Ghostbusters: Afterlife

PM me your address so I know where to send my spare copy.

But seriously, follow-up question - what if it's playing on TV?

You've got to admit that it does look especially unfortunate when the Hollywood remake that draws such an unprecedentedly high level of fan outrage just so happens to be the one that decides to use female leads instead of male ones (even if the characters themselves are completely different). This also goes for the whole idea of you "playing with" these outraged reactions only to want to retract them once they undermine your actual opinions. I could even speculate that a major problem isn't that the people who hated it out of sexism/racism existed in the first place so much as they were allowed to flourish because there were enough non-prejudiced people who were willing to let it slide because they didn't want another remake. By making a YouTube video announcing one's own personal boycott, one does invite scrutiny as to why they won't be watching this particular remake (which is not the best form for people who claim to be critics or film fans).

While it's good that you cite your sources and raise a valid point as to why the original Ghostbusters worked as an ensemble comedy, I'm not sure how you can automatically judge that the reboot doesn't do these things either. The fact that established comediennes like Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy share the limelight with lesser-known SNL alumni like Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones should indicate their own willingness to give the others a chance to shine (especially when a common compliment about the film is about McKinnon's show-stealing performance). It's not like the original Ghostbusters was the only adlib-filled ensemble comedy to be a hit, after all.

The thing is, Rodent, that you are well within your rights to not pay money to watch this film or even watch it at all but you do have to concede that your ability to comment on the film is fundamentally limited as a result. You can call the creators talentless (presumably based on previous works that you have experienced and found wanting) and disagree with their conduct in interviews and refuse to support the film on that basis, but that's still not the same as judging the actual film.

I'm trying to figure out exactly how applicable the whole "what if it was your favourite movie that was getting remade" approach truly is, especially when all it takes is you arbitrarily choosing the names of some creators with bad reputations and slotting them in as if that's in any way comparable. Yeah, Paul W.S. Anderson is not a particularly good director but his entire career consists almost entirely of B-grade genre fare - assuming a Taxi Driver remake ever came to pass, he would not be very high up on the list of directors who would get to make it. It's not comparable to Feig - a man with about twenty years of experience working in comedy on both film and TV - being seen as a logical choice to put together a worthy successor to Reitman's original.

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yooooo

From what I've heard from the critical reviews, this movie's production was probably a disaster, fueled by anger and bitterness from feminists than any actual intention to make a good movie. All the male characters are dumbed down or a-holes, lots of sexist jokes about female privates, as if all of which were making some kind of fatuous point about the "no-life basement-dwelling misogynists out to boycott this movie". Talk about an ironic self-fulfilling prophesy that proved the haters right about how this was all a sociopolitical campaign to promote 'progressiveness' among genders rather than any actual creative spirit to tell a good story. Doesn't help that Paul Feig was getting all salty on Tweeter about the Internet keyboard warriors. Might have influenced him to 'get revenge' by mixing the script with his own irate feelings about how all males are sexist pigs who should be ridiculed and shamed.

In short, what a joke.

I'm actually glad to see this is how the movie turned out to be. There were many movies that were remembered to be worse in retrospection over the decades. I'm sure this one is going to leave a real mark in the history books.

At least people cared enough to see a franchise reboot implode utterly.

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"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel

Can Ghostbusters really be called a 'franchise' though? It's got one overrated 'classic' - so-called - and a lousy, forgettable sequel that everyone's only remembering today so that they could use it as a defense for the reboot about how it's not the first time the 'franchise' got ruined, ironically admitting that the reboot is ruining something in their process of argument.

Yes.

Fair enough. Though I'm not sure if there was much to implode in the first place, considering its dwindling existence after the '90s.

Land of the Lost was from the 70s and they still managed to **** it up.

Oh, I remember those guys and their neon spaghetti shooters.

Who's up for aliens, stop-motion dinosaurs, and giant strawberries?

Feig's films have had solid production values and scripts, but IMO the "girly" humor that is applied throughout his films gets very old and repetitive insanely quick. I remember watching Spy and really enjoying the first 25 minutes, then I realized this is ALL it was going to do and had nothing left to give us, and in a 2 hour comedy, that makes things get dull very fast

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if most (if not all) of these jokes had been put in place before any backlash had even happened (this is a big-budget blockbuster after all, they're not liable to leave a lot to chance in this production). It's not like this is the first time Feig's put some kind of socially conscious subtext in his film - Spy is essentially a metaphor for how women are treated in Hollywood, after all. Like I wrote to Rodent earlier, there's only so much that you can judge the film without actually seeing it, so you're making a lot of presumptions (like saying the production was "probably a disaster" like that even means anything) and complaining about stuff in a vacuum. The whole "all the men are dumb or a-holes" thing doesn't mean anything either - that line could sum up half the Coen brothers' filmography, besides which it's pretty telling how the stupidest man in the film still manages to be kind and loyal while the smartest man is selfish and genocidal.

