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I guess he got over his dad saying they were full of crap: https://variety.com/2019/film/news/jason-reitman-ghostbusters-director-1203109264/ I really don't know what to think. I've enjoyed some of Jason Reitman's movies (in fact, "Juno" is one of my favorites), but in the past I've agreed with him that he wouldn't be the right fit for GB. But maybe that fresh, prestige-indie take could be a good thing. My other feeling is that it doesn't matter which "universe" it's in at this point, since there's only so much mileage you can get out of the original characters, particularly after Ramis' passing. You know, whatever. I'll be there opening weekend, assuming it actually happens. This franchise has its flaws, but it has my heart as well. What can I say.
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Jan 16, 2019 02:52
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Yes! Exactly! In my kid brain, I'd rather imagine the whole beam than have some sort of poor tangible version. So I just took it out, and lost it forever ago. My friend took the swirly green pool noodle from a different GB toy and put it in his regular proton gun, which I thought was an effective compromise.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:23
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I liked the trailer fine, although I was surprised there weren't more jokes. Still, if this movie turned out to be more of a drama/horror than a comedy, I wouldn't mind, so long as it was good. I have a feeling the marketing is working overtime to establish that this will have a different tone and it won't be full of comedy and it won't be like the original films or 2016. Trailers and posters are sort of where you lay down for the audience that laps everything up (that's us) what to expect. It's touching that the movie seems to be about the Harold Ramis's character's legacy, though I confess it's hard to imagine Spengler ever starting a family—his character struck me as someone too devoted to his work for that. I also hope the film doesn't reveal that he, like, abandoned his family or whatever. Perhaps he came to the small town to investigate a big supernatural thing brewing (perhaps the same thing Shandor Mining was once after), and brought all the GB stuff to set up a base, and then died (or was killed?) during the work.
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Dec 9, 2019 20:12
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Timby posted:GB2 is also an unspeakably ugly movie, which has always surprised me, given Chapman's pedigree. Everything is so smooth and slick and the movie is missing all that beautiful grain that defined the look of the first. That being said, it was shot during a transitional period for film stocks; I believe Chapman shot on the then-recently introduced Eastman 400T 5295 stock, which is a very fast stock, necessary because so much of the movie took place in abject darkness. I also wonder how much his heart was or wasn't in it. He'd gotten his shot at directing, Clan of the Cave Bear hadn't worked out as he hoped, and so here's a period where he's just getting offered studio comedies and he might wonder, geez, how did I go from shooting Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to Ghostbusters II and Kindergarten Cop. Here he is talking about that period and GB2. His attitude seems to be pretty philosophical, well, that's the kind of movies they were making then, worked with nice people, paid the bills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fQMv_tuI3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H2QAEIkFD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjlCqarSnvQ GB2 just kind of looks like a movie of its time to me, nothing special about it, nothing so great, nothing so bad. GB1 is just so much more distinctive.
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Dec 10, 2019 02:55
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Regarding the excellent Legos and the line "Ray is missing his ears."—let us not forget that Venkman pulls one of his ears in GB1 and both of them, more aggressively, in GB2, so you're simply illustrating the logical conclusion of it all.
