Well, once in a while, maybe. Steven Spielberg's remake and update of Guy Named Joe, a WWII fantasy about the ghost of a recently deceased flyer who (unbeknown to anyone alive) tutors a neophyte flyer and even plays matchmaker between that neophyte and his own former sweetheart, loses some of its timeliness in the process. The training of the young flyer doesn't seem quite so urgent when the purpose is aerial firefighting instead of wartime combat, and although the slow healing of a surviving lover is in some sense universal, it is not currently (so to speak) so widespread. This is a decidedly "mature" subject handled like a Lego construction kit. A few things do, in their mechanical kind of way, work: the echolalic hermit in the desert, the out-of-body experience of a coronary-stricken bus driver, the dance between the ghost and his ex-lover as "their song" plays on the cassette deck. And a dozen or more director-ish little touches. But the movie is so concerned to be "entertaining" (the slobby sidekick dunking a fried chicken leg into his beer before biting it) that it can never be trusted with the deeper emotions. Its evocation of men-at-work movies la Hawks and Walsh is as dry and academic as any nostalgia concoction of Peter Bogdanovich. With Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, and a fairy godmotherly Audrey Hepburn. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd