[QuickTidal]

I think it's funny how the RT review score is currently decent, but they are nowhere near their full gamut of reviews to aggregate (which is over 200 critics I think?)...but the reviewers that I trust hate it, and the reviewers I KNEW had been ready to sing this flicks praises before it dropped have given it a decent review.

But yeah, this will all hang on box office run. The producers are already saying that this series can be "endless"...but yeah, the butts-in-seats coin will be the make or break. Like BvS, critics can say whatever they like, this will fly on viewership numbers.

I still refuse to see it, especially now that I know the rough cut redditor was spot on right for all that happens in it...which means it's terrible. I feel bad that some of the cast who I like (mostly Kate McKinnon, SORT of Kristen Wiig [I loathe McCarthy and Jones]) ended up in this turkey.

Here's guy who has seen it, and here is his spoilerish review:

Also note that he WANTED to like it, and give it the benefit of the doubt going in...and still talks about how awful it was.



EDIT: I also kind of expected a bit of sexism aimed at men in this (what with Chris Hemsworth being a dullard mimbo; and the trailers have dick zapping jokes ect.) but most of the negative reviews I've read or watched call attention to the fact that every single male in the movie is either an idiot or an asshole...and I'm sitting here wondering how Sony ever signed off on that in a movie they were aiming to use to UP equality, not step it back. I'm baffled.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 11 July 2016 - 05:29 PM

[worry]

 QuickTidal, on 11 July 2016 - 05:11 PM, said:

every single male in the movie is either an idiot or an asshole..

So they went for accuracy over fantasy. Interesting choice, but I'm happy to hear it.

I'm really loving this pic from the premiere:


Anyway, I thought the trailers were so-so, a little overly jokey -- and I still think it looks a bit too SNL-sensibility in its humor -- but I'm more optimistic than ever about the movie as a whole.

[Imperial Historian]

Saw this yesterday. Was extremely sceptical but this was hilarious. The person who made these trailers should be shot.

[Studlock]

It's got 77% on RT which is about 50% more than my personal big disappointment of the year (BvS) so it can't possible be worst than that. Probably going to see it this weekend

[QuickTidal]

Under half the final reviewers which will rate it have been put up at RT though, expect that % number of fluctuate and possibly come down (or go up). Sony purposely only invited a spat of critics to screenings and threw up a weird embargo scheme.

I'm more interested in box office numbers. I mean, I still won't see it, but I'm curious how this will do monetarily.

[Studlock]

At 176 review it's at 76% fresh which means it's probably pretty good. Going this weekend probably.

[Tiste Simeon]

Most of the reviews I have seen have been "Well, unlike anyone who is sexist, I enjoyed this film." Or "Actually I love these actors and I love Ghostbusters so I was hoping to love this film, but I really didn't, please don't hate me, I don't hate women!!"

If I watch it, and don't enjoy it, am I sexist? No. But I am made to think that I had better enjoy it or I will be branded with the "if we call you this, you are basically worse than Hitler" moniker of "Misogynist"

So I'm not going to bother seeing it. I have only seen the original Ghostbusters once in my life, and I enjoyed it, nothing more. So I have no stake in this. That makes me, at worst, a mild sexist, right?

[QuickTidal]

Yeah Tiste, that's sadly the political miasma that exists around this flick.

Richard Roeper wrote a pretty savage review of it (and I mean he's critic royalty) and spelled out why he didn't like it...but that didn't stop feminist Twitter from raging at him all day. Luckily he is thick-skinned and dealt with them summarily.

But yeah, it's basically become an us or them camp mentality.

Which is utterly ludicrous for a movie.

I'm not going I see it because it looks like garbage and nothing I've heard or seen of it makes me interested.

As to rotten tomatoes, I was reading an article today that basically lays out that it's a flawed system in that there is no subtlety. It's either fresh or rotten and no one ever bothers to find out anything beyond the aggregate number. It's more worth dipping into actual reviews...and I think that's a good point. A fresh rating can come from a 3 out of 5 for example...it's a good point about how we collectively view how movies are received these days. I'm as guilty as the next person as checking RT to see if I should see a flick or not. Maybe it's time I stopped that.

[amphibian]

Welcome back to the world before/after Rotten Tomatoes.

