Skip to main content

REVIEW: We Have a Ghost

    In the long, storied history of ghost movies, one must face the question of how to present said specter. Are they like Casper the Friendly Ghost, or are they more in the vein of the spirits from Poltergeist? The best thing that can be said about Netflix's new film, We Have a Ghost, is that the spook at the center of an otherwise confused film is consistently endearing.

    Ernest tries the more sinister act on the Presley family when they move in to his haunt of fifty years, but their youngest, Kevin, is non-plussed. "That probably worked on everyone else before," Kevin explains, "but my life is like 1,000 times scarier than this." We have no idea what he means when he says this, of course. Aside from some non-specific comments about the family having needed an undisclosed number of "fresh starts," we know nothing at this point about this mystery trauma plaguing Kevin. Even now I am struggling to remember. It may have had something to do with his dad throwing a temper tantrum in a bowling alley. 

    Kevin captures his first encounter with Ernest on video, and when it goes viral, Ernest becomes an internet sensation, attracting the attention of the neighbors, the media, and paranormal investigators. As the attention mounts, so does Kevin's determination to find out what happened to Ernest and help him to ease into the afterlife.

   There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the film's premise. We've seen plenty of stories about loveable haunts and misplaced youths at odds with their family. The problem is that We Have a Ghost borrows pieces from all of them but gives no thought how to make them all congeal. Its flavor is some awkward blending of E.T. and Warm Bodies.

    David Harbour's ghost has all the frights of Goofy playing Jacob Marley in the Disney adaptation of "A Christmas Carol." Not an invalid choice, and here I think a deliberate one. This might read as perfectly viable within a film that is squarely for a family audience with a child protagonist, but played against a disillusioned high-schooler, the entire charade falls flat.

    (For those curious about where such a confused movie does land for a family audience, know that there is a scene where the flesh on Ernest's face melts off in front of a lot of people--comically, but graphically. Take that as you will.)

   For a film that lampoons the performativity of society, We Have a Ghost itself errs on the side of cynical. This is most noticeable in the final two thirds of the film when Ernest becomes an internet celebrity and we are treated to a train of Tik Toks showering him with hashtags and hot takes. (The best of these was easily the dude pontificating that "Just because you're made of matter, doesn't mean you don't matter.") The film makes a bid for relevance by musing about the insincerity of the modern world, and this is where Ernest's story would have really benefited from a character or two who can much his heartfelt openness, not a teen who within five minutes of meeting him compares him to a stripper.

    None of the cast particularly thrive in this setup, though Harbour shows an impressive versatility in a role that is almost entirely pantomime. Jahi Di'Allo Winston sells Kevin as a sullen teenager well enough, but I never bought into Anthony Mackie as a father caught between the love of his family and the love of ... social media? Capital? Again, despite his large carving of screentime, the father almost feels like less of a presence than the literal ghost. Perhaps that was meant as a deliberate commentary? 

    The film shows off a goofier side of Harbour, which many fans will delight in, and there are some fun set pieces with Ernest's ghostly antics that were probably fun to film, but otherwise the film's most notable talking point is probably the combover from purgatory.

    --The Professor




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What Does the World Owe Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

             When I say “first animated feature-film” what comes to mind?             If you’ve been paying attention to any channel of pop culture, and even whether or not you are on board with the Disney mythology, then you know that Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first ever full-length animated film. (Kinda. The Adventures of Prince Achmed made use of paper-puppetry way back in 1926, but that wasn’t quite the trendsetter that “Snow White” was.) You might even know about all the newspapers calling the film “Disney’s folly” or even specific anecdotes like that there somewhere around fifty different proposed names for the seven dwarfs (#justiceforGassy).  DC League of Super-Pets (2022)           But in popular discourse, l ots of people will discuss Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as little more than a necessary icebreake...

REVIEW: ONWARD

     The Walt Disney Company as a whole seems to be in constant danger of being overtaken by its own cannibalistic tendency--cashing in on the successes of their past hits at the expense of creating the kinds of stories that merited these reimaginings to begin with. Pixar, coming fresh off a decade marked by a deluge of sequels, is certainly susceptible to this pattern as well. Though movies like Inside Out and Coco have helped breathe necessary life into the studio, audiences invested in the creative lifeblood of the studio should take note when an opportunity comes for either Disney or Pixar animation to flex their creative muscles. This year we'll have three such opportunities between the two studios. [EDIT: Okay, maybe not. Thanks, Corona.] The first of these, ONWARD directed by Dan Scanlon, opens this weekend and paints a hopeful picture of a future where Pixar allows empathetic and novel storytelling to guide its output.      The film imag...

