Is it safe to talk about Ghostbusters again? Now that the remake is out, hopefully it is. My feeling on the remake is...I don't like remakes. But Hollywood's in that rut right now and the remakes/reboots/sequels-after-the-fact/etc. aren't going to stop. Now, I don't like remakes, but when it was announced that it would be an all-female cast, my first reaction was "Well, at least that's a different spin." I was heartbroken when Hollywood announced they were remaking The Karate Kid, but it ended up *trying* to do its own sort of thing that it's really just a name-only thing, so it ended up being nothing to get too worked up about.
If you're going to remake something, at least try to do it from a different perspective. Keep the spirit of the characters and movie, but don't be a lazy note-for-note, unimaginative cover song. A team of female Ghostbusters would be a different perspective, something to yield new results and set it apart. I know not all Ghostbusters fans felt the same, but that was my feeling. Early on, you had Bill Murray pushing for Emma Stone to be in it, although she seems too young to me. And I remember comedian Michelle Buteau campaigning to be a Ghostbuster; I think she would have been funny, and have the right New York-kind of attitude. If *I* was trying to cast a female Ghostbusters team? Buteau would work as a sarcastic Venkman-type; as the oddball Spengler-type, Gillian Jacobs; America Ferrera as the the knowledgeable and handy Ray-type; and Jane Lynch as the droll, Average Winston, the voice of reason in a sea of madness. In place of Janine, how's about Gemma Chan as Kanon, a benevolent spirit watching over the 'Busters in the guise of a put-upon, overworked, overqualified secretary? None of those names have the box office clout of a Melissa McCarthy or Kristen Wiig, and I know there are people who would hate MY cast list, but, hey, that's the list I made for my own amusement.
My trepidation about the Ghostbusters remake came when it was announced it would be a Paul Feig movie. I don't like Feig's movies, I don't like his style, and I don't like the way the performers are in his movies. (I've found Feig to be funny off-the-cuff in interviews, I just don't like his movies.) I'm not a real fan of what's considered to be "in" in Hollywood comedies currently. I would have felt exactly the same way if it was Judd Apatow directing the remake, with his usual crew of Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell and so on. You know exactly what you're getting with a Feig or Apatow movie, and I know I don't like what their movies are giving you, and I don't like their brand of comedy.
We all know the shitstorm that ensued, and I don't want to dwell on it. For me, the most frustrating thing has been the way that reporters and people involved with the remake and people on forums who think they're cool have gone out of their way to tear down the original movies. This isn't Adventures in fucking Babysitting we're talking about -- a low-tier Reagan-era movie that, sure, has some laughs, and a following, and in its case, the power of nostalgia is stronger than the movie's own powers -- this is fucking Ghostbusters we're talking about! Probably the most popular franchise of the '80s, long considered one of the best comedies, a well-made, always quotable, jam-packed with laughs and creativity film, it had all of those respected SNL and Second City comedic performers who were bulletproof at the time. I don't need to tell you how good the original Ghostbusters is, you know -- you know damn well. It's a genuine classic.
The thing that I always marvel at whenever I watch the original Ghostbusters is just how creative it is. It covers so many genres, it's pitch-perfect, there's never a dull moment, and there was never before a movie like it. It was a complete original. So, it's an insult to denigrate it for the sake of propping up the new, not original work that's capitalizing on its success and the fondness people have for the first. I know some Ghostbusters purists out there have said some vile things in regards to the new movie and those involved with it, but wouldn't a better strategy for the studio to have been trying to win the old fans over, rather than piss them off at every step? Fans can be a kneejerky, complaining lot -- take the higher road, studio.
The thing that irks me is the rewriting of history; people acting like the original was a kids movie that us 30 and 40 year old kid-men just can't get over. Ghostbusters was NOT a kids movie, and was never intended to be one. Kids loved it, yes. They made a cartoon out of it that kids loved more, yes. They also made cartoons out of Rambo and RoboCop, so I guess I'll start calling those kids movies, too. Secondly, a (suspiciously robotic and directed) comment in several reviews for the new movie are that it's "funnier and scarier than the original." People have lumped Ghostbusters in with Gremlins as a kind of kids horror movie. Well, it's neither. Ghostbusters has creepy moments, involves the supernatural, and employed a lot of effects guys with horror backgrounds, but it was never intended to be outright SCARY or a horror movie. Like I said, it taps into a lot of genres, but it was first and foremost a comedy movie, the latest in the line of all of those classic early '80s comedies brought to you by guys like Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman. (Just because the movie has a PG rating doesn't mean it's for kids; if it had been released just a year later, it would have definitely had a PG-13.)
