GhostBusters 3 is Finally Being Made. (2020 Release)

It'd been funnier if they acted like people and not characters in an extreme comedy. Egon is funny because he's this dry, extreme, scientific stiff who lets some odd comment slip through here and there.

Abby is "funny" because she's constantly yelling and gets upset by won-ton soup from a restaurant she doesn't like. But she has to order from them because NYC doesn't have 10,000 other Chinese restaurants that deliver.

The equipment is funny because its destructive and the guys struggle to use it the first time put. In 16 it's "funny" because when its used it either prompts an impotence joke, causes the user to fly around like a deflating balloon or, suddenly, they can use it like marksmen pros with ease and acrobatics because the one other time they used it with a measure of success they came out victorious.

The movie was them constantly talking, yelling and yammering. There's so many funny moments in the original that come from people just reacting to things (Egon moving towards the corner of the elevator after turning on Ray's pack) or small lines.

But in 16, nah just have everyone always, constantly, talking, yelling and making jokes that contradict lines that were just said or contradict all levels of common sense.

I think that movie got one laugh from me, but the rest of it was just painful nonsense.

 

I mentioned earlier in the thread that I felt this had a bit of a Eureka tone to the point that it almost looks like they filmed on the same small-town set. The interiors feel familiar.

 

For me, when the movie turned me off was the dean of the college and the middle finger joke. Seriously, who acts like that? The first film the characters were all slight exaggerations of the kinds of people you meet in life. I can't imagine any professional acting like that. I've known guys like Peck. I've met sarcastic slackers like Venkman or socially inept people like Lewis, I've never met a boss who would flip me off like a 16 year old in a series of middle finger gags. It wasn't funny, and it pulled me out of the movie, which is a shame because I love almost all the people involved.

 

But the key to the whole endeavor would be NOT following in anyone's footsteps, but creating real grounded characters in a universe where these four women become paranormal investigators. Characters that might exist in a real place. What they did was more like a SNL sketch.

They could have made it a great movie, but they didn't seem to really take the subject matter seriously and in so doing they created characters no one would accept as real people.

That was my perception anyway.

 

Agreed, they treated it as if everything, literally EVERYTHING in it had to be a big, obvious, joke. There was no time to build characters or a world, let's just throw a bunch of jokes out there and see what sticks. Not much did.

The example above about the administrator of the college is a good one. Dean Yeager in the original, the moment he was in it, was a character. Someone done with Venkman and Co. and he felt like a real dean.

New one? We need constant jokes so make him a rambling idiot who can't spell and likes to make middle-finger jokes. LAUGH!!! It's funny the 50th one he makes!

I think that one that "broke" me the most was the gag with "Kevin" and his eyes. Granted, by the time we got to that "joke" a LOT of bad stuff had already happened and I was already checked out, but this joke read the most like there was no script and the actors were just told to go out there, improvise, and we'll go with what we think is "funniest."

To be fair, Chris Hemsworth is funny and most of what he brings is one of the few things worthwhile in the movie and this gag is "funny" for a moment, but it shouldn't have been left in because it ultimately doesn't work and just takes out any shred of "realism" in the movie.

Kevin covers his eyes when he hears a loud noise. He thinks he HEARS with his eyes.

This joke makes no damn sense and no one that stupid exists while also being a functioning adult. It's not a gag that makes any sense because you'd think he'd realize that covering his eyes isn't blocking out the sound!

It just reads a lot as a gag Hemsworth did during one of the takes everyone laughed for the moment and just kept it in, never giving it much of a second thought. There's a lot of gags like this one in the movie, hell, they're all pretty much like that. It's a big improve skit.

The movie just had a of dumb nonsense in it.

 

So, like the original Ghostbusters, then.

 

..... No. Not at all.

The original Ghostubsters wasn't constant, wall-to-wall, broad, slapstick, near improvisational comedy. It was dry, and there was story, structure and quiet moments. It wasn't even like the SNL of the era it was made in.

 

I watched the original today, and it brought up a couple of points I want to address separately. First, in regards to the 2016 movie. I think a good note for comparison is this exchange:

It was a quiet, dry moment between friends and colleagues, and said to me Venkman is a guy busting his friends chops, and Spengler said it so matter of factly it made me believe he really did try it and just feels the others didn't understand what he was trying to do. It felt real. In addition to that, the exchange was funny. I feel if some version of this exchange had happened in the reboot, it would have been Abby (Melissa McCarthy) yelling at Holtzman (Kate McKinnon) "Ya tried tar drill a hole on your head!" To which Holtzman would grab a drill holding it to her head revving it going "Wanna see?!? Wanna see me do it?!?" And then Abby slapping it out of her hand, which to me wouldn't be nearly as funny or illustrative as the exchange in the '84 movie.

