Anybody see a ghost?

Who ya gonna call?

Tonight I got to see my favorite movie, Ghostbusters, on the big screen again. It has been 27 years since I saw it in its original release, and almost 15 years since I saw it at the student theater at UGA. After all these years, it was a real treat to see it on the biggest screen yet, right here in Columbus.

The print was a little grainy, not like the pristine all-digital releases we have all become accustomed to, but it still looked great. The surround sound mix was lively and loud.

On a screen that big, I was able to notice nuances that had escaped me watching it at home a couple of hundred times - particularly the presence of Mr. Stay Puft on a bag of marshmallows next to the exploding eggs and on a wall advertisement in a shot looking out over the city. It was also pretty exciting to see the wonderful rotoscoping effects (electrical sparks and laser beams hand-drawn on the film) so big you could really appreciate them as the boys blasted away with their proton packs. Furthermore, the matte paintings used for New York cityscapes in the backgrounds of so many of the shots - out the window in Dana's apartment, behind the temple of Gozer, and so forth - looked great writ large upon the screen. With the matte paintings, rotoscoping, and model work, Ghostbusters is old school filmmaking at its finest.

Since this was a limited release showing of a movie more than a quarter century old, I had the feeling that the audience would consist mainly of hardcore fans, and I was right. We even had three members of the Alabama Ghostbusters chapter on hand in full, and very accurate, costume. It wasn't exactly a full house, but those of us who were there - and the ages ran the gamut from maybe 8 to 60 or so - shared a bond. We knew the movie well, and loved it. At certain key moments, we would even recite the lines aloud together - mass hysteria! - and get a kick out of that participatory feeling that you usually only get with Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. We laughed at Peter's banter with Walter Peck from the EPA, cheered the appearance of the Ectomobile and when Winston joined the team, and we applauded when Gozer was sent back to her (?) dimension of origin - or the nearest convenient parallel dimension. Together.

And the best part about the whole experience was that I got to share it with my loving, devoted wife. Of course she has seen the movie before with and without me. If it shows up on tv, we usually will stop channel surfing and leave it on as background noise. We watched the blu ray on the big tv upstairs the day it was released. We've experienced the movie together numerous times. But seeing it in a theater, projected on a giant screen, and with an audience of people who were enjoying themselves as much as we were... well, that was just great. I never thought I'd be able to see my favorite movie in the theater with the girl of my dreams, but lo and behold, it happened. And technically, as we are due to have our baby in just a few weeks, I got to take my daughter to Ghostbusters, too. How cool is that?