Holtzmann was great and I was really surprised how good Patty was as the trailer made here look really horrible.
I love the “That’s a room of nightmares” line.
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Give it two years and Sony will probably reboot the franchise again it and probably go back to a Sequel.
Feig was obsessed with this being his on thing and a reboot.
Well, Egon was obviously hot for Ray. Oh, are you talking about the remake?
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Or Patty, for that matter. One moment we see her completely freaked out by a subway ghost, saying HELL NAW and wanting nothing to do with it. Then all of a sudden she shows up at HQ, says “I’m joining the club! I’m going to be a Ghostbuster! And I’m giving you a car and uniforms!” and they’re like oh, okay, cool. At least with Kevin we could see that he idolized the women like a puppy.
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I always recommend this set of criticisms of that movie.
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I saw the new Ghostbusters over the weekend, and I thought it was wonderful.
However, if asked to rate Sex & The City, I would also give it a poor rating. But that’s because I find the writing uninspired, the characters varying degrees of annoying and repulsive, and the general concept boring.
I think there are two issues at work in the data presented here:
- budding (and/or experienced) misogynists wanting to destroy anything that isn’t squarely aimed at their demographic (obviously),
- Rating/ranking systems that provide no way to confirm that the data is coming from people who have actually seen the movie/bought the product/etc. I’m not really sure how you fix that with movies other than some sort of exit polling, or through places like Fandango, who could ask you to rate the movie after you’ve purchased tickets and the show date has passed.
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There were just huge problems with the script and the editing. This is the first film by Paul Feig I have seen, from this example I think he is a seriously undisciplined director that probably shouldn’t have been giving a franchise launching tentpole film.
They should have done what Force Awakens did and give it a female cast but have some sort of hand off from some of the original cast and set it in the same universe. It would have calmed a large enough portion of the established fanbase and hopefully showcased good strong female characters.
In then end it looks like the film is going to tank and take down the franchise with it and all that will get remembered is the shit storm online. The manbabies will claim “victory” while the feminist side will claim “victory” and Sony will have to shuffle executives as they try to put out the dumpster fire that is their studio.
While the film is funny enough to please a small audience, this is a crowed summer. Feig managed to piss off the audience that would see the film over and over with his attitude of making this his own and shaming the people who were waiting 30 years for a new film.
This is film Lucy with the football.
I’m at least happy there are a ton of young geek girls that will find some new heroes in this film but this is really been a lost opportunity.
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Echoing and emphasizing this comment because it’s just that wonderful.
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[quote=“LurkingGrue, post:60, topic:81827”]I almost want to believe they were stoking those manbabies it to get attention
[/quote]I would totally believe it. Or, rather, I would believe that all sorts of websites, acting for their own benefit, were way too happy to postulate about the gyrations of a mob of manbabies and fiendish downranking campaigns orchestrated by “masculinity”. Because, hey, who cares if anyone goes and sees the movie as long as there are outraged commenters providing ad impressions, right?
I came across this earlier today and thought it laid things out quite neatly:
http://culturedvultures.com/avgn-james-rolfe-ghostbusters-backlash/
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I really hated what they did with Janine Melnitz in GB II.
I always thought they were chasing what the cartoon had done with her.
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Huh, Jacobin’s take is that the false dudebro controversy’s been ridden by the filmmakers to hide a boring film…
Dunno, women I’ve talked to who’ve seen it said there’s a lot of the “too sexy for academia?” lines like that one mentioned in the article. Plus the horrible sidelining of Leslie Jones: pass on a feminism that tokenizes the only prominent cast member of color.
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It’s doing very well, actually. Sony is very happy with its performance and has already announced the sequel.
I’d very much disagree that she’s ‘tokenized’. When the trailers hit, a lot of people assumed she was the token “streetwise” character. But her big contribution to the team is that she’s a big history geek who knows the backgrounds of all the buildings and the history of New York, so while the others are spouting science, she’s able to solve mysteries.
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I feel like movies have no idea how to use Kristen Wiig. There’s something about her very dry sarcasm that they seem to have a hard time utilizing. In The Martian, she’s cast as the foul-mouthed PR director for NASA and the movie completely neuters her character. She’s mostly reduced to giving the men disapproving looks.
Now I get they had to trim the profanity to keep their PG-13 rating on that - Watney gets a hell of a lot less fucks in the movie than the book - but you can be quite an asshole with dry sarcasm and no profanity.
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It’s because Furiosa’s infertile (and therefore useless as a Harem Girl) and thanks to that and the way she’s chosen to dress and do her hair, the War Boys don’t really see her as a “woman”.
The world’s better thought-out than you give it credit for when it comes to social dynamics.
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It’s doing just ok at #2 behind Secret Life Of Pets at 46ish mil, it’s not an outright failure but not a resounding success. Next weekend will be the real test if this this film has any legs against Star Trek AND Ice Age. It will hopefully do as well as Pixels but I seriously doubt it will hit that magic $500 mil.
Sony HAS to be happy with this performance as they have no cinematic universe and they are freaking out a bit.
I’d have to agree. From the trailers, I was entirely expecting Leslie Jones to fulfill the same role as Winston in the original movie, which is to say just kind of being thrown in without adding any real value, and without having any opportunities to actually develop the character.
The fact is that if you remove her character from this film, you’d have to rewrite large sections of the story to make up for it. She’s essential.
I also have to say that I was pleasantly surprised at how good she was in this movie. I haven’t really cared much for her in the SNL skits that I’ve seen her in, but after seeing Ghostbusters, I can’t help but conclude that the issue is not her, but that the SNL writers don’t know how to make proper use of her.
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um. I don’t recall her character in The Martian being foul-mouthed. And to be honest…all the characters in The Martian are in and of themselves shallow paper cut-outs…except…Mark Watney. It’s done on purpose. Every character other than Watney is just a shell, a total archetype to play the role of moving along story; but Watney is the only real character depth we get. So that we become engaged and engrossed in his survival and rescue.
Wiig isn’t reduced to anything any more than Chastain, Daniels, Bean, Ejiofor, or anyone else is. They are all paper dolls. There to keep things moving towards the only person we connect with…Mark Watney.
Now in GB. Wiig is all over the place. She is the prissy prud professor desperate to get her tenure in the stuffy establishment university. Then she is the down to earth “ghosts are real!” true believer. Then she is the fall over herself dumb struck puppy around Kevin. Then she is the crazed loon to the mayor. Then she is the butt kicking bad ass before the main fight. lastly she is the forever faithful friend who then saves Abby.
all. over. the. place.
Everyone else in this movie stuck to a single line with their character and their development as the movie goes along (or complete LACK of development in Kevin’s case). Wiig’s Emily is just a mess. I liked her fine. But given that she was meant to be the Venkman role? Her role was the let down.
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That was my point. In the book, she is. She’s great. In the movie she mostly stands around rolling her eyes at the dudes.
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Yeah my friends’ reading of that was how much she’s not listened to or is patronized by her white colleagues. And God forbid a PoC gets cast as the smarty scientist or the sexy tech lady or whatever: o to enjoy the problematic limited roles of mediocre white actors!
Red Letter Media’s review said some very nice things about Leslie Jones
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