Please use this thread only for grading and reviewing the movie after having seen it, to see others thoughts on having seen it, and to ask/comment on those viewings. No discussing of the movie's creation history or the controversies surrounding it, please reserve that for the other thread should it be reopened. The movie's been discussed in that regard for nearly 2-years, I think all that needs to be said has been said.
Ghostbusters
My Grade: B
________________________________________________________
Let me lay all my cards out on the table and say that this was a movie/remake I was not looking forward to long before the casting direction was made. The Ghostbusters was a big part of my childhood and to see it "rebooted"/remade to me was just an appalling cash-grab from Sony especially given how they've handled the property for the last 25 years in regards to a genuine sequel as a gateway for a new franchise until they pretty much strong-armed Ivan Reitman to relinquish some control so Sony could make the movie they wanted to make; and want they wanted to make was a Cinematic Universe because that's all the range now.
Universal has the "Monsters" universe which they want to revisit/start-up again, Fox has the X-Men, Disney has Marvel and Warner Brothers has DC. Sony's tried and tried to get something going with The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man but keep fumbling the ball, originally on Third-Down with the Raimi Spider-Man, then on Second-Down with the Spider-Man reboot and then they got to Second Down with the Fantastic Four, went to Third-Down and fumbled for negative yardage. So Sony really, really wants a franchise here and that's very apparent during the production company logos at the beginning of the movie where one of them is "Ghost Corps" the "Cinematic Universe" Sony wants to build here around the Ghostbusters involving multiple different films, "franchises" of the Ghostbusters around the country and kiddie films around Slimer and his spectral girlfriend.
With this movie being the proverbial Iron Man in this desire, I don't think they're going to get much traction. It's likely we'll see a sequel or maybe a spin-off but I doubt we're going to see the Disney/Marvel-like Expanded/Cinematic Universe Sony wants.
Much has been discussed and said about this movie over the last year-and-half/two-years since Paul Feig took the reigns and began his story/world-building and the Sony hack/leak revealed many of the fears and concerns people had with the way Sony wanted to move forward with this without tying it to the original movies or using the original cast "passing the torch" to a new batch of Ghostbusters. And, as has been abundantly clear the last couple years, going with an all-female Ghostbusting team (as is fairly par for Feig, going with all female main casts) really stirred up some tempers among misogynistic assholes across the internet.
But, Internet. Come on, did you expect anything else?
For me it felt like an odd route to go as opposed to a mixed-gender team with male and female Ghostbusters working together as equals with equal experience or scientific backgrounds/aptitude but, whatever. As set-photos and eventually movie clips and trailers came out my concerns grew as the movie just did not look funny and the humor in it broad and obvious and the look of the movie just didn't have the proper tone.
If you watch the 1984 original that be a pure horror/thriller had it not had comedic moments in it and starred men largely known for comedic work, from the trailers it seemed like this movie was going for the broad humor common to comedies these days.
So what have we got?
The movie starts with a "cold-open" of sorts with a tour guide leading tourists through some historic mansion or museum and he delivers a few jokes that fall flat in his speaking of the history of the abusive, slave-owning, famous former resident of the mansion and this eventually leads into his encounter with the purported ghost who haunts the mansion (which the tour ordinarily brings alive with parlor tricks). At this point I was already sort-of concerned as the jokes being made were too frequent and the opening scene just didn't have that same eerie atmosphere to it that the opening scene of the original movie had with librarian encountering the librarian ghost in the basement of the Main New York Public Library.
The curator of the mansion goes to meet with Kristen Wiig's character Erin Gilbert who in her college years co-wrote a book about ghosts with her now estranged friend Abby (Melissa McCarthy) but she's now a respected physicist wanting tenure at Columbia University, she's shocked to see the book has actually been published -apparently done without her permission by her former friend. Gilbert refuses to help the curator and goes to confront Abby at another college where old tempers sort-of flare up and she meets Abby's partner Holtzman (Kate McKinnon) the two have been furthering research and trying to find solid proof on the existence of ghosts; when they learn of the museum ghost they rush over to investigate where Erin joins and they have their encounter with the ghost there.
Eventually all three lose their respective positions at their colleges due to their investigation of the paranormal but decide to start-up their own operation to research and find evidence of ghosts, realizing they need to capture one for study and as proof to the scientific community they use devices made by Holtzman in hopes to do so. Meanwhile a NYC subway worker has her own encounter with a ghost in a subway tunnel and is surprisingly unimpressed by it but goes to Gilbert and Co. to help them capture the ghost, wanting to know herself what is going on. The capture is unsuccessful but it gives them the information they need to move forward with better equipment and training, eventually leading them to actually capturing ghosts in a public event. Combating them is the Mayor and Homeland Security who know of the existence of ghosts but have tried to keep it under wraps for the good of the public.
