'Ghostbusters' director Ivan Reitman's best films

Ivan Reitman died Feb. 12 at 75 years of age, leaving a half-century legacy of filmmaking that transformed cinema.

Reitman logged close to 70 movie and TV credits as a producer, and 17 feature films as a director. He also created four short films, a music video and an unsold pilot that aired as a TV movie.

Reitman directed some of cinema's classic comedies, making "Saturday Night Live" alum Bill Murray the comedic lead everyone believed he could be, and musclebound action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger the comedic lead no one believed he could be.

Reitman's oeuvre also explored sci-fi, horror, legal thrillers, sports dramas, romance and even politics.

What follows are his best feature films.

'Draft Day'

Reitman's final film ranked among his most uncharacteristic and well-made movies, regardless of middling reviews and box office returns.

Reitman weaponizes Kevin Costner's cantankerousness by casting him as the Cleveland Browns' embattled general manager in the hours counting down to the NFL's 2014 Draft Day.

Costner squabbles with the team's publicity minded owner (Frank Langella) and its possessive head coach (Denis Leary) over his draft picks, and with his mother (Ellen Burstyn), the widow of the team's former head coach, whom Costner had fired in spite of the man also being his father.

Even for nonfans of professional sports, seeing Costner jockey for the best deals as he wheedles with other teams over their respective draft picks is fascinating. Their conference calls manage to be as compelling and fast-paced as the action that any number of sports films show happening on their fields.

Former Superman Tom Welling appears as the Browns' previous-year starting quarterback, who's upset over the possibility of being displaced in the coming season, while future Black Panther Chadwick Boseman again demonstrates his range as a promising up-and-coming prospect.

'Legal Eagles'

Accomplished Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Robert Redford is the divorced dad to an inquisitive, insightful teenage daughter, and he tap-

dances to deal with his insomnia.

Principled defense attorney Debra Winger sits in on court cases like avid baseball fans who attend spring training sessions, and she shares Redford's workaholic sleeplessness.

And emotionally damaged Daryl Hannah was 8 years old when she saw her father die in the same mysterious fire that supposedly consumed his paintings, but she's come to Winger and Redford because she believes one of those paintings was instead swiped by an art gallery curator (Terence Stamp) who did business with her father.

Our "Legal Eagles" typically face off from opposite sides of the courtroom, but they team up on this case due to their mutual commitment to the law and the truth.

Redford and Winger's partnership works so well because each is

afforded their own charming personality quirks and flourishes of cleverness, while Hannah serves as a mercurial force of nature, with her succession of secrets and her frightening pyrotechnic performance art, that I'm guessing was avant-garde for 1986.

'Twins'

As Arnold Schwarzenegger told an interviewer in 2016, he understood it was considered a big risk to cast him as a comedic lead, so he, Danny DeVito and Reitman all agreed to forego their salaries for 1988's "Twins" in exchange for shares of the film's profits. All three agreed it was the best decision they ever made.

Casting a photogenic Austrian bodybuilder to play the offspring of a government-run scientific experiment to produce "a physically, mentally and spiritually advanced human being" could have come across as endorsing eugenics, especially when he was paired with the squat, balding DeVito as his unexpected and long-lost "bad" twin brother.

Schwarzenegger's character defends his hostile, cynical and estranged brother by pointing out the profound impacts of growing up in different environments. The supposedly already superior brother was raised with levels of love and education that his ostensibly inferior twin never received.

DeVito's savage sarcasm contrasts hilariously with Schwarzenegger's politely idealistic naivete, born from being raised in a tropical island paradise, isolated from human civilization.

'Kindergarten Cop'

This 1990 crime drama/family-friendly comedy proved the comedic chops Schwarzenegger demonstrated in "Twins" hadn't been a fluke.

Reitman opens "Kindergarten Cop" by setting Schwarzenegger in more familiar territory for him, as a shades-wearing, stubble-faced, inner-city cop-on-the-edge, not unlike Sylvester Stallone's "Cobra" in 1986, before transplanting him to the pastoral suburbs of Astoria, Oregon, to go undercover as a kindergarten teacher.

While Reitman didn't bring back DeVito for Schwarzenegger's second comedic outing, the director struck gold by pairing Arnold with the sedately gifted Pamela Reed, who plays the teacher-turned-cop who was originally slated to go undercover, before she caught a bad stomach bug.

This film also benefits from the diminutive Linda Hunt as Arnold's initially disapproving principal, who winds up being won over by his unconventional methods of teaching the kids fitness and discipline, and who also gets a kick out of seeing Schwarzenegger treat a physically abusive father to a taste of his own medicine.

'Meatballs'

This 1979 adolescent slob comedy gave Bill Murray his first starring film role as the shabby Camp North Star's lead counselor, "Tripper" Harrison, and marked the start of Murray's six collaborations with Harold Ramis, one of the film's writers.

"Meatballs" remains the apex of the summer camp subgenre of crude teen cinema, which is likely as extinct as the ski slopes race-and-party subgenre. In "Meatballs," hormonally overloaded campers and counselors-in-training pull pranks and scheming to make variously defined "scores."

Be warned that anti-gay slurs are tossed off throughout and one nerdy counselor-in-training is nicknamed "Spaz," but this film's bawdy antics nonetheless acknowledge that young women have desires and maturational milestones of their own, and the heart of its story centers on Murray mentoring a quiet, sensitive young camper, played affectingly by Chris Makepeace, who's emotionally distant from his family and peers.

Murray filmed "Meatballs" around the time he turned 28, and his character is existentially terrified that he now qualifies as a mature and responsible adult by default.

As a kid, I wished for a mentor like Murray.

As an adult, I hope I've been Murray for other weirdo kids growing up.

'Ghostbusters'

Reitman's best film, and it's not even close.

Filmmakers have spent decades chasing the dragon of heroic action-adventure epics that would also succeed as comedies, without undermining the credibility of their sci-fi/fantasy elements or the seriousness of their world-shaking high stakes.

Fellow 1980s films "The Ice Pirates," "Big Trouble in Little China" and "The Golden Child" all attempted this same feat, with varying degrees of creative and commercial success, but Reitman cracked this code by wrestling Dan Aykroyd's beast of a screenplay into filmable submission.

"Ghostbusters" gave genre fiction one of its most memorable, appealing and dynamic four-man bands, this side of Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four and Eastman & Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the latter of whom also made their debut in 1984).

The fictional reality the Ghostbusters inhabited felt lived-in and absurdly authentic, with a New York City as filthy and disgruntled as we'd seen in the news or a Martin Scorsese movie.

If you love the Marvel Cinematic Universe, tell Disney to thank Reitman for furnishing the MCU's template.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]