"2009"

If you break down “I aint ‘fraid of no ghost” – I think it means… I am, in fact, extremely afraid of many ghosts.     And I am especially fearful about the rumbling prospect of an ill-conceived “Ghostbusters III” — a specter that Sony has been slamming through the film marketplace for over five years like a twenty-story, sailor-suited, marshmallow man on the run from a pair of block-long graham crackers. The word ‘round the campfire is that this attempt to beat a ghostly horse could have been greenlit as of about a year ago, when longstanding hold out Bill Murray, who played Peter Venkman in the original, abdicated his franchise rights. But the film has been “coming soon” for a very long time, and Blues Brother-turned-vodka maven Dan Aykroyd, who helped pen all the “Ghostbusters” scripts (including potential #3 — with the recently departed Harold Ramis), continues to be haunted by stumbling blocks.

Cheap knockoffs are usually pretty easy to spot in real life. Buying a purse for my wife once in Chinatown, I asked, “is this a REAL Coach bag?” The vendor produced a hot glue gun and a Coach emblem and said, “It will be when you buy it.”  This kind of thing shouldn’t surprise us — in movies, it happens all the time. For those who don’t already know, Hollywood’s unspoken mantra is: “If it works, buy it or steal it!” This means that studios pilfer from successful foreign films all the time, and have for years. After all, as more than one sage has noted, there are no new stories, only new ways to tell them... Sometimes it’s just plotlines that get recycled. Example: observe how certain scenes in Akira Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress” (1958) resemble a little movie called “Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope” (1977).

I’ll never forget the segment on “60 Minutes” a couple of years ago, when Morley Safer interviewed our most famous living historian, David McCullough.

In Hollywood, August is rather indelicately known as a “dump month”— a time when studios traditionally litter theaters with films that have low box-office expectations and pack all the heft of a half-eaten Twizzler (à la this year’s “Let’s Be Cops” and “The Expendables 3”).  However, now and then over the years, the scheduling gods have managed to include a real gem with all the other celluloid junk. Here’s a look at some of the films that—from the 1950s to the 2010s—have defied their dog-day August release dates and become timeless works of art.   

They say the customer is always right — but not always right away. For instance, sometimes it takes a while for movie audiences to recognize just how special a film really is. When it premieres, there’s a barely audible thud, and very little box office.  The culprit could be poor distribution, half-hearted promotion, a storyline slightly ahead of its time, the ire of some influential critic with digestive trouble, or any combination of the above. A surprising number of now-classic films either just broke even, or actually lost money on initial release. Here are 10 classics from my list that fall into this category. 

While the holidays are the ideal time to cozy up to cheery family fare, it’s also a swell idea to take a break from interrelating with relatives to witness the astonishingly bad behavior of families far more dysfunctional than one's own (hopefully).