Second, I have a theory based on nothing that maybe the uniform in the trailer was a misdirect. Maybe they are Ray's family. Ray funds the initial Ghostbusters by taking out a 3rd mortgage on the house his parents left him. Could that be the house in the movie? Also, he is the one who finds Ecto-1 and buys it, which would make it his property. Just something I thought of while watching the original.

 

I really don't get this line of argument. In what world am I honestly supposed to take seriously the idea of Louis Tully and Walter Peck as 'real people'? I can't. At all. And they're far from the only ones, either.

Yeah, the og GBs themselves are more understated and dry overall, but they're also more hollow. You guys say the 2016 film played everything as a joke, yet the personal storyline between Wiig and McCarthy showed a real (and interesting) interpersonal relationship that just didn't exist at all in the original because that was literally just a few guys hanging out being funny together while fighting ghosts. There's really nothing deeper to the original characters' relationship than that.

 

To me, it doesn't matter what the original film/s did or didn't do. GB16 is crappy even as its own thing. It's one of the worst "line-o-rama" comedies I have seen. Putrid over-saturated cotton-candy colors, unfunny running gags, and too many ad-libs that should have been dropped. That's not to say I never laughed, but the ratio of good to bad jokes was pretty dire.

 

Don't know about Louis but the world seems full of Walter Pecks.

 

Full of self-important dicks, absolutely. Never seen one so ridiculously parody-esque as Peck in real life, though.

 

Walter Peck isn't all that wrong the movie. Venkman is a dick to him when they first meet and carrying nuclear powered ray guns that even the NRA couldn't defend should be concerning. Even closing the storage device makes sense only you proably want to bring in someone more qualifed than just some city employee. Jason

 

The kids even look related to Egon. Considering Egon can't be in the movie.. and considering that Ray was not the only person who can have a house.. it's Egon's kids. I have a feeling Egon got the place AFTER the events of the films because of the idea of doing more research into Shandor.. (as the Shandor sign is on the mining site)

 

I see people on the news almost every night that make Peck look sane and caring by comparison.

 

And I see people on YouTube every day that make Hemsworth's character look smart. It doesn't change the fact that both are over the top movie caricatures.

 

There are people on Youtube who think that they hear with their eyes?

Even if there are, "What about?"-ing the first movie doesn't actually make GB16 any better.

 

It's not so much that they're "real people" but that they're closer to "real people" than anything in the '16 movie. The world is full of Walter Pecks, self-important government douchebags who are petty and want to regulate everything to oblivion. Hell, thinking about it, I'm not even really sure what makes Walter Peck that extreme. I can't think of anything he does or says that's out of line or breaks the "reality wall" into parody. He's there to make sure these "ghostbusters" aren't harming the environment and it becomes personal when one of them insults him and turns him away. He wants answers and these guys shut-down and he's not going to listen to anyone to get there even when the people who built the things and the guy from the power company all tell him this stuff can't simply be "shut off."

Tully is probably about the most paradous, extreme, character in the movie but even he more or less stays within the limits of keeping the movie "real."

The comment about the personal story-line between McCarthy and Wiig's characters is a valid one but it's a relationship that's sort of strained by the over-the-top comedy and acting and it's not even really that strong a connection since the two seem to work it out off-camera moments after they reconnect and begin making this "ghostbusting" job.... Which they didn't even really want to do to rid the city of ghosts but to capture one to prove they're real and get them some credibility back, particularly for Wiig who was just fired from her job at a prestigious school. (Was it at Columbia?)

But since everything in that movie had to be a long, drawn-out, joke that was heavily improvised any "deeper" history between the two is lost. She comes in to chastise her about the book she wrote using Wiig's notes/research and then we get our first Won Ton Soup joke, then we get the queef joke, and then we get them running to the museum or whatever to see this ghost incident and we get, I think, I first joke where the heavy improvisation builds a contradiction but the scene needs to end now so we got to stop somehow.

They're leaving the research lab to go to the museum and Wiig is still hanging out by the queef-recording while McCarthy and McKinnon are by the door wanting to leave and McCarthy starts yelling for Wiig to get her ass into gear and come with them, Wiig is refusing because she doesn't want to get drug back into this paranormal business, but McCarthy wants her out of the room so she can lock the door, she doesn't even want her come with them to the museum. There's some fighting between them for a moment and McCarthy throws her hands up in frustration and says something like, "fine, the door will lock itself when you leave anyway!"

So what was the whole goddamn point of that fucking argument?!

She's yelling at her to leave the room so she can lock the door but the door locks by itself so there's no point in having to lock the door? Yeah, okay, maybe make sure the door gets closed but that just seems like something that'd happen by itself or someone would do if they have to open the door to even get out.

And part of that argument was that McCarthy doesn't want Wiig around or to come with them, she just wanted her out of the room, then cut to all three of them at the museum and they're all friends and co-workers now and none of the history between Wiig and McCarthy is really touched on again.

But that's kind of the sign of a "good" parody, one where you know who/what they're making fun of, they're just turning the stereotypes up to an extreme.