They hire a dim male secretary for no reason other than Gilbert finds him hunky (and there's no other applicants), through all of this is a bellboy at a hotel who's building the devices to lure the ghosts in from the otherside in hopes of ushering in an apocalypse because he's been treated poorly by society his whole life.
Overall? ....... The movie's not as bad as I had feared, some of actually sort-of works. When the movie is doing the "scary" stuff or an action piece or trying to be serious it works fairly well and is entertaining. It's common for movies these days to have protracted action scenes and here it works and doesn't grow old too fast nor is it too filled with explosions and action to the point of numbing your brain. Even during these action pieces the humor tapers itself down to tolerable levels. But that's the problem, when the movie's trying to broader humor it doesn't work and is too much. And I'd say the movie is 50/50 when it comes to those two aspects.
Wiig's character is very good as the "stiff" who needs to relax a bit and accept the things going on around her and that this is her destiny in life, McKinnon is fabulous as their quirky technology-creator who's pretty much loving every moment of her life. Seriously, every time she's on the screen it's a treat.
Chris Hemsworth does pretty good as their dim secretary Kevin but his one of the "broad humor" aspects of the movie that doesn't work. It'd be one thing if he was portrayed as your stereotypical dumb hunky guy but his character is one lost brain-cell away from needing to wear a helmet at all times. When they meet him he says he wears glasses without lenses in them because they got dirty and it's easier for him to rub his eyes this way and when he's told to not listen to a private conversation, or when something loud happens, he squints hard or covers his eyes. Yes, he's so dumb he thinks in order to STOP HEARING THINGS you CLOSE YOUR EYES!
It's sort-of like "Joey" in the TV series Friends. In the first couple seasons Joey was simply dim, obviously not smart but clearly capable of being a competent enough person to operate autonomously in society without needing someone to follow him around and make sure he doesn't run into a wall. As the series went on and all of the characters various personality traits grew stronger (Chandler is a sarcastic, insecure, jackass, Ross is a overbearing nerdy jackass, Monica is very clean, Phoebe is a dim hippie, Rachel is sort-of stuck-up) Joey grew dumber and dumber to the point where it was a wonder this guy isn't in a special home somewhere as opposed to be out and about where he could hurt himself something as innocent as a plastic spoon.) Hemsowrth's "Kevin" is where Joey would be if Friends was still running today. In another scene he says he can't answer the phone because it's in an aquarium, pointing to phone used as an aquarium decoration, not realizing the phone sitting right next to him on the otherside of his head (thus the sound coming to a different ear) is the one ringing. I've spent a lot talking about his character but his dumbness is a large example of the type of humor that doesn't click for me in this movie.
Then there's Melissa McCarthy whose humor is more miss than hit with me and this is a miss. Again, very broad humor and much of it involving her yelling and getting into slapsticky situations.
That leaves Leslie Jones's character, Patty, who's our layperson in the movie even though there's little need for one here. In the original movie Winston is the layperson so our expert characters have someone to explain things to, thus explaining things to the audience in a natural way. Patty doesn't quite serve that roll here because the movie doesn't take it's pseudo-science nearly as "seriously" as the original did nor is presented in a way that the audience need it explained to them; the characters encounter technology and new equipment they themselves need explained to them so the role of a audience-insert layperson is redundant. And her "purpose" in the movie's narrative is fairly minor she just sort of tags along and inserts herself into the group and they go along with it because.... she can get them a car. But a car borrowed from her uncle and which they cannot modify to suit their needs (as she freaks out when the car eventually is modified.)
Well, I guess there's also our villain who's really just sort of there. Things could be read into that he's a lonely man obsessed with ending society for being picked on so much, but whatever. It's just such a contrast to the original where there was no, corporeal, villain and the antagonist was the very things our protagonists were fighting. I don't see why this movie felt the need to give us a human villain.
Again, the movie is hit and miss and it's hard to say if one takes over the other enough to say whether or not this movie is a see or not see. Because neither really overpowers the other enough to push one way or another. The "bad" parts of, say Independence Day: Resurgence overpowers the "good" enough that that is a movie to wait for maybe rental or Netflix Streaming.
Captain America: Civil War is pretty much all hit so going to see it in theaters was a must.
