a game of flying around shooting asteroids that isn’t Sinistar . At least then you’ve got an extremely antagonistic villain: [embedded YouTube clip]

• Mike Sampson at JoBlo.com also wishes the studio would adapt a different game:
  

  I won’t get into how moronic this idea is (why get into a bidding war when you’re essentially creating the plot from scratch?), but if you were going to adapt an early-80s-era video game into a movie, why not GALAGA? That at least has something to it. Or just take the money that you spent to get “Asteroids” and put it back into BIOSHOCK a movie based on a game that actually has an intriguing storyline…

• Alex Billington at First Showing is sure most of the other early arcade games will hit theaters in no time:
  

  For the longest time, it was always a joke that one day someone would adapt Asteroids. Now it’s really happening. I’m sure this means movies based on Tetris and Frogger and Pac Man won’t be too far behind either, right? God damn you Hollywood! Is there any hope for this movie?

• John at The Movie Blog is flabbergasted at the idea:
  

  ARE… YOU… FUCKING… KIDDING ME!?!?!?!

  You had to pay MONEY for the rights to a story about… well… NOTHING??? It’s a triangle shitting out little dots hitting rock like objects. You’re going to build a MOVIE around that? Seriously?

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk is also annoyed and amazed:
  

  A F*CKING BIDDING WAR.  For a movie based on three dots that shoot one dot at other small clusters of dots.  If you can think of anything stupider than this… someone in Hollywood will pay you a lot of money.  GREAT NEWS, EVERYONE, TOM CRUISE JUST SIGNED ON TO PLAY BLINKING LIGHT NUMBER FOUR!  SOMEONE FINGER MY ASSHOLE SO I KNOW I’M NOT DREAMING!

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba is almost as shocked:
  

  This move makes absolutely no sense to me. If you just call your movie Asteroids (as five other movies have already done), no one is going to know it’s not based on the game unless you tell them it’s not. Is brain damage contagious? And does everyone in Hollywood have it? This is completely shitballsian.

• Sean at Film Junk believes the plotlessness of Asteroids makes this even more ridiculous than most game adaptation ideas:
  

  I mean, we all know that big screen adaptations of video games are usually doomed from the start, but when you’re dealing with a game as simplistic as Asteroids, well, I really don’t know what to say.

• Steven Zeitchik at Risky Biz Blog believes the plotlessness of the game is a good thing:
  

  “Asteroids” has about as much plot and backstory as a Cinemax special feature. Which means that, without the conventions of modern videogame storytelling to slow it down, it may actually work.

• Ross Miller at ScreenRant sees this adaptation as one of the least offensive of late:
  

  Still, of all the board game, toy and video game adaptations in the works, I think Asteroids is probably one of the most harmless. Since there’s no real story to the game, there’s no real story to ruin either. But nonetheless, it’s still irritating to see this Hollywood trend continuing at full speed.

• Annalee Newitz at i09 wonders what the game’s plot was originally and suggests a great idea for a mash-up:
  

  Why were you shooting the asteroids? Were they controlled by aliens? Were you trying to break them up so you could mine them for nickel in their cores? It was all an 8-bit mystery…Couldn’t they just combine Battleship with Asteroids so we could have a plotless tale of shooting that spanned skies and sea? Doesn’t that sound awesome?

• Andrew Mack at Twitch made up the perfect (and likely) plot synopsis:
  

  Aliens have redirected asteroids from the belt in orbit around the Sun, that one between Mars and Jupiter, and they are launching them at Earth, hoping to wipe out the human race from a distance. It’s up to the Asteroid Defense Human Defenders [ADHD - get it?], a collection of young, hot, thrill seeking space pilots to intercept these Asteroids before they become Meteorites and plunge into the soft recesses of our fragile Earth. They’ll be doing some plunging into some soft recesses of their own because they are so young and hot and thrill seeking. Either an Asteroid will get through their defenses, kill millions, and one of the pilots will have this big emotional moment where they torture themselves in grief only get their vindication when Earth can finally launch an assault on this Alien race and these pilots will be asked to lead the charge once they arrive at the belt. Or, one of their pilots will die, planting themselves on the front side of a massive Asteroid, and everyone will have a joined emotional moment then everyone can get their vindication when Earth can finally launch an assault on this Alien race and these pilots will be asked to lead the charge once they arrive at the belt. There will be lots of special effects and lots of explosions [which you must have even though there is no sound in the vacuum of space] and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is done in Real 3D. After all, it’s Asteroids damnit!

