I held a Bill Murray double-bill in my living room yesterday: Ghostbusters, followed by Rushmore. My, how his Ironic Preeminence has changed (grown?) in fifteen years. Peter Venkman and Herman Blume are opposing characters, of course, but something else is different--evolved: the Murray of Rushmore looks like he's listening to his fellow actors instead of performing a modified stand-up routine.

If memory serves, the last time I saw Ghostbusters was just before the release of its dreadful sequel. The original is a sentimental favourite of mine; I must have indulged in the film and its soundtrack (on audio cassette!) at least a few dozen times apiece between 1984 and 1989. I looked forward to popping Columbia's new special edition Ghostbusters DVD in the player for a stroll down memory lane, and indeed, this latest viewing was accompanied by a flood of childhood remembrances.

Murray is Venkman, Dan Aykroyd is Ray Stantz, and Harold Ramis is Egon Spengler--these three funny-named paranormal researchers go into the ghost-extermination business together. Their first client is an attractive symphony muscian named Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver); unbeknownst to her, she lives in "Spook Central," a building on the verge of possession by an ancient spirit named Gozer. (Dana enlists their help because her kitchen is haunted.) Between zapping and trapping spirits all over the Big Apple with his coworkers, Venkman tends to Dana's case alone, his sexual interests at heart.

The cast, which includes Rick Moranis as a nerdy accountant and Ernie Hudson as the much-maligned fourth Ghostbuster, is uniformly exceptional. (Moranis is my personal favourite of the bunch--it's a silly gem of a performance.) Aykroyd has an aw-shucks quality that's charming, while Ramis is appealingly square. That Egon is also the most effortlessly fashionable team member will amuse those who recall the "She Blinded Me With Science"/"Hip To Be Square"-era of Ghostbusters' initial release.

The highlight of the film for me as a kid was the Dana-Venkman romance, a subplot I now feel rings completely false. Venkman genuinely repels Dana in their early moments together, and I think Murray overplays his obnoxious hand when he's with Weaver. Dana kicks Venkman out of her apartment when he runs out of pick-up lines; several sequences later, having not spoken with him since, she runs into Venkman on the street and, rather curiously, agrees to meet him for dinner, a date she's apparently so proud to have that she tells her mother about it. There's suggestion that she's seduced by his fame--the Ghostbusters logo and crew are omnipresent in the media after a few successful jobs--but it doesn't jibe with Dana's arsty-fartsiness. As a nine-year-old, I glossed over the unlikelihood of their courtship. As an adult, I wished Murray would say one thing to her that wasn't laced with smarm. One thing.

Murray fares better in the other sections of Ghostbusters . He has terrific chemistry with the men in the movie, right down to the hapless student Venkman electrocutes during a hilarious ESP test. And he's very funny in the final reel, his consistently nonchalant attitude towards increasingly frightening situations bordering on and then delightfully surpassing the absurd. (Venkman's encounter with the alluring but dangerous "Gatekeeper" is classic comedy, the brightest example of Murray's mock-machismo that comes to mind.)

Regular readers of FILM FREAK CENTRAL know that Rushmore was my choice for the best film of 1998. (Some of you were confused, since the picture did not receive a wide release until February of this year.) One of Rushmore's many comic pleasures--perhaps its greatest--is Murray. His wry portrayal of disimpassioned millionaire Herman Blume may bear the mark of maturity, but he proved long ago, with an unbilled supporting turn in Tootsie, that he's willing to blend into the background when necessary. As Blume, Murray conveys hate for his dumb sons with an empty gaze, love for a headstrong teacher with an almost identical look, and his devotion to a fifteen-year-old overachiver called Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is super-endearing. When Blume dives into a pool and holds himself underwater in, one supposes, a half-hearted contemplation of suicide (a la Benjamin in The Graduate--and Rushmore's similarities to that coiled coming-of-age movie don't end there), his gestures are inimitably riotous. Murray's cyncism is unfiltered again at last in Rushmore, only this time it's tempered with world-weariness.

In the film's opening scene, Max (Jason Schwartzman), a veteran student of Rushmore Academy, awakens from a particularly self-aggrandizing dream while a school assembly is unspooling before him. A new guest stands at the lectern: Blume, a low-key tycoon whose bizarre, hostile, inspired speech prevents Max from falling back to sleep. Blume becomes his idol, and everywhere one expects Rushmore to go from its obvious opening fantasy sequence the filmmakers avoid like the plague. The movie is anything but predictable and nothing less than brilliant, a masterpiece that would have won Best Picture, or at least an Oscar nomination for Murray, in a perfect world.

Max's grades are plummeting, because he has dedicated himself to countless extracurricular activities. (His favourite is Drama Club, and his plays are jocosely earnest adaptations of Hollywood grist.) Rushmore is not so much an academic institution for Max as it is an outlet for his gregariousness and impetuousness. Max also relentlessly pursues primary teacher Miss Rosemary Cross (radiant Olivia Williams, permitted use of her British accent again after playing The Postman's American girlfriend); with the assistance of steel investor Blume, Max plans to erect a giant aquarium in her honour. Rosemary, quite a few years Max's senior and a widower to boot, barely entertains the dreamer's affections, eventually growing to prefer the company of "unimaginative" Blume.