The dean at McCarthy's college who is he a pardoy of? What administrator of even the lowliest, dumbest, most unaccredited colleges behaves like this and is prone to misspellings. ..... (Okay, an obvious answer just popped into my head but play with me here.) He's not a joke of an type of person that's common, that we'd all know or have experiences with, he's just there for a joke. To be a joke. To give off jokes. To try and make one or two people out there laugh.

We've all seen and dealt with government assholes, or just plain assholes who put their own goals ahead of everyone elses and take things to petty extremes. Very, very, few of us dealt with people who sit there and rattle of a bunch of middle-finger gags to get us to leave the room.

Hemsworth is probably the closest thing the movie has to the "Louis Tully" level of parody as he more-or-less seems to stay in some lane of "realism" but even then he veers onto the shoulder but there's a rumble strip there that pulls him back into his lane. Some of the gags with him are just a bit out of step with a boundary of "reality" like the thing with covering his eyes to block out sound, or the thing with there being no lenses in his glasses. (I don't recall the reason behind it, I seem to think it was because of the glare they were causing his vision bothered him, so he took the lenses out but kept the frames. I don't recall if it's implied that he needed the glasses to have useful vision (or to read) or if he just liked the way he looked with them on so any lenses that would've been in them would've been just regular pieces of glass/plastic like what are on the glasses you see on the walls of stores where you buy prescription glasses. (As opposed to reading glasses or getting the prescription filled where the "glass" has some distortion to it to make them useful to the wearer.)

The '16 movie was just extreme. Everything in it is extreme and a joke, and a running joke, and an endless joke. There's not one character in the movie who isn't in there to just be a gag and to deliver gags. And that much doesn't work very often.

Louis Tully stands out in the original because he's the one extreme they have. The one person taking these jokes right up to that "fourth wall" and poking it with a stick and threatening to pierce it. Everyone else is an extreme, a pardoy, an archetype but they're behavior is all within some form of reality because they're all playing it straight. Walter Peck may be an extreme of the government bureaucrat asshole but he's not running around, flailing his arms about, and doing a series of gags and comedy to force a laugh out of you at some point he's just being an extreme version of that asshole you once had to deal with. Or deal with once a month of your life as part of routine inspections to make sure you're keeping a series of logs in check to verify you're doing your job of cleaning things. (I've dealt with my Walter Pecks, I deal with my Walter Pecks. It's annoying. Though the guy now is cool and, to be fair, he's not a government guy he's a private guy by the company to make sure we're a step ahead of the government for when they come in.)

In the '16 movie they're all flailing their arms around trying to provoke a laugh at you and they're coming at that fourth-wall with a chainsaw. You're going to laugh goddamnit! Something in this is funny! LAUGH!!!! See! See! He thinks you cover your eyes to block out loud sounds! She hates this restaurant's won ton soup! The equipment is powerful and she's flying around like a balloon! See! See! She's constantly talking! CONSTANTLY! FUCKING! TALKING! HA HA! HA! A queef! Get it!! Get it!

The one laugh I got out of the movie? The ONE laugh? Was the most subtle, "original movie-like" gag where it may have been improvised (I dunno if this thing had anything resembling a script other than a series of pages that said "this scene needs to start here and end here, say things. Make jokes!") it's when they're in the theater, Patty is going around and she looks into a eerie looking room with some mannequins and prop junk in it and she says something like, "That's creepy, nope, not going in there!"

It was just something about the delivery and just the look of the room (which was "creepy-like", I guess) that made me laugh.

I didn't laugh at the won-ton soup jokes, the slime going in "every crack," Hemsworth mistaking his eyes for his ears, any of that stuff. Because it was all beating me on the head. I laughed at one joke that was quiet, subtle, and matched the look of the scene.

There's probably a couple others that were on that level that got a chuckle out of me, but all of the broad humor annoyed me.

There's lots of YouTube videos out there that explain the differences in the comedy and why it doesn't work (for all) in the '16 movie.


2:48 starts the segment that I think covers my thoughts best.

The Plinket Review is good at this stuff too, though long for some. Though it very much covers the problems with the movie.


32 minutes in or so they talk about how they filmed the scene, BTS interviews they literally say there's hour-long cuts of scenes where they they just sat and told jokes and McCarthy in an interview even admitting that she was surprised there was enough stuff to put a movie together. At least watch a segment starting at around 37:25 that gives a good example of the movie going too far with jokes, and how one could have played out better.

 

You'd be surprised.

And there is no whataboutism here. I responded to specific direct comparisons between the two movies. Those comparisons are bullshit. That's all I said. No one's holding GB16 up as a paragon of filmmaking. I'm just saying this whole "GB16 sucks because it's too jokey/not as 'believable'/refuses to take any part of itself seriously" as the original is just not true. GB16 failed because it didn't make people laugh. There's no deeper analysis worth making there.