• Craig Kennedy at Living in Cinema may have gotten ahold of the script already — even if he’s joking, this is probably it:
  

  Apparently they’ve already written the screenplay and one of our Universal insiders sent over a few pages. Here’s an excerpt:

  Player 1: Blip… blop… blip … blop … blip … blop… pew pew pew pew pew boom… blip… blop.. blip.. blop.. blip.. pew pew pew pew pew pew pew.. blip.. blop.. blip.. whoop whoop whoop pew pew pew whoop whoop pew pew pew pew whoop whoop whoop pew pew pew pew pew boom… blip blop blip blop… boom.

  Player 2: Blip… blop… blip… blop…

• Amos Barshad at Vulture offers his plotmaking services to the project:
  

  As you’ll recall if you enjoy fun, the game consists of a triangle shooting at asteroids moving vertically down the screen — and that’s it. So, guys, if you need a hand with that screenplay or anything …

• Kyle Buchanan at Movieline jokingly suggests some casting ideas for the adaptation. Here is one of the proposed stars:
  

  Natalie Portman as High Score
  Like the High Score itself, Natalie Portman carries a whiff of unattainable prestige, and if Universal added her to the film’s cast, it would be a Twin Galaxies-worthy coup. It may seem like a lot of work for the actress — after all, she’d have to be on-screen at all times — but isn’t Portman due for some outer-space atonement after the Star Wars prequels?

Before seeing Johnny Depp as John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s new crime film Public Enemies, we decided to check out an earlier portrayal of the infamous bank robber, Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger. The 1945 picture is a bit disappointing in terms of bank jobs, which are mostly shown in quick succession during a montage. There is one interesting robbery, but technically it’s an armored truck heist (also, having been shot by Fritz Lang for an earlier film, the scene doesn’t quite fit the rest of the movie). From what we hear, the robberies in Public Enemies aren’t that much more memorable, even if they do resemble an MGM musical, which is a shame considering how clever the real Dillinger was.

We definitely prefer a clever criminal and a clever plan when it comes to bank robber movies. Otherwise it’s just yet another taut thriller or slapstick comedy involving a tunnel dig from the bakery/bathhouse/chicken restaurant/luggage store/etc. next door. So we’ve come up with ten favorite bank jobs that involve originality and a successful getaway (a plan isn’t that clever if it doesn’t work). There have been hundreds of bank robberies throughout film history so if we’ve forgotten something really clever, inform/remind us of the movie in the comments. We’ve purposefully excluded armed vehicle, stagecoach and train robberies, though, so stick specifically to internal bank jobs.

10. Clive Owen Hides in the Wall, in Inside Man (2006)

In Spike Lee’s complex heist drama, Clive Owen plays one of the smartest, most precise bank robbers ever seen at the movies, and though his scheme is figured out in the end, it’s already too late for him to get caught. To begin, he and his team enter a New York City bank disguised as painters and refer to each other only as variations of the name “Steve.” Simple enough, but then as time goes on there are some mysterious activities going on with the moving of hostages and some sort of carpentry occurring inside a stockroom. Ultimately, the employment of fake kills and fake walls is ingenious, though the overall idea of camouflaging robbers as hostages had been done before (see #1).

