Some Enchanted Week

For Harrison Ford, 1998's Six Days, Seven Nights was just another in a string of lukewarm, forgettable films. For Anne Heche, who suffered a painful death after a horrific car accident last year, it was the biggest role of her career. It was directed by Ivan Reitman, who also died last year. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

Ford and Heche both give good performances that don't quite line up with their characters. Ford's famous for playing scoundrels but here he plays a horny scoundrel, something that tends to make a romantic lead much less attractive. It worked for Bill Murray in Ghostbusters but with Ford it's hard to shake the feeling he's Deckard play-acting to get into the Zhora's dressing room.

He and Anne Heche have no chemistry. Neither seems really into the other. I believe Heche as a high powered magazine editor. But there's something cold about her in the film and I can't imagine her being attracted to anyone. It doesn't help that not one single joke lands in this purported comedy. I never laughed. Some of the action adventure stuff, though, is pretty good and I wonder if this film would have done better if it'd given up on any idea of being a comedy.

I like how much practical effects were used and the location shooting. Ford, as a scoundrel pilot taking advantage of tourists, is arguably even closer to Charleton Heston's character in Secret of the Incas than he was in the Indiana Jones movies. He and Heche run afoul of pirates played by Temuera Morrison and Danny Trejo.

Impeccable casting there. I wish the film had focused more on fights with pirates.

Six Days, Seven Nights is available on Disney+ outside the US.

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With masks and masks we met the op'ra ghost.
Revolving canes precede the sausage joke.
Divergent routes commend our loopy host.
No wonder that the squeaky ride was broke.
Confections filled the box with testy frogs.
Advancing eyes were curled beyond a hope.
Euphoric futures pass behind the fogs.
Another night the Phantom ties a rope.
Rotund with hope, the plane began to climb.
Resurging sea would scrape the flyer down.
Emerging beasts resist the parent slime.
Ahead awaits the unsuspecting town.
Below the choppy plane the waves await.
Behind the slender years they offer bait.

Ivan Reitman

Some would say Ivan Reitman's greatest talent was staying out of Bill Murray's way. The restraint implied in that, though, would certainly be no small feat in an industry infamous for egos. But Reitman, who passed away a few days ago, did have a voice of his own that sustained his career for decades. Most people, quite rightly, consider his earlier films the best and Ghostbusters his one truly great film.

But Meatballs and Stripes are nothing to sneeze at. And, as a producer, he supported a couple of David Cronenberg's earliest films, Shivers and Rabid, two films that have continued to be talked about to this day.

Reitman and Murray worked so well together in those early films because Reitman didn't merely keep out of Murray's way, he kept up with him. There's a narrative speed to those films that matched Murray's pace. Reitman knew when to slow down and stay with an improved moment between Murray and Harold Ramis in Stripes, and Reitman knew when Murray had nailed a moment to move on to the next in Ghostbusters. Shooting Bill Murray in those early films must have been a little like being a wildlife photographer, especially in Meatballs.

How eerily appropriate it is that Ghostbusters: Afterlife was the last film Reitman worked on, not only producing for his son, Jason, to direct, but standing in for Harold Ramis as a body double. Reitman himself, of course, is as worth remembering as Ramis.