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The Ghostbusters are role models, if the roles you potentially wanted to play in your life are pervert conman, oblivious obsessive, regular joe, or buffoon. Peck is essentially the bowtie-wearing kid coming by to tell you that you shouldn't be zapping ants with a magnifying glass because the park service recently bumped the brushfire warning level from yellow to orange, like he might be right but there's nothing fun about doing the things you're supposed to do. Ghostbusters does the good work by informing kids that you're better off being a potentially dangerous prankster than a complete buzzkill, which is a lesson I could've taken more to heart as a pathologically harmless teenager
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Aug 1, 2018 16:27
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Iron Crowned posted:One of these days I'll get around to watching GB2016 Make sure to get yourself a piping hot Papa Johns and several cans of Pringles so you can really get the full experience on your Sony television
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Aug 1, 2018 16:41
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Iron Crowned posted:Pringles are good though They were, until GB2016 made them bad sean10mm posted:It's basically watching an A grade comedy cast wrestle with a C grade script. It's not terrible, but there are long stretches where it seems like the writers forgot to even try to be funny, and the actors are just trying to power through dialogue that's just sort of there. Nothing is scary even on the level of the librarian ghost scene, nothing is really threatening and nothing seems to matter very much. By the end of the movie the heroes have saved the day, but the characters themselves don't seem that happy about it. I wanted to like it but really struggled to maintain interest. The biggest problem I can see is that Feig just isn't comfortable with dead air and doesn't seem to understand the concept of a beat. Everyone has to be talking all the time, to the point where everyone's practically tripping over each other to get their lines out. It's a shotgun approach to joke-writing that speaks less to crafting specific jokes that you know will land and more to just throwing poo poo out there and hoping something works. It trades the confidence of the original for a wall of noise that just levels everything. Squashing Machine fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Aug 1, 2018 |
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Aug 1, 2018 17:26
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One of my favorite differences between GB1 and GB2016 is the treatment of the Ghostbusters' dismissal from their university positions. In the original, the dean is kind of a uptight prick like Walter Peck, but he's completely right to kick their goldbricking, student-pursuing asses out of the school, and calls Venkman out on being a professional con artist. It works comedically because it's obvious they're just loving around and not really qualified to be there, and feeds into their status as a bunch of goofballs. The irony operates on the fact that, in any sane universe, Dean Yeager and Walter Peck would be completely correct and justified in their actions, they just happen to be unlucky enough to live in one where ghosts exist. In GB2016, Kristen Wiig's character is coded as being a competent academic, so when she meets with Dean Middle Finger over the Youtube video, it's treated as some sort of grand injustice. Why can't this kooky character see how competent and right she is? It completely inverts the structure: everyone surrounding the Ghostbusters is some kind of moron or buffoon, which puts our main four in a positive light but saps the irony out of the film and puts them essentially in the role of the straight man. In GB2016, the universe unjustly punishes the Ghostbusters until they win. In GB1, the universe unjustly punishes everyone else, and that's why it's funny.