9. The Money is Floating Out of the Bank, in The Invisible Man (1933)

Is an idea clever if it’s not technically possible? Well, there are apparently scientists working on achieving invisibility, with relative success, so in the future H.G Wells’ concept of an invisible man may not be so unfeasible for real life criminals. Of course, by then it won’t be such an original idea to rob a bank using the power of invisibility. It’s the second most likely thing for a man of such ability to do (the first is to go into the women’s’ locker room). For Claude Rains’ character in James Whale’s adaptation of the Wells novel, the concept was still pretty original and obviously quite brilliant. And his idea to have the money just float outside and into the streets, for the townspeople to take, is very generous.

8. Modern Robin Hoods Don’t Actually Steal Anything, in Wisdom (1987)

If Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore were merely modern day Robin Hoods in this film (which Estevez also wrote and directed — with help from Robert Wise), they wouldn’t have qualified for the list, but because they didn’t actually steal any money from the banks they robbed, their holdups are quite interesting. During the 1980s, when American farming was in crisis, it was more beneficial to decrease farmers’ debt than increase their cash in hand. Does burning mortgage records still count as stealing? Yes, in a way that’s cleverer than simply looting money.

7. Small Army, Big Take, in Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

In this larger-scale precursor to Three Kings, a group of American soldiers led by Clint Eastwood venture into enemy territory during WWII to steal a huge cache of gold bars located in a bank vault. It’s certainly unlike most heist films in that it’s also a war movie, and both the robbers and the bank guards are armed with tanks.

6. Army-Trained Crew, in The League of Gentlemen (1960)

Of course, Kelly’s Heroes wasn’t the first film to feature a group of soldiers-turned-bank robbers, but it’s still quite different from The League of Gentlemen, which isn’t set during wartime. Instead the film involves former army personnel who are deemed corrupt in some way or another who are brought together to lend their specific military expertise towards a foolproof bank heist plot. We consider the plan foolproof despite the group’s ultimate downfall, and still count the job as a relative success (compared to most foiled heists in other movies) due to the very rare and circumstantial reason that they were caught.

5. Elliott Gould Takes Advantage of His Situation, in The Silent Partner (1978)

Pulling a job from the inside isn’t always a good idea, but Elliott Gould shows us that it can work if the inside man isn’t connected to the outside men in any way. He plays a teller who learns that his bank will be robbed, so he puts aside a whole bunch of money for himself knowing that it will just be lumped in with the real robber’s take, as far as the bank and the police are concerned. Unfortunately, the real robber (Christopher Plummer) catches on to Gould’s sneaky cut-in and threatens his life. The Silent Partner is apparently a remake of a 1969 Danish film with the English title Think of a Number, so that film should get some credit for this clever plot.

4. Lola Keeps it in the Family, in Run Lola Run (1998)

When she is desperate to get her hands on 100,000 Deutche Mark to pay a ransom, Lola’s (Franka Potente) options are depicted in three different scenarios. In the second of these segments, she decides to rob the bank where her father works. It’s a bold plan, but in a way it’s pretty clever because nobody would expect a banker’s daughter to be a bank robber. Of course, in the long run (no pun intended) such a crime wouldn’t really work, because she’s so easily identifiable, but in the short run it’s perfect, and hilarious, how the cops outside the bank don’t believe a young woman with bright red hair is the one robbing the bank.

3. Thomas Jane Investigates His Own Crime, in Stander (2003)

This film gets special props for being a true story, because it’s not often enough that real-life criminals are more clever than movie criminals. Thomas Jane plays a South African police Captain (named Stander), who starts robbing banks when he grows tired of his normal life. In the movie he often looks ridiculous, wearing disguises that seem straight out of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video. But his heists work out due to how unbelievable they are. Because he’s a cop, nobody suspects Stander for a long time, even when he’s recognized by a teller while leading an investigation of a robbery that he himself committed (this same irony occurred in the search for the informant “Deep Throat,” too).

