Ghostbusters 2016: Talk about the movie(s).

Lol.
I only saw that film 2 years ago. Does that mean there will be nude mud wrestling?

 

Actually it sounds like Zero Hour!, the cheesy 1957 air-disaster movie that Airplane! was largely a comedy remake of. It was not exactly an Oscar-worthy film...

But yes, as they say, "comedy is tragedy from a distance." Comedy and drama can easily explore the exact same themes and subjects -- it's just a matter of how they approach them.

 

You are not counting the montage. A lot can happen in a montage.

 

Yes. But the implication is they busted enough to fill the containment unit. Besides which the comment was semi jokey, but I guess for me it was Tuesday.

 

I never considered Ghostbusters anything but a comedy, and until this conversation I never thought there was any question about that. Sure it has some serious parts, but so do a lot of comedies. To me it always seemed that the emphasis of the film was on the humorous aspects, with the more serious stuff built up around that.

 

I always think it's good to look at how a film begins, how far in before your first joke (more in scenes than time) the afore mentioned Airplane starts with one. Ghostbusters ha so wait until Venkman is obviously cheating the test for the 'young blonde coed'. And even that could go either way depending on the film that follows. How many 'funny' things happen in ghostbusters? Or is it the personalities that make it funny? The performances? Little things like gum dropping student or rays dangling cigarette?

 

Completely ignoring the same vocal minority trying to tell everyone to ignore the trailer (even though that's the only evidence anyone has to judge the movie so far, but apparently wishful thinking is more enlightened or whatever) or else be treated like a close-minded troll or whatever, I'd place movies like Ghostbusters and Stripes somewhere between a movie like the Avengers or Iron Man and movies like Deadpool.

Neither group consists of full-blown comedies or full-blown dramas, but they all land somewhere in between those two extremes. And as far as which of those two groups Ghostbusters falls in, I'd say it'd be much closer to Avengers than it would Deadpool. Maybe a bit more comedic than than Ant-Man, for example, but it's definitely not the rip-roaring, non-stop, slapstick comedy the aforementioned people are claiming it to be.

 

Which aforementioned people claimed that?

 

Ghostbusters is a comedy, no question about it. Comedians were cast in the roles, the writers are comedians, the director's resume were comedy driven. The movie is a comedy. Come on.

 

The people who are trying to say it was much more serious than the new Ghostbustsers movie appears to be.

Which is the key word here: 'appears.' We've no idea how much comedy the new film will have in it. Heck at the end of the day it might be more serious than the original film is. The point is, we don't know yet.

 

To be fair, the whole discussion revolved around another poster calling it dramedy and me defending that opinion as I agreed with it. The new film, based on that trailer, seems to be neither as serious is one direction, nor as funny in the other. Though I suppose the lara Croft tribute ghost weapons are also funny.

 

It is a comedy. It is also a drama. Bill Murrays film immediately previous to this was The Razors Edge. Sigourney Weaver was a serious (genre) actress. Ernie Hudson does more genre films than comedies.
In some respects it has a lot in common with say...Aliens. Which has plenty of comedy right there on screen, inbetween the action. But that comes a few years down the line.

 

Though I am fuzzy on the whole huckster thing, I think it's safe to say that only Venkman may be one. Ray and Egon are both fully qualified and know their stuff, and are primarily motivated by pure scientific research, certainly initially. Venkman is a bit more....variable. But I am not sure Ray and Egon dragged him through school. Oh. He's a Psychologist. That may explain a lot....

It's not a mouse she's screaming at is it? Either version of the graffiti is not a joke as such, one is a reference to the exorcist, which last I checked isn't a comedy. It's a hybrid, and rarely trips out into the absurd (within its story reality) unlike say...the Blues Brothers or even Stripes. There are whole chunks where nothing funny is said or done, and chunks where the funny is mixed with the serious stuff. Guy is talking to a horse. Funny. Guy is possessed by a demonic spirit bent on enslaving the world. Not so funny. It's such a straight mix that you can't ignore the serious stuff, based very much on real world stuff. (Aykroyd knew his stuff.)
A good example from elsewhere...Buffy again. The film version plays it hard to comedy. The TV series skews more to an equal weight on the drama/horror, with the comedy being more in dialogue that anything being played as outright absurd. Its a conscious decision too, or we could have had John candy with dobermans and a bad German accent, and they would have kept the frankly rubbish two drunks in the park shtick in.

 

It's a comedy. But a comedy can have a heart and serious elements. Some of the best ones do. Really if the remake fails, it will be because it isn't funny. It has nothing to do with not living up to the original, because even nothing ever will live up to it. Even the sequel couldn't. I love the sequel, but until the reboot got announced it was hated by pretty much everyone. Ghostbusters is one of the best comedies ever made. Everyone who has been alive since 1984 has seen it. Children today have seen it. My 4 year old niece knows what the Ghostbusters are.

That's why I'm not hating on the remake. If it's funny I'll like it, if not I'll forget about it in a month. The writer/director usually makes me laugh and the cast has been great in everything I've seen them in. So it will never be as good as Ghostbusters, but nothing ever will. It's perfect and we'll never have that cast, those performances and that script ever again. But this movie may be enjoyable on its own.

 

Sigourney's previous movie was Deal of the Century so I don't know if that's the best argument.

 

I have no idea what that film even is, but it won't take away from my point which is that an acting leopard can change its metaphorical spots.
Of course the eighties is the period the action film comes into its own, which are usually full of humour. Ghostbusters is like an early entry to this template. It's why Loaded Weapon isnt as successful a parody as it could have been....Lethal Weapon was already a comedy. (I think there's and interview on that subject somewhere with Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. 'theyre doing a comedy version of our movies' 'isnt that what we were doing?')
Go back the opposite way and you have Chaplin, who stuck serious amounts of pathos, social comment, and even science fiction in his films, but ultimately, it's a vehicle for a guy falling on his bum.
I think it's because that line has been so blurred right back to Shakespeare, that it's hard to see when the rubicon is definitively crossed and when something is masterfully sailing the river. People go on an actors past work...which is why people don't like it much when Robin Williams isn't being the funny guy for instance. Audience Dissonance.
Cuts the other way too...a lot of people couldn't see why The Martian could be seen as a comedy, because it's Ridley Scott and Matt Damon.
But even the book is part comedy on its mother's side, there's plenty of stuff in there that's meant to make you laugh without ever rendering the serious aspects nonsensical or absurd.
Just like Ghostbusters.

 

TL;DR. Ghostbusters is a comedy.