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Go See Ghostbusters! It’s Awesome!
At long last, the new Ghostbusters reboot is out. As a kid who loved the original, and is a fan of the four comedians who star in this reboot, I had high hopes. (Although I lowered my expectations after the abysmal first trailer.) While I didn’t want to skew my first viewing by reading reviews ahead of time, I heard they were terrible.
Well, I have just come from watching the movie and I and pleased to report that it is great!
It’s important to know going in that while it’s based on an existing property, this is a reboot, not a remake. So while the general story is the same (four people come together in New York City to fight ghosts) and the logo is the same, this is a wholly new story, not dependent on the previous ones. There are cameos sprinkled in (of actors and ghosts), and there are some echoes and callbacks, but this movie stands on its own.
As of this writing, the film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 74 percent fresh rating from the critics (which is largely positive). The audience rating is 50 percent good. There’s a reason for that. If you look at the audience reviews, they’re either five stars or half a star (which indicates a divisive film). All the negative reviews are along the lines of “This movie is terrible! How dare you reboot Ghostbusters! You raped my childhood!” But those who took the film on its own merits gave it positive reviews.
And that’s what I suggest you do. Let go of other people’s baggage, let go your own expectations, and just enjoy the movie. As you might expect when you combine four excellent comedic actors, Kristin Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy, and Leslie Jones, and let them do what they’re good at, you get a movie that’s both funny and joyous. The latter quality being one missing from far too many movies lately.
It’s also a movie that you can take your kids to. The MPAA gave it a rating of PG-13 for “supernatural action and crude humor.” (They fight ghosts and there’s a small bout of toilet humor.) This movie might have one or two bad words, but other than some light flirtation, it was devoid of sexual content; ditto for drug references. All I can say is that kids might be frightened, because there are some spooky ghosts.
But that’s part of the fun, right?
Published in Entertainment
It reminds me a bit of Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album. When the project was still “Ghostbusters 3”, Pascal had a fascinating email that said they’d sue Bill Murray to appear. Moreover, she was looking for a lawyer who could manage to do it quietly.
Suffice it to say Akroyd and Reitman had no say in the creative process.
I don’t get how sexism even comes into it.
Ghostbusters 3 had been stuck in development hell for 20 years. The first I heard about it was in the ’90s and the torch was being passed to a new generation that included Chris Farley.
The death of Harold Ramis was the death of Ghostbusters 3. If it was ever gonna happen (which was unlikely), that died with him. This keeps the spirit and the joy of the original while taking it to new places, and it gets nods of approval in the form of original cast cameos (including Ramis) along the way.
And Aykroyd has a cameo in the film.
You don’t get the impression, from watching the film, that the people involved in the original film hated the fact that this one was being created.
Richard Roeper felt compelled to do a video reacting to the reaction of his review. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQeSIEQzCs
Paul Feig has been particularly shameless about blaming misogyny for the backlash against the movie. There were also allegations that Sony were deleting substantive criticisms from the trailers’ YouTube pages, but leaving the misogynist ones alone (including obvious troll cliches like, “Make me a sandwich!”) allegedly in the attempt to make it seem like all the backlash is driven by misogyny.
To their credit, though, I’m not aware of any of the actresses playing the gender card.
Onnagata are male actors who play women roles in Japanese Kabuki theater.
I’m not sure what the American version for this is called.
Why have ANY male actors or heroes?
…
“I didn’t see much of Alan (Arkin) after making the film (The In-Laws) in 1978. … Fast forward to 2002.”
Voice: Peter, it’s me, Alan. Congratulations.
Peter: Who?
Alan: Alan, Alan Arkin.
…
Peter: What?
Alan: The reviews, you moron.
Peter: What reviews are you talking about?
Alan: The In-Laws.
Peter: The In-Laws??!
…
Alan: The remake, moron.
Peter: Oh, the remake — it’s out.
Alan: It’s a turkey — the whole movie — in the toilet.