2. The Joker Kills His Crew, in The Dark Knight (2008)

The opening sequence of The Dark Knight works so well on its own that it functioned almost as a pre-feature short when released as a promotional tool attached to prints of I Am Legend. Really it’s one of the greatest bank heist scenes of all time, partly because it’s so clever. The concept of a gang leader killing off his team one by one in order to acquire 100% of the haul may not be the freshest, yet it’s written and executed (no pun intended) so perfectly that the plan seems original. The cleverest thing about this heist, though, has to be the Joker’s use of a school bus as a getaway vehicle so that he may blend in with a convoy of buses leaving a school.

1. Jean-Paul Belmondo Clowns Around, in Hold-Up (1985)

We’ve actually never seen this French Canadian comedy, but it was remade as one of our favorite Bill Murray films, Quick Change (both films are based on a novel), which we always thought had the most clever bank robbery in cinema before discovering this earlier film. So we’ll go by what we would have written for the American version and apply it to the source:

The employ of costumes in bank robberies was nothing new when Jean-Paul Belmondo and Guy Marchand wore disguises in this underrated comedy (which also stars Kim Cattrall, apparently in the Geena Davis spot), but the way the duo pulled off their costume changes was more clever than any other heist we’ve seen on the big screen, before or since. Belmondo enters a Montreal bank as a clown and seeming solo robber. Then, after letting his accomplice Marchand go free as a “hostage,” he changes into normal clothes and pretends to be a hostage, as well. In Quick Change, the way the re-disguised bank robbers get lost in the frenzy outside the bank is a little unlikely, but otherwise the plan seems smart and easy enough that once we’re sure nobody remembers either Hold-Up or its more well-known remake, we may actually try to pull it off ourselves.

Zack Godshall’s Low and Behold, which has been somewhat missing in action since premiering at Sundance 2007, screens tonight at Anthology Film Archives in New York before coming to DVD via Carnivalesque in November. Starring eventual Alexander the Last dreamboat Barlow Jacobs, who also co-wrote and produced, it’s a drama/documentary hybrid feature set in just-post-Katrina New Orleans that doesn’t always hold up in terms of narrative, but is always interesting in the frission between fact and embellishment. As I wrote when I saw it at Sundance:

Director Zach Godshall and co-writer/producer/star Barlow Jacobs incorporate documentary footage into a fictional tale of insurance adjusters in the devastated city. Jacobs plays Turner Stull, a blank-eyed young white guy who moves down to NOLA to evaluate storm damage under the tutelage of his carpetbagging uncle. Forced to traverse an unfamiliar city in which simple signposts and landmarks have been erased, making a living by delivering bad news to a seemingly endless stream of justifiably angry folks, Turner strikes up an uneasy friendship with an enigmatic black man named Nixon. This unlikely pair spends the bulk of the film driving around, attending to Turner’s insurance appointments and searching for Nixon’s lost dog. Their convergent quests may be a little too convenient, yet the set-up works. The actors, particularly Robert Longstreet as Turner’s uncle, are continuously engrossing, and the survivor interviews never fail to astound. Though less interested in mounting an investigation or assigning blame, Low and Behold is just as affecting as Spike Lee’s Where The Levees Broke–sometimes more so.

Low and Behold is the second feature on a bill that starts at 6pm. More info here.

Are you tired of all the false rumors of celebrity deaths (today it was Rick Astley)? And are you tired of all the jokes that Michael Jackson is really still alive somewhere, hanging out with Tupac, JFK and Elvis? So are we, but we thought we’d take both the obnoxious death hoax trend and the idea that MJ faked it so he could live in peace and out of debt as inspiration for something more worthwhile: a discussion of favorite false deaths in movies.

The device is quite popular, especially in thrillers and horror flicks, and it can be employed as a plot starter or in a twist ending. James Bond has done it, as has Sherlock Holmes. Whether someone fakes his/her own death or is simply mistaken for dead, the actual deed or the ultimate reveal can end up terrific cinema. In fact, it was very difficult for us to narrow our favorites down to ten. It’s a shame we had to leave out memorable scenes from Heathers, Hero and many other movies. Certainly you’ll disagree with some of our exclusions, too, so feel free to name them in the comments section.