Goddamn, this remake has caused such a quagmire of piss and bullshit that I didn't even want to devote this much time to it. My whole purpose of this post is to defend Ghostbusters II. If the original is taking a beating lately, then you know the always-unpopular sequel is getting poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disemboweled, drawn and quartered. I remember the Ghostbusters II mania in 1989 -- that ghost logo with the fucking peace-sign two was all over the place. There was merchandise all over the place. (Except in the one place that matters most for kids: toys. There were no Ghostbusters movie toys back in the day, thanks Bill "Grinch" Murray.) As someone who loved the movie and The Real Ghostbusters, I was excited by the movie, but ended up not being in love with it, especially compared to that year's Batman.
Throughout the years, I definitely preferred the original (way more), put it on a high pedestal, and thought lesser of the sequel. I never outright hated Ghostbusters II the way a lot of people did, but I always saw that it was a clear step down in quality from the first movie. The strange thing is, Ghostbusters II is a perfectly entertaining movie, it has a lot of quotable lines, it's funny, I'm never bored by it. People knock it for being too similar to the first one, but I never thought it was a complete Xerox -- it's different enough. The only real similarity is Dana being targeted again, everything else is nitpicking. You know some sequels that's the Same-Shit-Different-Movie? The beloved Back to the Future movies. Ghostbusters II doesn't reach that level of tediousness.
Honest Trailers treated the movie pretty unfairly, pretty much for the sake of winning points with the Pro-Remake people. I always thought it was a bit clever to have people dispute what the Ghostbusters had done for the city in the first movie, and discredit them. It seemed realistic to me; politicians were going to want to brush it underneath the couch, ordinary citizens probably thought they were frauds or myths even. The Ghostbusters are underdogs, I like that their profession is so crazy and unbelievable, but they handle it like a regular job, and there's all of that typical bureaucratic bullshit even in hunting ghosts! I guess people wanted a sequel where the Ghostbusters were obnoxiously drunk on their own power and treated like rock stars, but I like that they're back at the bottom, still underdogs, with the odds against them...
It feels realistic. It seems very New York City. And that's another thing I think the movie does that's clever -- I guess all of these kids putting together these criticisms and funny little YouTube videos disparaging Ghostbusters II don't remember or never heard the horror stories of what NYC was like in the 1980s. It was a scary place, man. That's one of the brilliant things about Ghostbusters being set there -- the city and its people have such a specific attitude, it really serves our heroes and makes for an ideal setting. If there was one place that would be a magnet for spooks, specters or ghosts, it would be 1980s NYC. NYC was a mean, mean place. So I find it incredibly creative to have a threat in the sequel be the underground river of slime that feeds off negative emotions, and to work that in with NYC's attitude, the dichotomy of the city that it can be a cruel place, yet also has such a perceived sense of community and a camaraderie that they are able to unite and combat that force of evil in the end. The people coming together on New Year's, the city's Times Square celebration being one of the holiday's most famous and symbolic celebrations, is realistic to me, and heartfelt in a way that's not schmaltzy, and works better than, say, the awkward and cheesy "Don't mess with New York!" scene from Sam Raimi's Spider-man.
There's just so much use of New York City -- its spirit and its famous landmarks -- in Ghostbusters II that, frankly, it's surprising that most of it was filmed in Hollywood and that the movie was written by a Canadian. It makes the movie stand-out, and I think there's a lot more good in Ghostbusters II than people like to give it credit for, and I guess it's just too hot to handle, too cold to hold.
And even though I like Ghostbusters II, and think it's sorely unappreciated, like I said, I do acknowledge that it's a step down from the first movie. (It's certainly not "atrocious," as people have described it. Or a "disastrous" sequel like Batman & Robin.) And I'm one of the only Ghostbusters fans who DIDN'T want a Ghostbusters III with the original cast. Sequels so long after the fact have a real bad track record -- most of 'em suck, quite frankly, it's something which experts now call the "Crystal Skull Syndrome." I remember rumors of a Ghostbusters III in the mid-90s that had a new team of Ghostbusters taking over, and the names being thrown out were Will Smith, Pauly Shore and Chris Farley. (The rumor also went that the script was being written by Conan O'Brien.) Can you imagine that? That sounds awful! And you had a problem with the remake!
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