the greatest movie ever made

Rating: 10/10 (9 June 2006)

Ghostbusters is hands down the greatest movie ever made. Everything about it is absolutely spectacular. There is just so much to say about it. For one, the entire cast is set in the roles they were born to play. Honestly. Bill Murray is at his comedic best. Sigourney Weaver is brilliant as a bright, independent woman and is given the added fun of being possessed for a good portion of the movie. Rick Moranis was destined to play the Uber-nerd Louis, Dan Aykroyd perfectly cast himself as a lovable, semi-naive back-up comedic effect guy to Bill Murray, and so on and so forth (I only get 1000 words). Aside from this is the fact that there is truly something magical about the whole premise. A group of guys, not super men, but just some guys, get together and decide to combat the supernatural problems of the world (well, New York). There has always been a certain aspect of this that made me feel better; the realm of moviedom, after having countless horror movie fiends and people running from said fiends, now had heroes to fight back. Everyone knows you can't do anything to fight a ghost. Until the Ghostbusters came along. What is especially fun is that with this certainly ridiculous sounding plot, the movie is executed in a completely mundane manner. If someone heard the story idea, they may think of some awful action movie or an Airplane-type absurd comedy. Instead, the whole film is done in a ho-hum type manner, with normal (enough) believable people having to save the world from certain doom. Yikes. Then, of course, we get into the fact that it really is just about the funniest comedy ever. You really can't completely appreciate everything if you watch it with someone who laughs too loud, like a drama kid or a line-reapter guy (hopefully you know the people I reference). You would just miss too much. It isn't a movie that necessarily will have a person rolling on the floor laughing at everything, but there are countless moments where, if you have the kind of sense of humor the world needs more of (and I don't mean that in some political sense or anything so don't read into me that deep), you would chuckle and think to yourself "that's funny." But again, you don't have too much time to think that, because something else funny is about to happen. Subtly. I once read someone's review on this very website that said that Ghostbusters was one of those movies that you think is good the first time you see it because you're in a theater and it all seems really big and whatnot, but isn't really that great when you go back and watch it again. This person must walk backwards or something, because that's completely opposite from the truth. And yes, I say "the truth" rather than "my opinion" because I looked it up and it is the truth.