GHOSTBUSTERS - a movie review -
As a social justice warrior (!) I loved the idea of ghostbusters with a female crew. And then when I saw who'd be in the cast, I was delighted!! After seeing GHOSTBUSTERS, I was laughing and impressed. It is a lot of fun to watch! But I was also downhearted because the script was shoddy, the bad guy was banal, and there was obviously a ton of money ($144 M) spent on the special f/x, which felt like (and is) a set-up to claim female-led action movies are a bad decision. Jeebus.
The good stuff in this is GREAT: the performances! Melissa McCarthy is so grounded and funny. The scene where she's possessed shows off her amazing physical comedy -- it's so clear and humorous that her body is being controlled by a sociopath. Kate McKinnon steals almost every scene in her female-Egon, even with no dialog. Kristin Wiig is relatable and sympathetic, but not given much fun stuff to do. She does have a special f/x heroic action at the end, but it's not as funny or as emotional as it needs to be (more below in the spoilers). And then, Leslie Jones! It's too bad her street-sharp toll taker is a stereotype, but her fully warm and enthusiastic version of Patty is so charming.
I liked the calling back scenes to the original too. The way they got their Ghostmobile. Where they found their logo. The funky firestation office. And then how we saw the (surviving) Ghostbuster actors with a part in this script. Look for Peter, Raymond, Janine, Dana and Winston!
But how crazy is it that neanderthal boyz, along with and organized some by their Gamergate brethren, made such a gender stink about the remake? And made the first preview clip the worst-ranked clip ever? And continue to have their members allowed to do unfair movie reviews and rank this movie so badly? That Sony would decide to gut the humor with a PG-13 rating? And then that awful, nasty Twitter attack on Leslie Jones with such racist, unfair jackassery? Which was led by a knuckle-dragging minion of Breitbart, btw, for which he got banned from Twitter and screamed "my rights!" (First amendment rights do not cover "fighting words" and insults, btw.)
The main issue I had with the movie, besides these disruptive politics, was that the story wasn't constructed to give the characters growth or emotional arcs. There were lots of actions that could've been re-jiggered to do this, but Sony and the screenwriters made a sort of lame script. And to have pop-eyed Neil Casy as the bad guy with a dufus device was underwhelming. The way that whole part of the plot moved was underwritten as well. It did highlight yummy Chris Hemsworth in a fun way, but even that didn't get really funny until the credits when there's a big dance off! Still worth seeing! Still worth getting a sequel (Sony announced it might be animated though, sigh).
Spoiler! Alternative suggestion for the plot!
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When I say an emotional arc would've delivered heart with the big-bangs and blow-ups at the end, I mean something like this: We see Erin go running to her old psychic-adventure partner Abby early in the movie. Their sisterhood had been shattered when years before Erin declared ghosts were never real. Well, their bond is re-engaged within the hour when the owners of a haunted mansion show up asking for help, and what they find makes Erin enthusiastically join back in as a ghostbuster. A tiny arc and fixed in 15 minutes.
Instead, the rift between them needed to be something like: Abby believes there's an alternate dimension where ghosts get trapped and monsters live. Erin refuses to bend that far; she'll hunt ghosts but she believes they're just confused spirits who need to be sent on. That disagreement needs to be a thread all the way through, with each counting events as proof of their theory. Then when the bad guy makes a device that cracks into our world and lets ghosts in, Erin needs to again deny this is real. She leaves, and then the big monster fest in Chicago streets convinces her. And when she willingly goes into the next dimension, she takes with her a device or knowledge that Abby had been working on & Erin had belittled. That's what she uses to save Abby and bring her back.
So she's risked her life, risked it based on her friend's theories, so saving her friend she also saves their friendship AND she proves her partner's theory and disproves her own. A sacrifice on multiple levels, the mark of a true hero! Sisterhood restored! That would've delivered the emotion and not just the adrenalin at the end. (And this is how I analyze movies all the time.)
The good stuff in this is GREAT: the performances! Melissa McCarthy is so grounded and funny. The scene where she's possessed shows off her amazing physical comedy -- it's so clear and humorous that her body is being controlled by a sociopath. Kate McKinnon steals almost every scene in her female-Egon, even with no dialog. Kristin Wiig is relatable and sympathetic, but not given much fun stuff to do. She does have a special f/x heroic action at the end, but it's not as funny or as emotional as it needs to be (more below in the spoilers). And then, Leslie Jones! It's too bad her street-sharp toll taker is a stereotype, but her fully warm and enthusiastic version of Patty is so charming.
I liked the calling back scenes to the original too. The way they got their Ghostmobile. Where they found their logo. The funky firestation office. And then how we saw the (surviving) Ghostbuster actors with a part in this script. Look for Peter, Raymond, Janine, Dana and Winston!
But how crazy is it that neanderthal boyz, along with and organized some by their Gamergate brethren, made such a gender stink about the remake? And made the first preview clip the worst-ranked clip ever? And continue to have their members allowed to do unfair movie reviews and rank this movie so badly? That Sony would decide to gut the humor with a PG-13 rating? And then that awful, nasty Twitter attack on Leslie Jones with such racist, unfair jackassery? Which was led by a knuckle-dragging minion of Breitbart, btw, for which he got banned from Twitter and screamed "my rights!" (First amendment rights do not cover "fighting words" and insults, btw.)
The main issue I had with the movie, besides these disruptive politics, was that the story wasn't constructed to give the characters growth or emotional arcs. There were lots of actions that could've been re-jiggered to do this, but Sony and the screenwriters made a sort of lame script. And to have pop-eyed Neil Casy as the bad guy with a dufus device was underwhelming. The way that whole part of the plot moved was underwritten as well. It did highlight yummy Chris Hemsworth in a fun way, but even that didn't get really funny until the credits when there's a big dance off! Still worth seeing! Still worth getting a sequel (Sony announced it might be animated though, sigh).
Spoiler! Alternative suggestion for the plot!
:
:
:
:
When I say an emotional arc would've delivered heart with the big-bangs and blow-ups at the end, I mean something like this: We see Erin go running to her old psychic-adventure partner Abby early in the movie. Their sisterhood had been shattered when years before Erin declared ghosts were never real. Well, their bond is re-engaged within the hour when the owners of a haunted mansion show up asking for help, and what they find makes Erin enthusiastically join back in as a ghostbuster. A tiny arc and fixed in 15 minutes.
Instead, the rift between them needed to be something like: Abby believes there's an alternate dimension where ghosts get trapped and monsters live. Erin refuses to bend that far; she'll hunt ghosts but she believes they're just confused spirits who need to be sent on. That disagreement needs to be a thread all the way through, with each counting events as proof of their theory. Then when the bad guy makes a device that cracks into our world and lets ghosts in, Erin needs to again deny this is real. She leaves, and then the big monster fest in Chicago streets convinces her. And when she willingly goes into the next dimension, she takes with her a device or knowledge that Abby had been working on & Erin had belittled. That's what she uses to save Abby and bring her back.
So she's risked her life, risked it based on her friend's theories, so saving her friend she also saves their friendship AND she proves her partner's theory and disproves her own. A sacrifice on multiple levels, the mark of a true hero! Sisterhood restored! That would've delivered the emotion and not just the adrenalin at the end. (And this is how I analyze movies all the time.)