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Nov 15, 2021 20:53
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I saw it! I saw it! I saw it! I liked it so much! I suppose it falls short of greatness as a whole, but God there are some great parts. During a scene of Ecto-1 on a merry chase through town I realized that no matter how this movie ended up among my _personal favorites_ of Ghostbusters sequels/spinoffs, it was unquestionably the _best_ since the original, when I’m putting on my fancy critic’s hat. It really, truly, neatly sidesteps the issue of comparison with the originals by being, truly, apples and oranges. I’ll always prefer apples. The 2016 reboot attempted to grow a new apple and it was a little mushy. This movie is an orange. It is as different from the originals as Tim Burton’s Batman from Christopher Nolan’s; you can like both, but one won’t give you what the other will. The best nerd analogy I can come up with is “Rogue One”. The whole beauty of that film is that it was Star Wars but not trying to act like Star Wars (at least for most of it), it was its own film—not the way I would want every Star Wars film to be, but great on its own terms and in its own way. Mckenna Grace is compelling and endearing, and it is to the film’s utmost credit that we really feel like it’s about her, not her lineage, not the original guys. Indeed, the film is at is strongest when it’s being itself (a hodgepodge of Spielberg influences and a story about an awkward, nerdy girl finding her groove). Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to see the original characters back in action once it happened. But it was honestly beside the point. Hell, here’s my dirty little secret: there are moments toward the end that are clearly designed to tug at my heartstrings and didn’t. I didn’t mind them. They weren’t badly done. They just didn’t move me. Jason Reitman’s attempt to ape Spielberg only gets him so far, I suppose. The shameless borrowing from the original actually worked on the macro level (all the stuff that was actually part of the plot)—I liked that much, much better than I thought I would. What absolutely does not work is the ten million jokes thrown in as references for the fans. The filmmakers should have trimmed a great many of these out. They land with thuds. For all the film’s flaws, it gives the “Ghostbusters” franchise a good movie, and a different _kind_ of good movie—which is invigorating. And whatever it opens the door to (and you can tell the movie is hoping to keep that door open)… I’m on board. On a scale of “We came, we saw, we kicked its rear end” to “Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes”, I give it a “Beautiful. You’re hired.”
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Nov 19, 2021 05:01
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Karloff posted:I did feel Gozer was more human and less otherworldly in this. The 84 rendition genuinely feels like something from a different plane of existence, this Gozer was a little more super-villainy and human in her mannerisms, like in the way she lounged on the chair The lighting was a big part of it too. But yes, I do think Gozer moved differently in this one. I chalk this up to hiring an actor instead of a trained model. As a side note, I was terribly distracted because I knew, I just knew, that had to be a famous person I recognized but I couldn't figure out who… I'm told the actor was Olivia Wilde. As much as I was hoping to see new things instead of retreads, I liked the Gozer plotline and what it added to the mythos. I liked seeing a more menacing version of the character doing more things. I really could have done without some of the direct quoting of dialogue and of shots from the original film—the "There is no Mom" was a low point for me, and I didn't like how they recreated the terror dog transformation so closely.
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Nov 19, 2021 15:27
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PneumonicBook posted:Where'd the OG team get proton packs from? Egon took them all! This was established a half hour ago! He took all the traps, not all the packs. I just did an interview with NPR about the movie, what's so special about Ghostbusters, etc. etc. — the piece airs Tuesday, hopefully I'll have a link for you. It won't be a very long piece and I am not the focus of it, so hopefully I'll get one smart comment in and acquit myself nicely! Finally, I thought this was adorable: Mckenna Grace at age 9 dancing to guess-which-song.  https://www.instagram.com/p/CWdpqVxl9qU/
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Nov 20, 2021 04:14
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Bacon Terrorist posted:Hilarious Sigourney Weaver was credited before actually appearing in the film. I actually liked this—for me, it was a nice "Wait, what happened, what'd I miss?" moment, and then wham, you cut to the post-credits scene, and there she is. Almost like an announcer telling the audience to please welcome a special surprise guest. It was funny for me though because in that few seconds of "Wait, what happened, what'd I miss?" I thought maybe Weaver was the voice of Gozer? I was surprised to watch the credits and see Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo turn up. Didn't have her on my bingo card for this series. Also, to Bacon Terrorist's point about Murray's visible aging, the Weaver scene made the comparison even worse; hell, for a good run in her life she looked better every year, she's 72 now and looks 50 at worst.
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Nov 20, 2021 14:44
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Regarding the film's reverent attitude toward the equipment, I see where people are coming from, but I also think that's a function of how the whole film is shot. Yes, we get loving, reverent shots of every piece of gear, and so I understand how it comes off like Luke's lightsaber in The Force Awakens… but I think the film uses closeups _in general_ more than the originals. I was much more aware of the use of lenses on this movie than I was in the prior two. Wide shots were wider, close-ups were closer, there was probably more being done with depth of field. That's not to say the original films didn't give us the occasional intimate closeup or big wide vista, I just sensed it more on this movie—or maybe I'm mis-seeing because this one was on the big screen and I'm used to the original two at home.
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Nov 21, 2021 17:30
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Kind of nice that this movie goes out of its way to correct two of Ray's numerical errors from the original movie, the date of the Tunguska event and the Bible quote.