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Aug 7, 2018 14:48
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echoplex posted:Dean Yeager's turn around and smile move is one of the finest bits of physical comedy in cinema. It completely demonstrates the difference between the movies. It's small, subtle, and 100 times funnier than some Mad TV clown doing the inflate your middle finger like a balloon gag. Alan_Shore posted:Not only that, but when Venkman is chewed out by the Dean, it's the only time he doesn't have a come back. Just a deadpan "I see." Yeah, it's great. He just completely cops to it. No indignation about how misunderstood and competent he is. Just recognition that his con's run its course.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:19
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Kinda makes me wonder if the core issue with GB2016 (one of them anyway) is that it's so focused on being A Comedy Movie, they have have comedy plot, comedy stakes, the plot is an excuse for comedy to happen, while as mentioned the original movie doesn't give a poo poo about genre. A big issue with modern filmmaking I think is that it's obsessed with sticking to what's expected of its genre (an already vague, artificial and often unhelpful term) giving movies no room to stretch or explore. I'd say this is a big part of it, or at least Feig misunderstanding where comedy comes from in a movie. The supporting cast in the original is pretty straight-laced, the closest thing to a wacky character is Louis, and he's largely kind of your standard 80's dweeboid. Venkman's ostensible romantic rival is the nasal-spray-using violinist who's coded as being a stuck-up wet blanket type. There's very few people making "joke jokes" outside of Venkman. The lines you remember from Egon are him being socially oblivious and somewhat disconnected from reality. Contrast this with GB2016, where it's like every person in New York just took the intro course at the UCB. Our main four are just constantly making references and quips, and the writing's afraid to make anything even harmlessly at their own expense. All the supporting characters outside of the Game of Thrones guy are just constantly riffing. It's constant noise, and leaves you without that central lens character to attach to. Fart City posted:GB2016 is also a comedy movie that doesn’t really have very many constructed jokes. It’s so improv heavy that there isn’t much in the way of a focused punchline, but rather an unending assault of almost-punchlines. It’s the practice of “one of these has to work, right?” And it doesn’t. Put about as well as you can, 100% Squashing Machine fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 18:21
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Basebf555 posted:Even Louis though, his dialogue is not funny in the way that Feig's comedy is funny, even when it works. It's a deeper kind of funny that depends heavily on Moranis' performance and it's rooted in character, not any traditional set-up/punchline structure. Right, there's that difference that Louis isn't aware that what he's saying is supposed to be funny. Everything he says drips with sincerity. He's clueless, but not stupid, if that distinction makes sense. GB2016 is chock-full of stupid people.
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Aug 7, 2018 18:37
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It also contrasts with the "what the hell are you doing?" lady and the three's sort of embarrassed apology. That's funny. You almost killed someone because you're a bunch of overgrown kids and your response is completely inadequate. In GB2016, she would've been screaming and running around and the proton beam would've chased her around the corridor, and the entire time Wiig and McCarthy would be shouting TURN IT OFF!!! WHO TAUGHT YOU HOW TO SHOOT, ALEXANDER HAMILTON????
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Aug 7, 2018 18:46
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ruddiger posted:The original Ghostbusters almost kill that maid in the hotel and apologize profusely. Kristen Wiig straight up murders Bill Murray's character and it's played for laughs. It's funny, I'd describe the original as a darker film, tone-wise, but no one dies. The worst thing that can happen is you get turned into a dog or have 500 gallons of marshmallow fluff dropped on your head. Though that fluff must've been pretty hot, maybe Peck died. Anyway, yeah, the new Ghostbusters kill one guy and watch another die without any real reaction on their part, they're pretty much sociopaths.
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Aug 7, 2018 19:29
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It sounds like they're reading the scene directions instead of their lines. They're just narrating everything that's already happening visually.
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Aug 7, 2018 19:41
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I'd say that the reason the ad-libs in the original Ghostbusters work is because the script was pretty tight in the first place, so something that diverged from it had to be true to the character and really land to make it in. Apparently Feig only ever took to heart the parts of these commentaries and articles that said "did you know X famous line from a movie was actually an AD LIB???" and decided that the entire movie would be that great if he just let his actors riff forever. Coincidentally, it lets him and Dippold off the hook for actually having to write the thing, they could just put down some broad strokes and let everyone else fill in. Ramis seemed much more specific about his scriptwriting and the things that he found funny or interesting, which is probably why Ghostbusters 2016 seems to be lacking a real creative voice.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:11
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Jose Oquendo posted:I listened to an interview with Paul Feig recently, and he said something that was very telling. He said he was 'slavish' to test audiences. So he basically has no artistic vision at all. It's just throwing a bunch of poo poo at the screen and seeing what a tired test audience laughs at. Yeah, if you wanted to grow mediocrity in a lab that's how you'd go about it
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Dec 11, 2018 05:55
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I'd prefer if Sony would just stop taking additional swings at the money tree and let Ghostbusters be, but Leslie Jones melting down as though she has any claim at all over the property is nice little signpost on the highway to Bad Ideasville
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Jan 22, 2019 01:56
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