Ivan Reitman(has his son EVER done a full on comedic film?)
Thank You for Smoking. I actually really enjoyed it. And while it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, I got a lot of quality laughs from
Young Adult.
To be clear, I was fine with the 2016 movie being an all female team of Ghostbusters, I just didn't like the specific people the movie cast for the roles, or the director who I only knew from a particularly unfunny, disgusting comedy I couldn't even get through.
Personally, I'm quite fond of most of the 2016 cast & crew from other things. Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, & Cecily Strong have all done fantastic work on
Saturday Night Live. And I really enjoyed Paul Feig's previous team-up with Melissa McCarthy in
Spy. But
Ghostbusters was just a complete waste of all of their talents. Jones was just doing "generic loud black woman," a far cry from her more personal-feeling
SNL work. McCarthy seemed to be making a deliberate choice to not do her standard "angry crass woman" schtick from all of her other movies but didn't really replace it with anything else, so she was just adrift. Wiig was kinda working for me as the straight-woman until her over-the-top screaming at the mayor to evacuate the city. McKinnon was funny but I think could have been even funnier if they had made her character weirder; like, Harpo Marx weird. (Speaking of, I loved Sigourney Weaver's mid-credits cameo as McKinnon's mentor. I wish that she'd been in the whole movie.) Honestly, the only performance that completely worked for me was Chris Hemsworth, who just had some killer one-liners as the ultimate mimbo!
I might have been interested in this... twenty years ago. Just a ship that has sailed.
Yeah, much like
Indiana Jones, I think
Ghostbusters was setting themselves up for failure by trying to make a new installment any time after 1996. Filmmaking techniques just changed so much that it would be impossible for any later installments to capture the flavor that people had come to expect from the originals.
You know what would get me a little excited? Hearing that the team who made Into The Spider-Verse had been put in charge of doing an animated Ghostbuster project.
While I haven't seen
Into the Spider-verse yet, I tend to agree. Putting it into a different format would help to paper over the fact that a 2020 incarnation is destined to feel vastly different from the 1980s originals.
Plus, let's be honest, how many of us first became fans of the property thanks to the cartoon?
What would really get me excited is if they could work out the rights issues to do an animated crossover movie between
Ghostbusters &
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!
I keep seeing everyone say that Ghostbusters II was a steaming pile through and through, but I can't see it that way. It has the original cast, a great concept and story, and the production values are top notch. The real problem is studio meddling, which is why all the brilliant production design for props, sets, etc. from the first film are now all stupid, cartoon-centric and clunky, and get in the way. It's also responsible for all the over the top slapstick humor that the first film was so subtle with. I'd put money on the idea that if they'd been able to make the movie with the same script, but without all the meddling, it would have been a lot better.
About 16 years ago, I worked on a play with a guy who worked as the sound designer on
Ghostbusters 2. He was pretty pissed at the studio because most of his work ended up getting buried in the mix by the music.
Personally, while I'm a huge apologist for
Ghostbusters 2, I would say that there's probably no truly compelling reason for it to exist. I'm glad that it does and I think that it gets way more flack than it deserves. But I acknowledge that it's basically just the first movie done over again. That's OK. The first movie was great and featured some fun characters that I very much enjoyed seeing again.
But I think that gets to the heart of why another
Ghostbusters movie is easier said than done. The first movie's success has little to do with the premise and more to do with a bunch of really funny actors at the peak of their comedic powers playing funny characters.
Ghostbusters 2 got some mileage out of just trotting out that same cast and making them do similar stuff. But the problem with a new cast, whether it's set in the original continuity or the 2016 reboot, is that you basically have to build the whole thing from scratch again.
That's not to say that there's absolutely zero value in the premise by itself but I think that's why it works better as an animated adventure cartoon series for kids rather than as a big budget live action feature film. I'm honestly surprised that there hasn't been more effort to do another
Ghostbusters cartoon series, particularly in this reboot-happy age that's already given us remakes of
Duck Tales, She-ra, Thundercats, not to mention rebooting
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, &
My Little Pony every decade or so.
Am I the only one who thinks we might see a crossover with the 2016 film? Even though I think the 2016 film is terrible I am still a fan of all the actors in it and I would love to see those actors get a another shot only hopefully with a better script this time around. I know it doesn't exist in the same canon but you always have alternate universe' to explain it away.
I always thought that it would have been fun to have the 2016 movie make some vague references to Melissa McCarthy's dead father; then in the post-credits sequence, Holtzmann would open up a dimensional portal, they'd see Ray on the other side fiddling with his own dimensional portal, and then McCarthy would take one look at him and say, "Dad?" (Cut to black.)
I didn't care much for GB2, either, but it was all worth it just for Peter MacNicol's character.
I also enjoyed Harris Yulin as the judge. Yulin is a great actor that we don't see often enough but I've enjoyed a bunch of his TV guest appearances over the years: Quentin Travers on
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a mobster who helped Maris get out of a bunch of traffic tickets on
Frasier, and most powerfully as Amin Marritza, the guilt-ridden Cardassian file clerk in
DS9's "Duet."