Just beware; there may be SPOILERS after the jump:

10. Irene Dunne Survived the Shipwreck in My Favorite Wife (1940)

Nick’s wife, Ellen, has been missing for seven years after a shipwreck and is presumed dead. Of course, just when he finally declares her deceased and tries to move on by marrying someone else, Ellen returns, having been only stranded on a desert island all those years. Madcap screwball comedy ensues. The hilarious reveal comes early on, though, when Ellen (played by Irene Dunne) shows up at the new couple’s honeymoon hotel and causes Nick (Cary Grant) to do a stunned and tilting extended take while an elevator door slowly eliminates his view of his supposed-to-be dead first (and favorite) wife (Dunne). The situation was slightly combined with Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train for the plot of Throw Momma from the Train, except that the (ex-) wife who ends up actually alive in that film was not nearly so beloved.

9. The Body on the Floor is Not a Corpse in Saw (2004)

We aren’t exactly fans of the franchise (we’ve only seen this first installment), but the reveal at the end of the original Saw is amazing. Throughout the horror film, which is set primarily in a dirty bathroom occupied by two chained-up men forced into a morality game, there is a seemingly dead corpse lying in the middle of the floor. But ultimately the body gets up off the ground and turns out to be the mastermind, the “Jigsaw Killer.” Do we buy that anyone could remain that still for so long? Not exactly, but it’s a neat trick and plot twist nevertheless.

8. Rock Hudson is a Human Reboot in Seconds (1966)

Sometimes we wish that Hollywood would come along and reboot our lives the way they reboot film franchises. Seconds is kind of like that, as it involves a company that gives people second chances by faking their deaths and transforming their appearance. The film’s protagonist goes through the process of becoming a “reborn” and receives the face of Rock Hudson, which is a pretty good deal no matter how much the service cost. But in a kind of It’s a Wonderful Life way, the character decides that he wants his old life back. Unfortunately, unlike George Bailey, he’s technically already gone through with the “suicide,” and it’s not so easy for a change of heart.

7. Jack Nicholson Swapped Identities in The Passenger (1975)

Somewhat akin to the concept of Seconds, only less sci-fi, a TV journalist (Nicholson) assumes the identity of a dead man who has been staying at the same small African hotel, and he reports his own death instead. A word of advice learned from this Michelangelo Antonioni film, though: when picking a new life, choose one that isn’t so criminal and hated as a gunrunner. Also, don’t be surprised if your wife comes looking for the person you’re pretending to be in order to find out what happened to “you.”

6. The Dead Woman Wasn’t Laura in Laura (1944)

It’s a common narrative idea to have a detective become obsessed (even fall for) the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating. It’s not as common, though, for that woman to suddenly show up alive, the way Laura (Gene Tierney) does in Otto Preminger’s classic film noir. Where has she been all this time? Oh, up in the country where there are no newspapers or any other means of her hearing that she’s apparently been killed. And the body that was found dead in Laura’s apartment? Oh, that was another woman Laura’s fiancée was seeing on the side. The revelation scene here is great because both the detective (Dana Andrews) and the non-dead character are in shock — he because she’s alive and she because she’s “dead.”

5. Jerry Orbach’s Assassination is Staged in F/X (1986)

Mobster’s deaths are often faked in the movies, but in this film the feds get smart and hire a special effects artist from Hollywood to make the assassination look realistic. The twist here is that for a while the artist (Bryan Brown) thinks the supposed-to-be fake shooting was real after all, and he has been framed as the killer. But then it turns out the mobster (Orbach) is indeed still alive. But then he’s killed for real. But then the effects artist takes on the guy’s identity, so it seems he’s still alive. The movie isn’t really as confusing as it sounds.

4. The Floating Body is a Special Effect in April Fool’s Day (1986)

1986 was a good year for movies involving deaths faked by fictional special effects artists. In this prank of a slasher film, based somewhat off Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None, nobody really dies. We find out in the end that everyone’s murder has been faked with great detail by a hostess and her hired effects team. Technically that means that April Fool’s Day counts for more than one false death, so we picked the inaugural death as the single false death, because it is the one that sets the fear and mystery in motion (well, really, the guy crushed by the boat does this, but he doesn’t “die,” so we can’t use him). The movie was remade last year for a direct-to-video release, but apparently there are a few actual deaths in that one.