I think Rotten Tomatoes isn't a good way to parse the critical output/lay audience thoughts either, so I don't follow that.

Tbh, I don't purposely follow the output of any critics beyond FILM CRIT HULK (and I disagree with about half of what he says). I read the Movies/TV threads here, listen to what my friends say/talk to them, watch a tiny bit of TV in which ads slip through my filters, and see trailers at the movies. That's it. I don't want to spend my time on this planet eagerly consuming marketing breadcrumbs.

I'm more like Apt in my methodology than I thought - although we wildly disagree on 3/4s of almost everything.

[Aptorian]

Nobody is perfect.

[worry]

What do you care what total strangers call you anyway? See the movie or not, but this whole anxiety about namecalling is such manufactured Velveeta neurosis that I'm shocked anyone here is subscribing to it. The movie received an immediate backlash from the same MRA dolts who crybaby their way into every conversation. That was a real phenomenon we all saw in real time. If you're one of those guys, maybe make swan diving off of bridges your next hobby. If that's NOT you, then DO WHAT YOU WANT regarding the movie, but please spare the rest of us your #NotAllMen bellyaching.

[worry]

That's part of my new official feature The Rant of the Day™. Please sound off in the comments below.

[Tiste Simeon]

For me it's less about what strangers on the internet call me - I couldn't care less, I know I'm not a sexist - but more the whole culture of punishing dissenting opinions, hatred being flung every which way and "if you disagree with my opinion, you're automatically a [insert relevant -ist]"

Both sides of this have been massively petty, and to me it's just dumb that on one side you have the actual sexists going "HOW CAN THE SJW BRIGADE DO THIS" & on the other you have "IF YOU DON'T LIKE WGAT I LIKE YOU'RE AN AWFUL PERSON AND HATE WOMEN AND LITERALLY THE PATRIARCHY PERSONIFIED" I just find it all a bit pathetic. Over a film.

[worry]

While I don't grant the "both sides are equally bad" claim -- seems like an easy equivalence to rationalize just washing one's hands of the whole thing, which you can do without bothering with the equation -- even if I did grant it, it still seems to me that if you let that affect your choice, then you're inside of that, not outside of it. Like you certainly might feel apart from the storm when you're in its eye, but that's not really the same as being safe somewhere on the outside.

[Tiste Simeon]

Good point! I think ultimately my decision was actually made by the fact that I hardly go to the cinema anyway and if it ended up on Netflix I'd probably watch it just to see what the fuss was about.

I just don't like being told by anyone how I should think about something & both sides are guilty of that.

[worry]

That's the spirit!

[Macros]

I'm very tempted to make a joke involving irony and your stance given your being told what to do by a large bearded fellow everyday, but I wi t, cause I like you Tiste

I understand the fear of being labelled a whatever by the slavering moronic mass that social media has become, people outraged for the sake of it.
But as I'm not on social media I couldn't give a shit, I won't be seeing this in the cinema because I can't be arsed, I will watch it eventually because I'm a big fan of Kate and the other girls are reasonably entreating. The cinema has gotten expensive and my spare time is limited. It would take a hell of a trailer or a series I'm already invested in (marvel for example) to make me go to the cinema now.
This is neither.

[worry]

I put my money where my mouth is and saw this. I liked it more than I expected to, for sure. Most of the humor lands, and actually feels organic (some of the jokes from the trailers are *still* clunkers, but a few of them land better in context and derive from character rather than clever-writer syndrome). The ghost design is actually pretty great throughout, and while it's something of a CGI-fest, that stuff blends pretty seamlessly with the practical effects. And it actually allows the GB vs ghost action to be a lot more tactile than the original movies, for some pretty great new innovations that weren't possible in the originals. Its flaws, which aren't huge, include a few tonally off moments (jokes do intrude on the more serious moments), and there's not quite enough Slimer. It also naturally feels like the first movie in a superhero franchise, with origins and symbols all established -- it handles that stuff pretty well, tbh, but it doesn't necessarily stand out in a sea of pretty good movies all doing the same thing (GotG and Ant-Man come to mind). I think I'd give it like a B+ overall.

