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GHOSTBUSTERS (2016)
The 1984 comedy ranked #5 on my list of favorite film comedies and there is a plethora of reasons why I was not interested in watching the remake nor why I could even get behind the idea of making it at all, primarily the idea of resurrecting the film without the late Harold Ramis just seemed wrong to me, but I didn't know that this remake was being done with a female cast which made me a little more comfortable about watching it, but it still wasn't a great idea and was a remake that I could have gone through my life without knowing about, despite little signs throughout that people involved in the original were giving this reboot their blessing.
Director and co-screenwriter Paul Feig and his muse, Melissa McCarthy seem to be the culprits here, deciding to remake something that really wasn't screaming remake, but when has that stopped Hollywood before? The film is not a scene-for-scene remake like Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho, but it follows the same basic story outline and tweaks some of the characters and their relationships in order to give the piece an air of originality and possibly fool the one or two people on the planet who never saw the 1984 original.
In this film, Erin (Kristen Wiig) is about to begin a new teaching job at Columbia when a book about the paranormal she wrote 20 years ago with Abby (McCarthy) has appeared online and is putting Erin's job at risk. She tracks down Abby who is still chasing ghosts with the silly yet intense Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and refuses to take the book off the internet. Of course, Erin gets fired from Columbia and before you can say, "Who ya gonna call?", we have a 2016 distaff version of the Ghostbusters.
Feig and Kate Dippold have constructed a screenplay that sticks pretty close to Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis' original concept, tweaking it for the New Millenium...changing the sex of the lead characters required some major re-thinking of a lot of the story, especially the part about Peter Venkman and Dana Barrett, which basically had to be scrapped here; unfortunately, the villain they came up with to replace that story wasn't nearly as interesting. I did love Erin hating their work being referred to as ghostbusting.
Feig and McCarthy were once again afforded a seemingly unlimited budget like they were for Spy and every penny spent is up there on the screen, creating their own vision for this well-loved story while paying homage to the film from which it came, evidenced in lifting of original set pieces from 1984 as well as cameo appearances from four cast members of the original film. Feig keeps control of this epic project and gets performances from his cast that serve the story, but if the truth be told, Kate McKinnon quietly walks off with this movie as the goofy Holtzmann, which really wasn't that hard to do. Hardcore fans of the original film, you stand warned...
The 1984 comedy ranked #5 on my list of favorite film comedies and there is a plethora of reasons why I was not interested in watching the remake nor why I could even get behind the idea of making it at all, primarily the idea of resurrecting the film without the late Harold Ramis just seemed wrong to me, but I didn't know that this remake was being done with a female cast which made me a little more comfortable about watching it, but it still wasn't a great idea and was a remake that I could have gone through my life without knowing about, despite little signs throughout that people involved in the original were giving this reboot their blessing.
Director and co-screenwriter Paul Feig and his muse, Melissa McCarthy seem to be the culprits here, deciding to remake something that really wasn't screaming remake, but when has that stopped Hollywood before? The film is not a scene-for-scene remake like Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho, but it follows the same basic story outline and tweaks some of the characters and their relationships in order to give the piece an air of originality and possibly fool the one or two people on the planet who never saw the 1984 original.
In this film, Erin (Kristen Wiig) is about to begin a new teaching job at Columbia when a book about the paranormal she wrote 20 years ago with Abby (McCarthy) has appeared online and is putting Erin's job at risk. She tracks down Abby who is still chasing ghosts with the silly yet intense Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and refuses to take the book off the internet. Of course, Erin gets fired from Columbia and before you can say, "Who ya gonna call?", we have a 2016 distaff version of the Ghostbusters.
Feig and Kate Dippold have constructed a screenplay that sticks pretty close to Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis' original concept, tweaking it for the New Millenium...changing the sex of the lead characters required some major re-thinking of a lot of the story, especially the part about Peter Venkman and Dana Barrett, which basically had to be scrapped here; unfortunately, the villain they came up with to replace that story wasn't nearly as interesting. I did love Erin hating their work being referred to as ghostbusting.
Feig and McCarthy were once again afforded a seemingly unlimited budget like they were for Spy and every penny spent is up there on the screen, creating their own vision for this well-loved story while paying homage to the film from which it came, evidenced in lifting of original set pieces from 1984 as well as cameo appearances from four cast members of the original film. Feig keeps control of this epic project and gets performances from his cast that serve the story, but if the truth be told, Kate McKinnon quietly walks off with this movie as the goofy Holtzmann, which really wasn't that hard to do. Hardcore fans of the original film, you stand warned...