3. Kim Novak Only Plays One Person in Vertigo (1958)

We never fully bought this Hitchcock classic when we were young, and even though we grew to love it and appreciate it, the premise is still a little ridiculous. Obviously Judy Barton is the same person as Madeleine Elster, who seemingly jumped/fell to her death from a bell tower earlier. She’s played by Kim Novak, too, and looks so much like the other person, even if her hair and clothes aren’t the same. But people in movies (even James Stewart) don’t always recognize disguised persons so easily, especially if they think they saw the person die. Of course, that minor issue can be set aside for the sake of the story and its themes, but just barely.

2. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Digitally Killed Off in The Running Man (1987)

One year after F/X and April Fool’s Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in this sci-fi action flick about a violent game show that kills off convicted criminals for the entertainment of civilians. And like those two movies, it employs the idea of special effects for false deaths. When it appears that one particular contestant (Schwarzenegger) can’t lose, the show’s host (Richard Dawson) stages the guy’s gruesome death using CGI. Of course, the unstoppable running man can do more than not lose, he can win, and that consists of killing the game show host and proving that he’s alive and innocent to the viewers at home (or wherever). Never mind that there’s a second person (María Conchita Alonso) whose death is faked in that CGI sequence; if she hadn’t been with Schwarzenegger she would have died for real anyway.

1. Harry Lime is Hiding in the Shadows in The Third Man (1949)

Probably the most famous reveal ever that a character is living, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who supposedly died of a broken neck after being hit by a truck, stands in a shadowed doorway but is identified when a spot of light briefly illuminates his face. This one couldn’t possibly be a spoiler for anyone due to how iconic it is.

Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger, the Robin Hood of Depression America, on the lam from a fledgling FBI led from a desk by J. Edgar Hoover (an unrecognizable Billy Crudup) and on the ground by Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale, on growling Batman autopilot). Dillinger meets a girl named Billie (Marion Cotillard) in a Chicago nightclub and decides, on the spot, that she’s going to be his girl; she resists a bit but he’s kind of a bully, and she kind of likes it, so soon they’re having epic, virtually abstract sex. Then there’s a bunch of shooting and running around — half the time, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, partially because I could barely see it, partially because I could scarcely understand the dialogue, much of it mumbled and/or drowned in score — but eventually Billie ends up in jail. She won’t snitch on “my man Johnny.”  Spoiler alert: Batman finds him anyway.

Depp interprets Dillinger as a nattily-dressed gentleman murderer/celebrity thief with a fraction of the winking zeal he brought to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. If those films stand as examples of how rote genre exercises are sometimes the best vehicles for balls-to-the-wall star power, Public Enemies has the inverse problem: the style and structure of the film mutes its megastar, reducing him to an image mostly devoid of personality. This is not necessarily an unexpected direction for Mann: Miami Vice, though arguably more inspired by the music video-as-emotional-placeholder ethos of the original TV series, featured two lead performances that worked on a purely visual level … in large part because Colin Farrell and Gong Li were both tasked with linguistic challenges that they could not meet. Casting women who cannot speak English intelligibly seems to be a growing trademark of Michael Mann films: in Enemies, Cotillard tries out a handful of accents, none of them convincing for an American coat check girl circa 1933. Increasingly, Mann seems to be making movies that might be better off silent.
As far as I could tell, Public Enemies tells us that there’s a Depression going on in two ways: with very occasional visual reminders, such as an image of a hobo slumped in front of a palatial bank that Dillinger is about to rob, and with a title on the screen. Otherwise, this is pure 1930s movie escapism, which would be fine if Spinotti’s camera was up to the task of capturing the contrast between the glitzy dance halls where Dillinger plays and the scrappy climes in which he hides. Instead, both poles are flattened out, and whatever tension could conceivably be milked from a story with a long-proscribed ending collapses in kind.
But there is one area in which Public Enemies nods to the gangster movies of old that does succeed. The gangster myth, especially as manifested in the 1930s flicks that reinforced the fame of someone like Dillinger in his own time, only works if the gangster and his lifestyle are linked to love and desire. Being sexy is not something that Johnny Depp has to work at; this is something that just requires Johnny Depp to show up. Though Cotillard is not convincing as a US Citizen, she would have to work much harder than she does to be unconvincing as a woman in love with Johnny Depp. The romance between Dillinger and Billie does what gangster romances are supposed to do: it humanizes the criminal and demonizes the cops and the feds who are trying to keep the lovers apart. The best moments in Public Enemies — a brutally violent interrogation scene in which Billie is humiliated in virtually every way short of rape, a scene where Dillinger takes a casual walk through the office of the men who are trying to jail him — have a kind of surreal quality, in which the boy and girl, embolded by a passion that’s making them crazy, are driven to test what they can get away with. It’s because of these moments that Public Enemies can’t be called a complete failure, or even a must-avoid. It’s not a bad film, it’s just badly made.