Here we're in the middle. If you think the movie looked good you're not likely to be disappointed as there is some good here. If you think the movie looked bad, I'd say your worries are overblown because this movie isn't nearly as bad as it "could have been" considering the way the trailers presented it as being pretty much all broad, slapstick, humor and considering the history of remakes/reboots of older properties.
Does that mean go see it? Ehhh..... Yeah, go see it. It's actually mostly enjoyable and the humor and "bad" in it doesn't quite overpower the good in it. A lot of the broader humor doesn't work, there's plenty of times they're doing a joke and they pull the SNL thing of keeping on running it into the ground (the opening scene about the previous owner of the mansion, an encounter with the head of the school Abby works for, a discussion in the mayor's office about a common idiom) until it's unrecognizable as a joke but the action parts more-or-less work pretty good. There seems like there's supposed to be a character arc going on between Abby and Erin but it feels like some of it got cut out so we see the build-up on a second animosity between them but never really see that next fight/falling out and jump right to the resolution/rekindling..... Twice.
But, I'd almost say the movie is worth seeing for McKinnon's character alone; the one odd part with her is in the trailers. Pretty much everything else she does and says is fantastic.
So, my concerns were mostly eased. The trailers greatly mis-presented this movie as it's not nearly as obvious and broad as they suggest. The movie still has problems when it comes to the humor in it and your tolerance levels for McCarthy and to a lesser extent James, but it's not more than one can handle.
I could "stand" watching this again if/when it shows up on Netflix or something, I'm unlikely to buy it on Blu-Ray. It's possible I'll see it in theaters again if a friend wants to go see it.
But, there it is. The most controversial movie in the last two years hits theaters and it sort of hits with a soft pat rather than with a thud or roar.
Oh, one other critique. The CGI ghosts in the movie aren't too fantastic and pretty consistent with what is scene in the trailers. Too cartoonish and colorful. When we "meet" Slimer he looks like he just came from the actual cartoon show as opposed to ethereal, translucent specter he was in the original. And there's a former or lead villain takes that's a literal cartoon.
Of note, there's a series of during animated credit sequences, a cut dance number sequence from the near-climax of the film during the scrolling credits and a post-credits scene.
One mild insult? The dedication to Harold Ramis is at the literal end of the credits, just before the post-credits scene, rather than somewhere more notable. Though there is a nice "cameo" of him in the movie itself.
Ghostbusters
My Grade: B
________________________________________________________
Let me lay all my cards out on the table and say that this was a movie/remake I was not looking forward to long before the casting direction was made. The Ghostbusters was a big part of my childhood and to see it "rebooted"/remade to me was just an appalling cash-grab from Sony especially given how they've handled the property for the last 25 years in regards to a genuine sequel as a gateway for a new franchise until they pretty much strong-armed Ivan Reitman to relinquish some control so Sony could make the movie they wanted to make; and want they wanted to make was a Cinematic Universe because that's all the range now.
Universal has the "Monsters" universe which they want to revisit/start-up again, Fox has the X-Men, Disney has Marvel and Warner Brothers has DC. Sony's tried and tried to get something going with The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man but keep fumbling the ball, originally on Third-Down with the Raimi Spider-Man, then on Second-Down with the Spider-Man reboot and then they got to Second Down with the Fantastic Four, went to Third-Down and fumbled for negative yardage. So Sony really, really wants a franchise here and that's very apparent during the production company logos at the beginning of the movie where one of them is "Ghost Corps" the "Cinematic Universe" Sony wants to build here around the Ghostbusters involving multiple different films, "franchises" of the Ghostbusters around the country and kiddie films around Slimer and his spectral girlfriend.
With this movie being the proverbial Iron Man in this desire, I don't think they're going to get much traction. It's likely we'll see a sequel or maybe a spin-off but I doubt we're going to see the Disney/Marvel-like Expanded/Cinematic Universe Sony wants.
Much has been discussed and said about this movie over the last year-and-half/two-years since Paul Feig took the reigns and began his story/world-building and the Sony hack/leak revealed many of the fears and concerns people had with the way Sony wanted to move forward with this without tying it to the original movies or using the original cast "passing the torch" to a new batch of Ghostbusters. And, as has been abundantly clear the last couple years, going with an all-female Ghostbusting team (as is fairly par for Feig, going with all female main casts) really stirred up some tempers among misogynistic assholes across the internet.
But, Internet. Come on, did you expect anything else?