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Nov 23, 2021 18:45
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My interview with NPR's "Here and Now" aired today in many markets. I'm not the best speaker in the world, but for Ghostbusters, I'll put together a coherent sentence! https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/11/25/ghostbusters-new-fans
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Nov 25, 2021 21:52
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I was watching Afterlife on Saturday night  I think what I liked best about Reitman was how even he knew something special happened on the original film. He loved to tell the story of how he saw the guys in their costumes in New York for the first time and got that wonderful feeling that something was clicking. He recognized that that kind of magic is a gift from the movie gods that doesn't come around every day, and he was happy to shepherd it, embrace it and ride the wave right till the end. RIP.
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Feb 14, 2022 05:31
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I only saw Evolution once, in theaters, and even at the time I thought it was a pale echo of Ghostbusters, but with one truly incredible scene. "There is always time for lubricant" is just amazing.
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Feb 14, 2022 17:29
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Part of me wonders if the reason GB gives me such warm fuzzies is precisely because it thumbs its nose at the warm-fuzzies game so many other movies play. In animal terms, Afterlife is a dog, it loves you and wants to be loved. The original film is a cat, it's too cool for that sort of thing and doesn't give a crap what you think. Well, I'm a cat person. (Mind you, I am very fond of Afterlife. Its Spielbergian aspects and its heart-tugging largely work on me. I think its efforts toward emotional appeal are more successful than GB2's, with that mawkish score and deliberate pleas to our kinder human nature.) I think what I'm trying to get at here is also why kids love Ghostbusters. I've watched the original film with kids a few times, and have very fond memories of watching it with my nieces—it's so much fun watching them enjoy it on the level that people our age (I'm guessing) did at the time. It has lots of things that kids like, but it is not a movie quote-unquote "for" kids—between some of the grownup jokes and the technobabble, it deliberately shuts them out sometimes, but that's part of the fun for them, it's like a mystery to solve, or a fun thing the older kids are doing that they want to be grown-up enough for.
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Feb 16, 2022 05:59
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I collect some side-by-side examples of Bernstein scores that sound like GB on my "Overthinking Ghostbusters" chapter on music: https://www.runleiarun.com/ghostbusters/chapter6.shtml In addition to the Thriller example mentioned above, there's bits from Slipstream, Trading Places, Summer and Smoke, Heavy Metal, Thoroughly Modern Millie and The Buccaneer… I'll have to look at the Black Cauldron score! (I enjoyed the books as a kid but never saw the movie.)
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Oct 20, 2022 03:37
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Wow! My thanks to you, Mr. Buttermilk. I'm definitely gonna have to listen to that whole score but I certainly hear what you're hearing. I can't believe I never dug into this myself, I must have missed it on his filmography somehow when I was digging into his work. I'm glad Black Cauldron came after GB or I would have to write a whole thing about how you can hear antecedents and blah blah blah… as it stands, I'll probably be able to just line up some interesting examples of familiar-sounding music and harrumph, well, what do you want, it's Hollywood.
