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This is a great film that received very little attention in the movie theaters when it was released in September 2008.  A romantic comedy, Ghost Town made me laugh out loud more than any movie I can recall seeing in the last year or so.  This is due largely to the work of Ricky Gervais, Tea Leoni and Greg Kinnear, as well as the finely crafted screenplay by David Koepp and John Kamps.  David Koepp also directed the film and wisely eschews an over-reliance on special effects by focusing on the dialogue and narrative.

Ricky Gervais (star of the original British version of “The Office”) plays Bertram Pincus, a dentist who dies for about seven minutes while having a colonoscopy performed under general anesthesia.  After being revived, Pincus can now see and communicate with the ghostly inhabitants of Manhattan.  Once they discover his newly acquired abilities, the ghosts in NYC begin to seek him out to help them solve some problem or situation from their lives which keeps them from going on to their eternal rest.  In particular, Frank Herlihy (Kinnear) tries to enlist Pincus in his scheme to break up the impending marriage of his widow (Leoni) and her fiance, played by Billy Campbell.

While the plot is hardly original, the movie is a delight to watch, and Gervais is extremely funny in his role. I have always loved Leoni’s work, and I find nothing in this film to dissuade me from this opinion.  If you want an evening of laughs, along with an unconventional love story, you would do well to rent “Ghost Town” and watch it ASAP.  I give the movie nine out of ten stars.

Here’s a small snippet of dialogue from the film (courtesy of IMDB):

Bertram Pincus: Did anything usual happen during my operation?
Surgeon: You… uh… died for seven minutes.
Bertram Pincus: I died! For seven minutes!
Surgeon: We brought you right back. People die all the time.
Bertram Pincus: Yeah, but it’s usually just once… at the end.

And here is the trailer for the movie.

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