We had intended to go over to Alsager today just to see how the place had changed in the eight years since I was there, but it’s quite miserable out so we decided to stay home and put a dvd on. Dad let me choose, so I selected the new Ghostbusters film. I suspected it would be crap, but I hadn’t seen it before and I just wanted something amusing to watch.

Having just watched the film I was right about it’s quality, but at the same time I loved it. It’s a strange piece, at the same time wanting to seem totally new yet constantly nodding to the original films. Bill Murray makes a cameo, for example, but as a completely different character. There may be two bound copies of my MA thesis on film upstairs, but I loved what I just watched not for any of the intellectual reasons I wrote about. Watching the film sat next to my father, in the very room where I probably first encountered ghostbusters as a child, for a few moments I was that fife or six year old again, sat next to his dad, laughing out loud at funny people zapping ghosts. The film may have been awful, but sometimes that isn’t the point.