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Oct 20, 2022 16:40
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GB2, 2016 and Afterlife all try to add something that wasn't very present in the original film, in different ways. Emotion. Or sentiment, if you're feeling snarky. GB1 is basically a film on Venkman's wavelength. It doesn't get wrapped up in character development or their inner lives. It goes from one scene to the next with swagger in its step. Only at the very end, when we think Dana might be dead, does the film get a really serious/sad moment that isn't played for laughs or for scares, and it doesn't last long. It doesn't *undercut* its movie moments of emotionality so much as it never brings them up to begin with. The movie is the guys on their big adventure with a few side scenes of Venkman and Dana's romance before even that gets wrapped up in the big adventure. GB2 changes the game. Even Egon's gotten more emotional over five years. There's a baby, and cute shots thereof. There's regrets. There's morals and discussions about the importance of being good people. There's Randy Edelman's score with its tinkling piano. Unfortunately, I don't find a lot of this very successful. GB2016 tells a story of friendship. It is meant to touch your heart when Erin leaps into the pit to save Patty, reaches out to her, etc. I actually do think this element of the movie works, and helps it stand apart from the original. They do a better job of that than they do with the humor. Afterlife has a whole emotional plot for Phoebe. She is a more conventional movie protagonist with dramatic speeches and stuff. It's not nearly as much of a comedy as the first flick, it's really all about family. It's been said eight million times but Afterlife feels like someone aping 1980s Spielberg than it does the original. Again, I find Afterlife successful in what it does—there's probably too much hugging at the end, but its attempts at feeling still, well, *feel* better for me than GB2's awkwardnesses. I think it's very hard to replicate the unique vibe of the original. And so if the new film continues on its own path I'm okay with it, as long as it does it well. I've enjoyed seeing spy videos and photos over the past couple of days; that's enough to get ME emotional…
Icon-Cat fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jun 7, 2023 |
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Jun 7, 2023 20:21
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A little something I typed up for my Facebook friends today, thought this thread might enjoy it… ———— For the anniversary of my favorite movie, I wanna share something I only noticed this year. Well, maybe not ‘noticed’, but never really put the pieces together on till now. Okay. Just in case it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, the end of “Ghostbusters” / beginning of the credits is a crowd of New Yorkers cheering for the gang upon their triumphant return from the rooftop, having blown up the giant marshmallow man and saved the day. All good. … From their perspective. You see, I never really considered this question—what does the crowd know? I’ve long assumed that their function was like an audience surrogate, giving us permission to whoop and cheer for the good guys as if it’s a curtain call at a play. (And to be sure, that’s part of the fun.) But there’s a difference between us and them. The crowd on the screen doesn’t know what we know. (The movie even sets us up for this chasm between their knowledge and ours, by cutting from the oh-so-heroic, music-fueled moment of the guys entering the building for battle to the unglamorous plod up the stairs.) The crowd didn’t hear anything the Ghostbusters said in the building or on the rooftop. They heard whatever Gozer bellowed, but it’s not the most straightforward material to make meaning of. (We, the audience, have the benefit of Venkman explaining it to us with the J. Edgar Hoover line. The crowd onscreen received no such explanation.) The crowd doesn’t know that Stantz is responsible, however unfairly, for summoning Mr. Stay-Puft. The crowd definitely doesn’t know that the heroes they're cheering for pulled a solution out of their rear end with a “very slim chance” of an incredibly dangerous gambit which fortunately happened to work. The crowd just knows that the guys went in, then after a while some scary stuff happened, then a giant monster appeared, then the guys shot him, and then he started burning and going after them directly, and then when he got real close he blew up and the natural balance of things was restored. In short, the crowd is applauding a conventional group of world-saving heroes, and thus giving us, the audience, the gift of enjoying it with them. But that’s not what actually happened. It’s the movie’s last trick, and we’re in on it—and yet, the end result is that we forget we’re in on it. The movie told us the guys were conning us, but we applaud not the con, like it's "The Sting", but the triumph of good over evil, like it's a superhero movie. We merrily agree with the theme song that promises results we know drat well were not quite so straightforwardly delivered. I think "The Prestige" has the answer: we want to be fooled. Like any great magic trick, you can know everything there is to know about how it’s done, and yet, somehow, it's more fun if you choose to let the guy put one over on ya…
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Jun 8, 2023 17:48
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The_Doctor posted:Well that looks all perfect I dunno. How's the wiring?  For the longest time when I was a kid I wondered how they did the earthquake scenes in the original, since I knew that was a real place in New York. It was only when I was in high school and getting into making movies myself that I learned that only parts of those scenes were shot at the real building, and shots that required actually breaking things / making holes were shot on a set that so closely mimicked the original that I never spotted the change. It was at once so simple and so flabbergasting to my young mind, and helped me think all the more, gee, movie magic is neat. I got a little bit of that feeling back just now. 
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Jun 8, 2023 23:36
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Well, come on, you start this thing with an '80s song and Coney Island and I'm already on board. I can't say I love the title, which seems like a fantasy video game or something ("Hell Freezes Over" would have been so much better)—it makes slightly more sense if you know New York is the Empire State, but come on, nobody thinks about that. I hope the urgency of the plot is what requires Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd to join up… I was hoping the kids would take center stage more. But I like the sort of vague existential threat presented here—I sort of hope it stays that way instead of building up to some vengeful ice king of the ancient deep or whatever—and I like the cold-weather suits. Also, the trailer editor clearly has a good sense of humor putting the words "fear itself" right near a shot of Bill Murray (who played FDR once) (or am I the only one who saw that).
