El pueblo fantasma

Plot synopsis:
The film begins as married New York City businessman Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear) is accidentally killed while trying to buy an apartment for his mistress. Shortly afterward, cynical dentist Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) has a near-death experience while under general anesthetic during a colonoscopy. When he recovers, he is able to see and communicate with ghosts who populate the area. The ghosts annoy Bertram by asking him to help them with personal business that was left unfinished when they died. Frank promises to keep the other ghosts away if Bertram will break up an engagement between Frank's widow Gwen (Leoni), a professional Egyptologist, and Richard (Billy Campbell), a human-rights lawyer who Frank says is dishonest. Bertram eventually agrees to the deal and tries to woo Gwen away from Richard. Bertram's past rudeness to Gwen makes this difficult, but he attracts her interest by analyzing the teeth of a mummified Egyptian Pharaoh that she has been studying.
When Bertram has dinner with Gwen and Richard, he decides that Richard is not as bad as Frank claimed, but Bertram himself begins to fall in love with Gwen, and she enjoys Bertram's sense of humor. At another dinner, Gwen reveals that she learned of Frank's mistress the day he died, and when Richard visits Bertram for some dental work, Bertram drugs him with laughing gas in order to make him reveal that Gwen has broken their engagement. Frank doesn't understand why he is still on Earth if his "unfinished business" was to break up Richard and Gwen.
Gwen, not being engaged to Richard any longer, says yes to a work proposal that would send her to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt for six months. As a going-away present, Bertram gets her a new key chain from a fancy jeweler's, as she had earlier mentioned that she desperately needed one. But when he mistakenly reveals information about Gwen that only Frank could have known, she demands the truth, and Bertram tells her the whole story about the ghosts. Gwen doesn't believe him and demands to know what Frank's worst nightmare was. Frank lies to Bertram, telling him a fake nightmare, and Gwen, thinking that Bertram has been lying to her and playing some kind of game, walks away and cuts him off. Bertram demands to know why Frank lied to him about the nightmare, and Frank points out that Bertram only cares about his own needs.
Bertram sinks into a depression and asks a fellow dentist (Aasif Mandvi), for medication that will help him forget Gwen. His colleague instead convinces him that his life would be better if he decided to stop being selfish and start helping people. Bertram begins helping the ghosts around him with their "unfinished business" on Earth, bringing comfort to people they left behind and enabling the ghosts to depart. As he does this he realizes that the ghosts were still on Earth not because they had unfinished business, but because the people they were close to were not finished with them. He begins to appreciate life and the people he encounters.
Bertram realizes that the reason Frank cannot leave is that Gwen has not let go of him yet. He confronts Gwen who asks him to ask Frank why she wasn't enough for him, and Frank says he's sorry for hurting her, which Bertram tells Gwen. Gwen is incredulous that after his infidelity, all Frank would have to say was 'sorry' and thinks that Bertram is making it all up. He rushes after her and while trying to persuade her to believe him, gets hit by a bus. Bertram, now a ghost himself, watches with Frank as people crowd around his body and Gwen sobs over him. Richard arrives on his way to the reception and tries to revive Bertram with prayer and CPR. Seeing how distraught Gwen is, Frank gives Bertram 'some advice' that will be useful in case he is resuscitated, and tells him that Gwen's tears are for Bertram, in other words she loves him. After saying this, Frank is finally allowed to leave the earthly plane.
Bertram wakes up alive in the hospital. Later Gwen, who needs dental work, comes in for an appointment with another dentist but finds Bertram's office to say hello. Bertram tells Gwen of Frank's real nightmare—that of losing his way home, which was the advice Frank told him, and then assures her that Frank has 'found his way home.' The movie ends with Gwen saying, "It hurts when I smile", to which Bertram replies "I can fix that for you".

Tags: revenge

Review:
A mad Mexican mix of western cliché and vampire lore. A mysterious gunslinger called the Rio Kid appears out of nowhere to kill any hombre foolish enough to boast that he's the fastest draw in the Mexican west and Texan, the son of an infamous bandido, sets out to track down the phantom and redeem his family's honor. Joining him on his quest are Nestor, an old-timer seeking revenge after doing a long prison stretch because of the Kid and the Rivero brothers, who want to make a name for themselves as gunfighters. They converge on San Jose, a ghost town held in a grip of fear by the Kid, and soon find out they're up against the supernatural...These atmospheric, black and white antics are a classic example of south-of-the-border insanity, an outré blend of Western clichés and vampire lore. The Rio Kid is a handsome black-clad devil two centuries old who tracks down trigger-happy outlaws so he can drink their blood (thus ingesting their prowess) and is something of a frightful folk hero (he even saves a gypsy girl from rape) until the few remaining townspeople discover the awful truth. Some plot threads wouldn't have been out of place in a straight western, including the romantic rivalry between Texan, a hero-in-the-making who has to live down accusations of cowardice, and the fiancé of Nestor's daughter as well as the timeless themes of revenge and the reclamation of a town under the thumb of a bad man. There's also quite a few Universal horror clichés as well: the tavern on the edge of town is full of superstitious locals warning strangers not to go out at night and the Kid, who can change into a bat at will, rises from his cemetery crypt nightly and can't see his reflection in a mirror. His fangs hang down to his chin when feeding and there's silver bullets, stakes through the heart, and a gypsy wagon with an old blind man whose dancing daughter falls under the vampire's spell as well. There's also a song, "The Ballad Of Manuel Saldivar", that's sung throughout the movie and it makes Texan very upset whenever he hears it because it's about his father -he single-handedly beats up a mariachi band who plays it and almost has a breakdown when the gypsy girl does a rendition. The movie plays -and looks- like a DESTRY-themed episode of GUNSMOKE with a vampire and it's a most amusing way to spend an hour-and-a-half, that's for sure.