REVIEW: Snow White

     Here's a story:       When developing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , one of the hardest scenes to nail was the sequence in which the young princess is out in the meadow and she sees a lost bird who has been separated from its family. As she goes to console it, The Huntsman starts toward her, intent to fulfill The Evil Queen's orders to kill the princess and bring back her heart. The animators turned over every stone trying to figure out how to pull off this episode. They went back and forth about how slow he would creep up on her. When would he bring out the knife? When would the shadow fall on her? One of the animators reportedly asked at one point, "But won't she get hurt?"       That was the moment when Walt's team knew they had succeeded at their base directive to create pathos and integrity within the form of animation--to get audiences to care about a cartoon, such that they would worry that this tender-hearted girl wa...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 25 Most Essential Movies of the Century

       "Best." "Favorite." "Awesomest." I spent a while trying to land on which adjective best suited the purposes of this list. After all, the methods and criteria with which we measure goodness in film vary wildly. "Favorite" is different than "Best," but I would never put a movie under "Best" that I don't at least like. And any film critic will tell you that their favorite films are inevitably also the best films anyways ...      But here at the quarter-century mark, I wanted to give  some  kind of space to reflect on which films are really deserving of celebration. Which films ought to be discussed as classics in the years ahead. So ... let's just say these are the films of the 21st century that I want future champions of the film world--critics and craftsmen--to be familiar with.  Sian Hader directing the cast of  CODA (2021)     There are a billion or so ways to measure a film's merit--its technical perfectio...

REVIEW: The Electric State

     It's out with the 80s and into the 90s for Stranger Things alum Millie Bobby Brown.       In a post-apocalyptic 1990s, Michelle is wilting under the neglectful care of her foster father while brooding over the death of her family, including her genius younger brother. It almost seems like magic when a robotic representation of her brother's favorite cartoon character shows up at her door claiming to be an avatar for her long-lost brother. Her adventure to find him will take her deep into the quarantine zone for the defeated robots and see her teaming up with an ex-soldier and a slew of discarded machines. What starts as a journey to bring her family back ends up taking her to the heart of the conflict that tore her world apart to begin with.      This is a very busy movie, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons. There is, for example, heavy discussion on using robots as a stand-in for historically marginalized groups. I'll have ...

REVIEW: Mickey 17

Coming into Mickey 17 having not read the source material by Edward Ashton, I can easily see why this movie spoke to the sensibilities of Bong Joon Ho, particularly in the wake of his historic Academy Award win five years ago. Published in 2022, it feels like Ashton could have been doing his Oscars homework when he conceived of the story--a sort of mashup of Parasite , Aliens , and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times . Desperate to escape planet earth, Mickey applies for a special assignment as an "expendable," a person whose sole requirement is to perform tasks too dangerous for normal consideration--the kind that absolutely arise in an outer space voyage to colonize other planets. It is expected that Mickey expire during his line of duty, but never fear. The computer has all his data and can simply reproduce him in the lab the next day for his next assignment. Rinse and repeat. It's a system that we are assured cannot fail ... until of course it does.  I'll admit my ...

The Paradox of The Graduate

     If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces.       But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like  The Graduate .      I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since.      But what's int...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

     Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in.      We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself. Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses. Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thi...

REVIEW: Cruella

  The train of Disney remakes typically inspires little awe from the cinephilia elite, but the studio's latest offering, "Cruella," shows more curiosity and ambition than the standard plug and chug reboot. This may have just been Bob Iger checking 1961's "101 Dalmatians" off the list of properties to exploit, but with the film's clever design, writing, and performances, director Craig Gillespie accidentally made the rare remix worth a second glance. This prequel tracks the devilish diva's history all the way back to her childhood. When primary school-aged "Estella" witnesses the death of her doting mother, her fiery, nonconformist spirit becomes her greatest asset. This will carry her into adulthood when she finally assimilates herself into the alluring world of fashion and the path of the indominatable "Baronness" who holds a strangling grip on the landscape. Their odd mentorship melts into something twisted and volatile as Estel...

REVIEW: Ezra

     I actually had a conversation with a colleague some weeks ago about the movie, Rain Man , a thoughtful drama from thirty years ago that helped catapult widespread interest in the subject of autism and neurodivergence. We took a mutual delight in how the film opened doors and allowed for greater in-depth study for an underrepresented segment of the community ... while also acknowledging that, having now opened those very doors, it is easy to see where Rain Man 's representation couldn't help but distort and sensationalize the community it aimed to champion. And I now want to find this guy again and see what he has to say about Tony Goldwyn's new movie, Ezra .       The movie sees standup comedian and divorced dad, Max (Bobby Cannavale), at a crossroads with how to raise his autistic son, the titular Ezra (William Fitzgerald), with his ex-wife, Jenna (Rose Byrne). As Jenna pushes to give Ezra more specialized attention, like pulling him out of publ...