If anything, you're demonstrating a huge part of the problem in focusing is on singular out-of-context parts of the film (that you seem to hear about second-hand from potentially dismissive reviewers) rather than trying to determine if they work within the film as a whole (which, again, is hard to do without actually seeing the film). People complain about whether or not Feig and co. made a decent film, but this all reads like cherry-picking things in the name of confirming a bias towards it being a bad film no matter what the film is actually like. Maybe those things are part of what makes it good, and the haters are pulling off their own "self-fulfilling prophecy" in that their vitriolic opposition to the film on the basis of some absurd anti-PC platform is actually convincing more people to actually see the movie and decide for themselves. It's not like the film is a confirmed failure - critics are mostly positive (as of right now, it holds a 73% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes based off a considerable sample size of 221 reviews) and, while it's not a smash hit, BoxOfficeMojo has it doing solid numbers on the basis of its first couple of days in theatres. I honestly think it's a good thing that Ghostbusters actually managed to be a rare example of Hollywood rebooting a classic and making it worthy of the original's reputation (as opposed to stuff like RoboCop or Point Break) - that's definitely one for the history books, no matter how many haters regurgitate the same complaints again and again.

The general reaction I observed was fans of the original were not impressed by the new take. People unbeholden to it, seemed to receive the new film very well. Seems like it took well to the newer people it seemed targeted to.

Apparently, the sequel has already been green-lit. Reminder, so was Fant4stic 4.

Let's speculate endlessly on a movie we'll all forget about in 2 weeks.

Ironically, you're making a lot of presumptions about myself. Pot, I would like to introduce you to a little friend called "kettle".

If anything, you are demonstrating the kind of holier-than-thou attitude that generated so much frustration towards the movie in the first place. Everytime someone tried to point out their disliking of the trailer back then, they're either dismissed as sexist or, in your case, condescendingly attacked as a blind 'hater' who 'regurgitate' the same complaints without actually acknowledging the validity of said complaints. A lot of more sensible reviewers who are avid supporters of the new film have actually bothered to take those complaints into consideration, but of course, there's the other camp like yourself who are too good for that sort of thing and would just take the easy route of dismissing people's claims as tin-foil paranoids.

Since we're playing the hypocrisy game here, I think I shall pay my favors as well and do unto you what you did unto me.

tl;dr, don't care what you just said.

God, I love this community already. Can't wait to meet more people like you, Iroquack.

I like this guy... http://www.dailywire.com/news/7504/g...ing-john-nolte

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By the way, between Sony suing Murray for not participating in the movie and the smear campaign against legitimate criticisms by even the actresses and director himself, I don't think the 'books' are looking so good for the movie, especially in terms of how the Internet - just only one of the largest population on the planet, that's all - is going to remember it. Similar unfairness by other companies performed against people by large corporations like EA and Konami were merely remembered today for their atrocities, not for this delusional dream world you conjured, Iroq. Their actions speak for themselves and a lot of people are not stupid enough to suddenly forget these things or ignore them, so I don't really care if you're just going to pull another passage of accusation out of your ass about how these haters really are according to your perception, you can't change reality - but go ahead, really, I would love to see you waste your time.

It is now at 5.2.

Maybe my brain is just being dumb right now, but what would an example of "girly humour" be? I legitimately do not understand what you mean, and am curious to find out.

I didn't mean to sound sexist with my comment sorry if I did.

When I think about it, the viewpoint I have will probably be seen as subjective to you, maybe it's just dependent on taste in comedy.

The 2nd half of Spy focuses on 3 female leads for most of the time. The rich bitchy girl, McCarthy and the British girl, I forget the names.
I didn't believe them to be good enough actresses to deliver jokes without sounding very abrupt and bland(or phony). When they were confined to more of their own character tropes (like in the first half, with Jude Law being alive still) they had a subtlety with the humor that I was very fond of and it didn't try to overdo itself. I really did enjoy the first half of the film.

The 2nd half follows only one type of humor, the range isn't there anymore. It's very loud and obnoxious, and forgets the somewhat plausible and smarter surroundings it had before. Once they amp up McCarthy and only focus on the three women I just found it extremely dull. I'm not saying that I find actresses dull or female comedians dull, but they failed to leave a discernible impression with the humor. It feels very confined as a comedy once it relies on nothing but McCarthy and the other girls to save the day.

A little more subtlety would've made it seem more mature, which I think a film like Spy starts out good at being, a comedy with a brain. It did have a statement to make
About female casting in Hollywood. But they then try to make McCarthy a mouthy loud Chris Farley clone and the other bitchy sarcastic girl is just a more annoying David Spade with a bad mouth and the movie's momentum completely halts. Maybe it's a fault of the script, not the cast, but I was able to see the steam slowly being squeezed from the film and into my living room when it concentrated on nothing but the three female leads doing gags that they just weren't able to carry and deliver naturally like other female comedians can.