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Nov 8, 2023 17:53
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Timby posted:That scene bothers the poo poo out of me because the passage Ray quotes is from Revelation 6, not 7. He also gets the year of the Tunguska blast off by 1, so I've always interpreted it as the character just being a little off with his numbers.
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Nov 17, 2023 04:43
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I saw it! I saw it! I saw it! It's not a great movie, but it's great fun. It seems like Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan have sort of realized they'll never quite get the vibe of the original back, particularly if Murray won't star, so they're simply making adventuresome movies with spills and chills and spookiness and teamwork and heart. "Afterlife" and "Frozen Empire" are the kinds of movie that would have played beautifully in the 1980s. I enjoyed every minute. Old characters, new characters. (I thought the balance worked, I didn't feel like anyone was short-changed.) I think you need to be in a certain breed of Ghostbusters vibe to enjoy this as much as I did — you have to really enjoy technobabble and Aykroydian ghost mumbo-jumbo, this time without Murray around to deflate it quite as often. Oh well. My quibbles: — I didn't like the cinematography as much this time around, I particularly didn't like the sort of floating drone camera they use a lot. — I felt the film was lacking in authentic New York vibe which I was hoping to get. To be fair, New York these days is also missing that. — Perhaps not a spoiler but to be safe: So we're just never going to delve into any more of the emotional issues of Egon not being part of Callie's life… how all that backstory happened… that chapter is just over and all is forgiven, and we the audience have to fill in any blanks. Okay. On a scale of “Ray, this looks extraordinarily bad” to “We came, we saw, we kicked its rear end,” I give it a “We have the tools, we have the talent!” And gentlemen, it is my solemn duty to inform you that it’s Millah time.
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Mar 23, 2024 03:54
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Put simply, these movies have gotten more sentimental as time goes on. GB1 had a delightful vibe of just hanging out and goofing off, it wasn't until the closeup of Venkman when he thinks Dana's dead that emotions like sadness/heartbreak/pain entered the equation. GB2 made the Venkman-Dana relationship more mature, introduced a baby to the cast and of course brought in the dimension of good vibes among humanity. I suspect you can trace a lot of that to Ramis, who of course displayed his social conscience in his work and in his interviews. GB2016 put a lot on the plot between Erin and Patty, their friendship and the schism, culminating in that moment where one dives to save the other. You'd never have had that in the original films with the guys. Afterlife of course was firmly in the Spielberg/Amblin vein of things with the family plot and with bringing in what the movie industry calls 'heart', and I think that's where Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan are more comfortable anyway. The 1984 film is special because it didn't have time for 'heart' in that way, it was too busy with 1980s things like making money and smoking; Venkman would have laughed in the face of it all. But we live in imperfect times of caring and sentiment and going on social media to proclaim that you have empathy. Oh well. Back when "Seinfeld" was created — and that was much closer to 1984 than 2016 — they famously made a little rule for themselves, "No hugging, no learning." The original Ghostbusters is very much a "no hugging, no learning" film. In GB2, New York hugs and learns, even if our characters mostly stay on the level (till Stantz and Janosz at the end, ha). In everything after that, our characters both hug and learn—I'm sure we see Ghostbusters in uniform hugging each other in all the modern films. Icon-Cat fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Mar 23, 2024 |
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Mar 23, 2024 15:29
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Further to my moment to moment 38 year long analysis of this movie, anyone else ever notice that, at the introduction to Dana as she gets out of her taxi ride, the two car horn honks are in time and not that dissonant against the score at that moment? Of course! Because she's a musician. In that track, even the ondes Martenot is trying to sound 'pretty', rather than, well, like the instrument we associate with wwwwwooooooo-eeeeeeeee scary wails, ha. Basically, that whole little intro is the movie briefly classing itself up. Course, it wouldn't be the only time a car horn is used in conjunction with a GB score. I always loved the way the more frightening horn sound takes us into Parker's opening at the start of GB2. Actually, listen to that whole sequence, and you'll see (well, hear) that the sound crew had some fun making car noises play along with the music. Icon-Cat fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Apr 9, 2024 |
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Apr 9, 2024 23:09
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