[Werthead]

My take. It was pretty damn good. A few things fell flat, but given the almighty clusterfuck I was expecting from the first trailer, it ended up being very decent indeed. The biggest issue is the lack of a decent, charismatic villain but that didn't hurt the first movie either (and they do repeat the trick of having one of the main supporting characters possessed to get round it, which kind of works).

Quote

Ghosts are rising across New York City, summoned by an unknown force. Four paranormal investigators have to stop them with advanced and unsafe nuclear technology before really bad things happen. You know the drill.

Remakes and reboots are a controversial topic, particularly when it's of a beloved and iconic franchise. Ghostbusters, released in 1984, was groundbreaking in its special effects but what really sold the movie was the improvisational humour of Bill Murray and excellent judgement of tone, in which a generally serious situation (an evil demon prepares to arise in the city, sending two minions to pave the way) was reacted to with what can only be called the sheer apathetic, sarcastic attitude that only New Yorkers can fully employ. Throw in some astonishingly memorable one-liners and a warm-hearted camraderie between its leads (borne from years of working together on sketch shows and other movies) and you have an all-time modern classic.

Then, five years later, the exact same gang got back together and delivered the underwhelming Ghostbusters 2, which, a few solid scenes aside, threw away a lot of the lessons learned from the first film and killed the franchise (which had expanded to an excellent animated series and a pretty solid comic book) stone dead.

Twenty-seven years have passed since then - more time than between the Cuban Missile Crisis and Ghostbusters 2 - so the time is certainly ripe for a remake of the original movie. Normally I'm against remakes if there is a way instead of doing a continuation, even through a soft reboot, but in this case it's justified. If New York had suffered two massive, public invasions of the paranormal, then it'd be harder to sell the tension and scepticism that is a core part of a Ghostbusters movie, not to mention the problematic division of duties between the old castmembers everyone wants to see in action and the new, inevitably younger characters who will have to handle the franchise in the future.

As remakes go, this is a pretty decent one. It learns from the original film that New York is as much of a character as any of the actual Ghostbusters and if it doesn't quite judge the tone as well as the first movie, it makes a pretty decent fist of it. The four actresses deliver solid comic performances, although their dramatic chops are more variable (Melissa McCartney, perhaps unexpectedly, is possibly the best performer in the more serious moments of the film, although Kristen Wiig isn't far off). However, it's Kate McKinnon as eccentric engineer/inventor Jillian Holtzmann who steals every scene she's in and gets the best action moment in the whole movie. More of her in the sequel please.

There's a host of great side-performances from the likes of Andy Garcia, Charles Dance, MK Williams and Matt Walsh (catnip for everyone who's ever written fanfic where Omar from The Wire and Mike from Veep team up against a world-threatening danger...that's just me then?) and, as you'd expect from a film made in 2016, the effects are pretty great, if used to overload in the grand finale. There's also well-judged cameos from the entire primary cast of the original film (the retired Rick Moranis and late Harold Ramis excepted), and I'd like to see more of Sigourney Weaver's new character because 1) she's Sigourney Weaver and 2) she's Holtzmann's mentor. I mean, don't wait for the sequel, just give us a Weaver-and-McKinnon spin-off (kinn-off?). That'd be just fine.

There are negatives: for every two jokes that work there's one that doesn't, the running gag of sexually objectifying Chis Hemsworth to a degree that'd be creepy if it was a female character (and that thus being the point) is amusing for the first half of the film and then runs out of the steam in the second, the villain is pretty much a complete non-entity and there's much less of an attempt to justify how the the hell the Ghostbusters pay for everything (the first film spending so much time on something pedantic resulted in some hilarious gags). There's also that odd thing of establishing that the villain has an amazing power which should win him the movie instantly (he can mind-control an entire crowd of people) but then he forgets to use it on the heroes, allowing them to defeat him. But given how horrendously bad this could have been, it's actually a pretty fun picture.

Ghostbusters (2016) (****) certainly isn't as good a film as the 1984 original, but it's not as far off as you'd expect. There's good chemistry between the leads, most of the jokes work and at under two hours the movie doesn't outstay it's welcome as some recent effects films have. There's also a break-out performance from McKinnon and the establishing of a new paradigm (the Ghostbusters getting secret government backing and funding) that could drive quite a few future installments of the series. The movie is on general release right now worldwide.

[worry]

Oh yah, Andy Garcia. Small-ish role, but he's super good in it.