Ghostbusters

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Can you ‘go gangbusters’? 

From our UK edition

‘Is it anything to do with cockle-picking?’ asked my husband, confident he was on the right track. Naturally he wasn’t. We’d just heard that the economy, growing by 0.6 per cent, was ‘going gangbusters’. The nearest my husband could get was gangmasters, a word we had both learned in 2004, when at least 21 Chinese migrants drowned in Morecambe Bay while picking cockles for a gangmaster, later sent to prison. The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 then made it a crime to be in charge of people harvesting shellfish or agricultural produce without a licence. Twenty years earlier, the name of the film Ghostbusters was added to the world’s vocabulary. An accompanying song went: ‘If there’s something weird/ And it don’t look good/ Who you gonna call?

Monday

Alexander Larman

Ivan Reitman wasn’t afraid of no ghost

The death of filmmaker Ivan Reitman was announced early on Valentine’s Day, which seems grimly appropriate. Although Reitman was not exclusively a director of romantic comedies, his films all had a cheerfully good-natured quality that generally made them significant box office successes. From his debut proper, the Bill Murray comedy Meatballs, to his final film, the Kevin Costner sports drama Draft Day, his films tended to celebrate the warmer and happier aspects of life. You might even call them Capra-esque, although Frank Capra never made a picture in which a giant, phantasmal marshmallow terrifies New York City. One-nil, Reitman.