For me it felt like an odd route to go as opposed to a mixed-gender team with male and female Ghostbusters working together as equals with equal experience or scientific backgrounds/aptitude but, whatever. As set-photos and eventually movie clips and trailers came out my concerns grew as the movie just did not look funny and the humor in it broad and obvious and the look of the movie just didn't have the proper tone.
If you watch the 1984 original that be a pure horror/thriller had it not had comedic moments in it and starred men largely known for comedic work, from the trailers it seemed like this movie was going for the broad humor common to comedies these days.
So what have we got?
The movie starts with a "cold-open" of sorts with a tour guide leading tourists through some historic mansion or museum and he delivers a few jokes that fall flat in his speaking of the history of the abusive, slave-owning, famous former resident of the mansion and this eventually leads into his encounter with the purported ghost who haunts the mansion (which the tour ordinarily brings alive with parlor tricks). At this point I was already sort-of concerned as the jokes being made were too frequent and the opening scene just didn't have that same eerie atmosphere to it that the opening scene of the original movie had with librarian encountering the librarian ghost in the basement of the Main New York Public Library.
The curator of the mansion goes to meet with Kristen Wiig's character Erin Gilbert who in her college years co-wrote a book about ghosts with her now estranged friend Abby (Melissa McCarthy) but she's now a respected physicist wanting tenure at Columbia University, she's shocked to see the book has actually been published -apparently done without her permission by her former friend. Gilbert refuses to help the curator and goes to confront Abby at another college where old tempers sort-of flare up and she meets Abby's partner Holtzman (Kate McKinnon) the two have been furthering research and trying to find solid proof on the existence of ghosts; when they learn of the museum ghost they rush over to investigate where Erin joins and they have their encounter with the ghost there.
Eventually all three lose their respective positions at their colleges due to their investigation of the paranormal but decide to start-up their own operation to research and find evidence of ghosts, realizing they need to capture one for study and as proof to the scientific community they use devices made by Holtzman in hopes to do so. Meanwhile a NYC subway worker has her own encounter with a ghost in a subway tunnel and is surprisingly unimpressed by it but goes to Gilbert and Co. to help them capture the ghost, wanting to know herself what is going on. The capture is unsuccessful but it gives them the information they need to move forward with better equipment and training, eventually leading them to actually capturing ghosts in a public event. Combating them is the Mayor and Homeland Security who know of the existence of ghosts but have tried to keep it under wraps for the good of the public.
They hire a dim male secretary for no reason other than Gilbert finds him hunky (and there's no other applicants), through all of this is a bellboy at a hotel who's building the devices to lure the ghosts in from the otherside in hopes of ushering in an apocalypse because he's been treated poorly by society his whole life.
Overall? ....... The movie's not as bad as I had feared, some of actually sort-of works. When the movie is doing the "scary" stuff or an action piece or trying to be serious it works fairly well and is entertaining. It's common for movies these days to have protracted action scenes and here it works and doesn't grow old too fast nor is it too filled with explosions and action to the point of numbing your brain. Even during these action pieces the humor tapers itself down to tolerable levels. But that's the problem, when the movie's trying to broader humor it doesn't work and is too much. And I'd say the movie is 50/50 when it comes to those two aspects.
Wiig's character is very good as the "stiff" who needs to relax a bit and accept the things going on around her and that this is her destiny in life, McKinnon is fabulous as their quirky technology-creator who's pretty much loving every moment of her life. Seriously, every time she's on the screen it's a treat.
Chris Hemsworth does pretty good as their dim secretary Kevin but his one of the "broad humor" aspects of the movie that doesn't work. It'd be one thing if he was portrayed as your stereotypical dumb hunky guy but his character is one lost brain-cell away from needing to wear a helmet at all times. When they meet him he says he wears glasses without lenses in them because they got dirty and it's easier for him to rub his eyes this way and when he's told to not listen to a private conversation, or when something loud happens, he squints hard or covers his eyes. Yes, he's so dumb he thinks in order to STOP HEARING THINGS you CLOSE YOUR EYES!
