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Ghost (1990)
Rate:
9
Viewed:
9/03, 10/19
10/19:
Many actors have at most one signature film, but it's been four for Patrick Swayze:
Dirty Dancing, Road House,
Point Break, and Ghost.
A veteran producer-director of screwball comedies such as
Airplane!, Jerry Zucker never saw Patrick Swayze as
Sam Wheat, but Patrick, despite his already massive fame, wanted the role so much that he had to audition for it. Today,
it's hard to believe given Patrick Swayze had made Dirty Dancing possible which won the hearts of many women all over the
world.
After Patrick Swayze was cast, he refused to do the film until Whoopi Goldberg was given the role
of Oda Mae Brown. Nobody saw her this way. As a result, she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Honestly, who
could've done it better than Whoopi? She took Ghost to another level with her presence and comic relief.
The first twenty minutes isn't that good, but as soon as Sam Wheat is killed, the movie simply takes off. Patrick Swayze and
Demi Moore have no chemistry and reportedly had none off-screen, either. When he's transformed into a supernatural character
with the halo light around him, it saves Demi Moore from being a liability since all she had to do
was cry on cue. Otherwise, things wouldn't have worked out. Simply put, the afterlife is the best part of Ghost.
There are famous movie villains, and there are some actors who will never recover afterwards after playing them. Tony
Goldwyn and Rick Aviles are these two. I recently saw a film that starred the former and said, "Watch out, he's a bad dude,"
which proved me correct.
I've often read Ghost, the number one moneymaker of 1990 worldwide, is among top twenty romantic films made. Yet I'm
not sure if I agree with the assessment. The real question is: is it really the romance or the supernatural that did it?
I have to say it's been the latter the whole time.
Strange but true, Ghost is what I call a racist movie. Why does Willy have to be played by an ugly Puerto Rican? Why
does Oda Mae Brown, a crackpot psychic, have to be a black woman? Why do all the bad shit have to appear on the colored side
yet everything looks great on the white side of New York City? Why do I see white people as the only employees of a bank
and they're viewed as trustful? Why is Carl Bruner, a white dude, the least likely to be suspected of Sam's murder? During
the scene of body transformation, why not show Sam Wheat as Oda Mae Brown the entire time? Oh, I'm sorry, we can't be offending
people with heavy scenes of interracial, lesbian touching.
A well-known character is played by Vincent Schiavelli as the Subway Ghost. He exclaimed, after
kicking into the window of a cigarette machine, "Oh, I'd give anything for a drag! Just one drag!" Well, guess what? He died
in 2004 of lung cancer at 57 which is the same age as Patrick Swayze's when he passed away from pancreatic cancer five years
later.
All in all, thanks to Ghost, interest in pottery making shot up by over 10,000% in 1990.