Michael Douglas, Val Kilmer, Emily Mortimer, Tom Wilkinson. Dir. Stephen Hopkins, Paramount, 1996
It's a Saturday night. No money, not enough to go out and do something. Friends all have plans. Or maybe it's Sunday afternoon, overcast, chilly, what Douglas Adams called "the long dark teatime of the soul." Or it's 1 a.m. and work ended at midnight but sleep won't be happening soon. What now?
Now it's time to flip on the tube, settle back on the sofa, and find something to pass the time. A movie. A masterpiece would be nice, of course, but Saturday nights and anytime after midnight and Sundays when football's on just aren't the times Superstation or your local indie channel program masterpieces. They run Casablanca or The Godfather when they can draw a big audience. On that Saturday in June when 34 broke, lonely people are channel surfing until sleep rescues them, Superstation runs a good-enough movie.
A timekiller. Something to hold the attention, to provide enough entertainment to give those 34 people their fix, their diversion until bedtime, something to keep them from thinking about that old revolver in the shoe closet for one more day. A movie like The Ghost and the Darkness.
These sort of circumstances explain why I already knew about The Ghost and the Darkness. I don't remember if it was a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon, whether HBO or Superstation or the Saturday Night Movie on CBS. Nor does it matter. I was bored, restless, sad maybe, and here's two hours about a couple guys trying to kill two lions in 19th Century Africa in order to build a bridge for a pan-Africa railroad. Filmed on location, lots of gorgeous scenery and elephants and hippos and shit, with a good cast and lots of nice helicopter and Steadicam shots to give it a touch of the epic adventure.
On that night, The Ghost and The Darkness rose to its moment. If it waals really only good-enough, that counted as so much better than the alternatives that by the time I turned off the TV I felt better, more relaxed. I stopped thinking about the shoe closet, and the movie took on near-mythic proportion in my memory. So much so that when I ran across the dvd at Goodwill Monday it went into the cart without hesitation.
Now, tonight, I have a stack of other dvds, many of them features I haven't ever seen. Tonight I have friends who will take my call. Tonight I have a massive essay on James Bond movies to compose. Tonight, I'm not one of 34 broke, lonely people. Tonight I have options.
Which means, even though The Ghost and The Darkness remains a good-enough movie, tonight was the wrong night for it. Tonight it was just-ok. Some other night or afternoon or overnight it may do the job for me again.
If you've never seen The Ghost and The Darkness before, and you like Douglas and Kilmer well enough, and you could stand to look at some gorgeous far-off land, and you don't mind men firing guns at marauding beasts, and you're staring down the barrel of one of those shoe-closet nights, I think you may find it good-enough to get over the hump until the pillow calls your name.
Just make sure it's one of those times.
I enjoyed this movie. I watched solely because of the soundtrack which I found at a used music store probably 20 years ago. Played the CD to death having never seen the movie. It was only two years ago that I finally watched it. One of my weirder movie moments.
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