Peter: (big grin) No kidding.
Alan: (now laughing) And you and I — we got raves — better reviews for the remake than for the original.
Peter: (full-out delight) No kidding. Better than the orig… (Can’t finish — laughing too hard.)
Perhaps “sequel”, like “reboot” is too specific a term. I would have liked to have the movie acknowledge the existing movie in some way, although you would end up with a considerably different movie having to do so.
That’s what this one does. It resets the continuity but it still gives loving winks and nods to the previous movie.
I rather badly need to re-watch the original — it’s been a long time — but I enjoyed the remake when it came out and thought it was an excellent adaptation of the book.
Until a few months ago, Ghostbusters was always one of those movies that I’d never seen all the way through, as I always caught it on TV after it started. When I finally sat down and watched it, I enjoyed it immensely, but don’t have any great emotional attachment to it (likely my loss).
The new movie is sufficiently different to not even count as a reboot: it’s a wholly different film with the same basic premise and a ton of homages. Like Fred, I highly recommend it.
Curiously, that’s the same approach the DNC uses: You Americans are racist, sexist, homophobic neanderthals bitterly clinging to guns and Bibles and separate bathrooms. Vote for us!
So you went to see it? You’re invite to elaborate on your specific objections.
Having only seen the trailer, I can tell you what the critical flaws appear to be. The leads are uninteresting. We know one is a great engineer because another character said so. (Actual line: “Holtzman, you’re a brilliant engineer.”) And no one is better at qunatum physics than the skinny brunette, because actual line, “Erin, no one is better at quantum physics than you.” That’s just lazy writing.
If Paul Feig wrote the original, he would have Ray saying “Peter, you are always trying to exploit your status as an academic in order to make it with beautiful women.”
But it gets worse. We don’t just have a brilliant engineer and world’s best physicist and stereotypical black woman but funny brilliant engineer and funny world’s best engineer and funny stereotypical black woman. You shouldn’t try to make every character funny. That’s usually a sign that you have a lot of jokes and you want to write a script around them (for the proper way of doing that, see Caddyshack. No, seriously – see it immediately, Paul Feig).
Watch the original and marvel at straight they played it. Peter and Louis notwithstanding, to the extent that anyone else was funny, it was contextual e.g. Egon’s funniest line: “Not necessarily. There’s definitely a *very slim* chance we’ll survive.”
Having actually seen the film, I can tell you that the trailers (especially the first one) do not do the movie justice.
Which, if true, would be the first time I can ever recall that happening. I’d be interested to know why they would do that.
They might occasionally do it on purpose, though I think in this case they didn’t.
I remember seeing the trailer for Moscow on the Hudson and thinking it was going to be a great comedy. What I didn’t know is that just about every joke in the movie was in the trailer. It was a good movie, but I didn’t appreciate that when I first saw it because I went in with the inaccurate impression that that was the kind of movie it was.
Now that I’ve watched the RLM review of the movie, I will concede that Leslie Jones’ character doesn’t appear to be as awful as the trailer led me to believe. Other than that, I feel pretty vindicated; bad script-writing, flat characters, and unfunny improvisation. And those problems are probably much worse than I anticipated.
Jillian Holtzmann: [eating Pringles chips from the can] Just try saying no to these salty parabolas!
Yes, a lead character verbalizes the already blatant product placement. When Wayne’s World mocked this idea 25 years ago, they weren’t this on-the-nose about it. Sweet judy blue eyes, even if this was improvised the fact that it made the final cut is a very bad sign.
Oh well, I’m sure they drew the line at potty jokes…
Making movie trailers is interesting, and can lead to some pretty big omissions/misdirection. I remember hearing a podcast with a guy who worked on the trailer for Sweeney Todd, and when asked why there’s no indication in the trailer that it was a musical, he said that they’d determined that those familiar with Sweeney Todd would know it was a musical, and for most of those who weren’t, pointing out that it is a musical would make them less likely to want to see it.
It really sucked.