Apparently three-time Oscar nominee Michelle Pfeiffer has been relegated to playing only “cougars.” The slang term has been used heavily to describe the actress’ latest character, a Parisian courtesan who has an affair with a pretty boy half her age (Rupert Friend). But just prior to appearing in Chéri, which reunites her with the Dangerous Liaisons writer-director team-up of Christopher Hampton and Stephen Frears, Pfeiffer starred in two direct-to-video releases in which she similarly ends up with a much younger guy. In Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman she falls for Paul Rudd, while in Personal Effects she has an affair with Ashton Kutcher (ironic since Heckerling’s film takes shots at Kutcher’s marriage to real-life “cougar” Demi Moore).

The term “cougar” has some negative connotations, which is a shame given all the movies we see in which an older man romances a younger woman and think nothing of it. But it’s good to see Pfeiffer still getting work at her age (51), especially in roles celebrating the idea that older women can still be desirable. And in our opinion she’s every bit as desirable as she was at age 25, when she broke through with her sexy appearance in Scarface.

Below we spotlight ten other actresses/characters who’ve shown us that aging women can still be very attractive to young men.

10. Margaret Whitton as “Vera Prescott” in The Secret of My Succe$s (1987)

At 37, Whitton is a little young for this list, but she seems much older in the traditional role of the sexy boss’ wife who falls for an employee (Michael J. Fox) at her husband’s company. Things are a little more complicated than normal because she’s also the young man’s Aunt, though she doesn’t see the harm since they’re only related by marriage, not blood. Personally, aunt or not, we’d have gone for the kinky Whitton over the boring Helen Slater. At least she’s not his mother.

9. Jennifer Coolidge as “Stifler’s Mom” in American Pie series (1999 - 2003)

Having your own mother come on to you is totally wrong (even if you’re French), but your friend’s mom is another story. Coolidge was the original MILF, or at least the woman who popularized the term. Despite being under 40, the character (whose first name is revealed to be “Janine” in the second installment) is still classifiable as a “cougar,” even if it was Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) who technically seduced her. She certainly fits the term in the sequels, at least, when she’s over 40 and coming back for more.

8. Isabelle Huppert as “Erika Kohut” in The Piano Teacher (2001)

We may not be able to count her incestuous mother character in Ma mère as a “cougar,” but Huppert definitely fits the bill in this Michael Haneke film, in which she plays a piano teacher who becomes obsessed with her 17-year-old pupil. Teacher-student relationships are one of the more common for “cougar” movies (see also Jacqueline Bisset in Class and Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal for more such educational “cougars”), but music tutors tend to be the hottest, due to the kind of close contact involved. In this film her character is quite awkward (she still lives with her domineering mother) and the whole masochism thing can be very discomforting, but Huppert has a way of being sexy even in the most abnormal of ways (that mud scene in I Heart Huckabees shouldn’t turn us on as much as it does). Just as long as she’s not hooking up with her son.