A colourful bouquet of supporting characters surrounds the three leads, from Max's trusty peewee messenger (Mason Gamble) to John Cassavetes veteran Seymour Cassel as Max's gentle barber father, whom Max shuns publicly, wishing his was a blueblood heritage. (Max attends Rushmore on scholarship and keeps his social status under wraps.) I should mention that Schwartzman's performance is so pitch-perfect that I wondered if Rushmore had been scripted as a showcase for this unknown's hidden talents. (The answer is "no," according to director Wes Anderson.) Research uncovers that Schwartzman is the son of Talia Shire (Rocky's Adrian and sister to Francis Coppola). No other member of Schwartzman's legendary family has hit it so thoroughly out of the park their first time at bat. Schwartzman is a gifted actor and, importantly, he physically resembles the clever guys we go to high school with rather than, say, Leonardo DiCaprio. Meet the anti-teen idol, and revel in this young man's inspiring debut.

Congratulations to Anderson, co-writer Owen Wilson (who can be seen as the blonde guy in Armageddon), and co. for crafting a gorgeous (their visual inspirations were not, refreshingly,other teen movies, but, again, The Graduate, and Barry Lyndon), confident, and utterly unique comedy. Rushmore is thrilling in its inventiveness and heart-warming in its sweetness of tone. Though I was disappointed by their previous effort, the aimless, wispy Bottle Rocket, both movies demonstrate that Anderson and Wilson are hopeless romantics and connoisseurs of cinema.

If only Buena Vista had put the kind of effort into their Rushmore disc that Columbia Tri-Star did for the dual-layered Ghostbusters Collector's Series DVD. The latter not only contains a spectacular new widescreen (2.35:1, 16x9 enhanced) transfer that bests all previous video versions (plus a Dolby Digital remix that sparkles), but also a host of impressive extras. On the negative side, Ghostbusters' colours are a tad muted; the DVD's audio (how wonderful it was to re-experience such crappy-catchy songs as "Savin' the Day" in 5.1!) lacks bottom end, though at least the new mix is full of nifty surround effects. (When Louis (Moranis) is attacked outside Tavern on the Green ("I think I've got a Milkbone!"), listen for creepy growling in the rears.)

Only two weeks after their fantastic Taxi Driver: Collector's Edition DVD, CT-S has upped the ante for supplemental material with Ghostbusters. The first thing I did after viewing the film was sample its "live" video commentary by co-producer Joe Medjuck, Ramis, and Reitman, which looks like this (please excuse the poor quality of this capture):

From left: Medjuck, Ramis,and Reitman

Because it's housed on the subtitle track, one can toggle the silhouettes of the three players while listening to them yap away about the production. (To owners of widescreen sets: the "live" commentary will unfortunately not work in 16x9 mode.) I left the accompanying video on the screen--it was nice for once to not have to listen to disembodied voices.

An outtakes section is comprised of ten deleted scenes. (Actually, most of them are tail ends of scenes that did make it to the screen.) Wisely cut, all. The worst of these was "Bums": thank goodness somebody recognized that Murray and Aykroyd doing double-duty as sports-obsessed homeless people was a bad idea. (John Landis would probably disagree.) Virtually every storyboard is available on this disc for your perusal, with select scenes--"Dog Drags Dana"--split-screen compared with the final product. Along those lines, one can also access plenty of production photos and conceptual drawings.

Despite Reitman's dismissal of many of Ghostbusters' opticals as "cheesy" elsewhere on the DVD, Richard Edlund and his hard-working F/X team give us fifteen minutes worth of anecdotes in a behind-the-scenes featurette. (Be sure to check out the multi-angle before-and-after special effects demonstration.) There are two more featurettes: a retrospective (minus the participation of Murray and Weaver) and a 1984 EPK that's actually a lot of fun.

I've saved the best for last: the most addictive inclusion of this package is a series of production-note subtitles--you can choose to run these highly informative making-of tidbits throughout the feature. Imagine a "Pop-UpVideo" version of Ghostbusters. Access everything (plus trailers for Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 2, Groundhog Day, and Stripes) via a cool but somewhat cryptic and frustrating 3-D animated menu.

If only the new cover design didn't stink. I'd be surprised if more than fifteen minutes (one for every year that Ghostbusters has celebrated an anniversary) was spent designing it on Adobe Photoshop; the film deserves better packaging artwork than this! (The 1984 poster design was/is so striking that I don't understand why they didn't just rehash it.)

The Rushmore DVD is, to quote a friend, "Disney vanilla." That is to say, Buena Vista's subsidiaries always put out the same movie-only digital product. The image is not anamorphically enhanced, but it is letterboxed at 2.35:1. (Along with Ghostbusters, Rushmore argues strongly against pan-and-scan.) I found no fault with the transfer otherwise; contrast and shadow detail are exemplary.

The film's 5.1 track has been faithfully reproduced for home theatre; music sounds better here than it does on the soundtrack CD, which is also worth owning. (Anderson's employment of British Invasion tunes is conceptually appropriate; as he wrote in theCD's liner notes, "I thought this made sense because [British Invasion bands] played loud, angry, teenage rock songs, and they wore blazers and ties; and our movie is about a teenager who is loud and angry, and he is almost never seen without his blazer and tie...") Though it makes no diagetic sense, Max's final play ("Heaven and Hell," about the Vietnam War) makes swell use of the discrete channels. In fact, this portion of Rushmore is of reference quality. The only bonus is a (cropped) trailer, which I never liked, anyway: it spoils too many of the picture's surprises.

It should be noted that the original poster art for Rushmore (left) has also been altered for home video, subtly but significantly. Compare:

Why are Schwartzman and Murray's heads now turned in different directions? And to where did the background collage disappear? And why the omission of that brilliant tagline, "Love. Expulsion. Revolution"?

Argh.-Bill Chambers

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