It's sort-of like "Joey" in the TV series Friends. In the first couple seasons Joey was simply dim, obviously not smart but clearly capable of being a competent enough person to operate autonomously in society without needing someone to follow him around and make sure he doesn't run into a wall. As the series went on and all of the characters various personality traits grew stronger (Chandler is a sarcastic, insecure, jackass, Ross is a overbearing nerdy jackass, Monica is very clean, Phoebe is a dim hippie, Rachel is sort-of stuck-up) Joey grew dumber and dumber to the point where it was a wonder this guy isn't in a special home somewhere as opposed to be out and about where he could hurt himself something as innocent as a plastic spoon.) Hemsowrth's "Kevin" is where Joey would be if Friends was still running today. In another scene he says he can't answer the phone because it's in an aquarium, pointing to phone used as an aquarium decoration, not realizing the phone sitting right next to him on the otherside of his head (thus the sound coming to a different ear) is the one ringing. I've spent a lot talking about his character but his dumbness is a large example of the type of humor that doesn't click for me in this movie.
Then there's Melissa McCarthy whose humor is more miss than hit with me and this is a miss. Again, very broad humor and much of it involving her yelling and getting into slapsticky situations.
That leaves Leslie Jones's character, Patty, who's our layperson in the movie even though there's little need for one here. In the original movie Winston is the layperson so our expert characters have someone to explain things to, thus explaining things to the audience in a natural way. Patty doesn't quite serve that roll here because the movie doesn't take it's pseudo-science nearly as "seriously" as the original did nor is presented in a way that the audience need it explained to them; the characters encounter technology and new equipment they themselves need explained to them so the role of a audience-insert layperson is redundant. And her "purpose" in the movie's narrative is fairly minor she just sort of tags along and inserts herself into the group and they go along with it because.... she can get them a car. But a car borrowed from her uncle and which they cannot modify to suit their needs (as she freaks out when the car eventually is modified.)
Well, I guess there's also our villain who's really just sort of there. Things could be read into that he's a lonely man obsessed with ending society for being picked on so much, but whatever. It's just such a contrast to the original where there was no, corporeal, villain and the antagonist was the very things our protagonists were fighting. I don't see why this movie felt the need to give us a human villain.
Again, the movie is hit and miss and it's hard to say if one takes over the other enough to say whether or not this movie is a see or not see. Because neither really overpowers the other enough to push one way or another. The "bad" parts of, say Independence Day: Resurgence overpowers the "good" enough that that is a movie to wait for maybe rental or Netflix Streaming.
Captain America: Civil War is pretty much all hit so going to see it in theaters was a must.
Here we're in the middle. If you think the movie looked good you're not likely to be disappointed as there is some good here. If you think the movie looked bad, I'd say your worries are overblown because this movie isn't nearly as bad as it "could have been" considering the way the trailers presented it as being pretty much all broad, slapstick, humor and considering the history of remakes/reboots of older properties.
Does that mean go see it? Ehhh..... Yeah, go see it. It's actually mostly enjoyable and the humor and "bad" in it doesn't quite overpower the good in it. A lot of the broader humor doesn't work, there's plenty of times they're doing a joke and they pull the SNL thing of keeping on running it into the ground (the opening scene about the previous owner of the mansion, an encounter with the head of the school Abby works for, a discussion in the mayor's office about a common idiom) until it's unrecognizable as a joke but the action parts more-or-less work pretty good. There seems like there's supposed to be a character arc going on between Abby and Erin but it feels like some of it got cut out so we see the build-up on a second animosity between them but never really see that next fight/falling out and jump right to the resolution/rekindling..... Twice.
But, I'd almost say the movie is worth seeing for McKinnon's character alone; the one odd part with her is in the trailers. Pretty much everything else she does and says is fantastic.
So, my concerns were mostly eased. The trailers greatly mis-presented this movie as it's not nearly as obvious and broad as they suggest. The movie still has problems when it comes to the humor in it and your tolerance levels for McCarthy and to a lesser extent James, but it's not more than one can handle.
I could "stand" watching this again if/when it shows up on Netflix or something, I'm unlikely to buy it on Blu-Ray. It's possible I'll see it in theaters again if a friend wants to go see it.
But, there it is. The most controversial movie in the last two years hits theaters and it sort of hits with a soft pat rather than with a thud or roar.
Oh, one other critique. The CGI ghosts in the movie aren't too fantastic and pretty consistent with what is scene in the trailers. Too cartoonish and colorful. When we "meet" Slimer he looks like he just came from the actual cartoon show as opposed to ethereal, translucent specter he was in the original. And there's a former or lead villain takes that's a literal cartoon.
Of note, there's a series of during animated credit sequences, a cut dance number sequence from the near-climax of the film during the scrolling credits and a post-credits scene.
One mild insult? The dedication to Harold Ramis is at the literal end of the credits, just before the post-credits scene, rather than somewhere more notable. Though there is a nice "cameo" of him in the movie itself.