7. Lauren Hutton as “Countess” in Once Bitten (1985)

As a seductive female vampire, Hutton’s character is an obvious play on the term “vamp.” But now that we have the term “cougar,” she is retroactively classified as that too, since she specifically seeks out virginal young men like Jim Carrey. As a vampire, she’s also the closest thing to a real cougar, since she takes a bite out of her victims partners.

6. Cloris Leachman as “Ruth Popper” in The Last Picture Show (1971)

We’ve mentioned older women who were the boss’ wife and older women who were teachers, but Leachman’s Oscar-winning role in The Last Picture Show crosses the two by being the teacher’s wife (well, her husband is the high school basketball coach). She may be depressed, but she’s also quite sexy and doesn’t deserve to be treated as bad as she is by her teenage lover (Timothy Bottoms). Of course, part of our consideration of Leachman’s hotness has to do with her real-life persona — foul mouth, semi-nude magazine covers and all.

5. Bebe Neuwirth as “Diane Lodder” in Tadpole (2002)

We may have been weird for having a thing for “Lilith” growing up watching Cheers, but there’s something very attractive about a domineering older woman when you’re a teenage boy. And yet in Tadpole Neuwirth is only a second choice for 15-year-old “Oscar” (Aaron Stanford), who is actually in love with his stepmother (Sigourney Weaver). Supposedly Oscar only has sex with Diane, his stepmother’s best friend, because he was drunk and she was wearing the stepmother’s scarf (and therefore smelled like her). But we can’t believe any sober kid would pass up Neuwirth’s advances, especially not after she gives him a massage.

4. Karen Young as “Brenda” in Heading South (2005)

To be fair, Young shares this slot with Charlotte Rampling and Louise Portal, her costars in Laurent Cantet’s film about three middle-age women who go to Haiti to have sex with young locals. But Young is the hottest (not necessarily because she’s the youngest) of the trio, probably because she’s the more reserved one and therefore has the most room to open up and get wild with the concept of sex tourism.

3. Jane Seymour as “Kathleen ‘Kitty Kat’ Cleary” in Wedding Crashers (2005)

We’re not sure when or where the term “cougar” originated, but we likely first heard it when used to describe Seymour’s character in this movie. Her nickname, “Kitty Kat” has to be a reference to the term, too. In any event, she’s a hot older woman (also a MILF) who just “had her tits done” and won’t let her younger prey (Owen Wilson) out of the room until he’s felt them. This could be the extent of her interest but it has to qualify, as it is a form of seduction. Also, Seymour is super hot for being in her 50s, even if her character is a bit creepy.

2. Kim Basinger as “Marion Cole” in The Door in the Floor (2004)

Talk about a hot woman in her 50s, Basinger is like Pfeiffer in that she still looks as good now as she did in the ‘80s. As “Marion Cole,” she’s somewhat an amalgam of other “cougar” roles, including the unlisted (but referenced) maternally incestuous ones. She’s also kind of the boss’ wife. Her young lover is her (temporarily separated) husband’s assistant, who has been hired because of his resemblance to their dead son. But complicated and disturbing motivations aside, no kid could say no if ever seduced by a “cougar” as hot as Basinger.

1. Anne Bancroft as “Mrs. Robinson” in The Graduate (1967)

Obviously the top spot on the list goes to the original “cougar,” “Mrs. Robinson.” When we think of young men being with older women we immediately recall the famous seduction scene from The Graduate. Indeed the seduction of “Stifler’s Mom” in American Pie occurs while the song “Mrs. Robinson” plays on a stereo. Of course, at a mere 36-years-old, she’s a tad young to be considered a “cougar,” but there’s no debating that she not only belongs on this list but belongs in the top spot — and not just because its so iconic and pioneering a role. Bancroft was extremely hot. Just watch that seduction scene one more time. Or look at that single iconic leg of hers.