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Ghostbusters

Ghost Garbage fire go!

Ok so I actually got off my ass and pirated me a copy of this trash and watched it with my mum. Tbf she actually liked it but there’s no accounting for taste and she has none haha.
To be honest I didn’t think it was that bad at the start, it seemed fairly entertaining, it looks good, the effects are ok, it’s not shot badly. I actually liked some of the ghosts which I found surprising, some of them looked pretty good.

The problems start early though, all the jokes are fart or poop or ass or front ass related, it’s so cringey it’s almost unbearable and it’s not funny beyond like a single pity guffaw.

I heard people talking about this pringle ad during the first ghost encounter scene and I was like ‘so she’s eating pringles, who cares?’. But whatever you heard it’s much worse, I mean it’s not like a one second shot, those pringles are in shot almost through that scene and she draws attention to them a few times and I was like ‘Seriously?’ it was shameless and it completely took me out of what should have been the first pivotal moment of the film which just turned into a silly gross out gag.

Seriously this movie is not funny, the funniest jokes in this movie were made by the editor when he was putting this together, every joke in this movie does not land, period. I saw a lot of reviews where people were saying Kevin, Chris Hemsworth’s character, the dopey secretary, was the saving grace in the movie. And I think they’re dead. His jokes were just as terrible if not more terrible, some of the jokes I was told were funny had no context, he just said them randomly with no setup. He was just saying dumb things, if any movie needed a laugh track it was. What’s so funny about his character exactly? He’s dumb, like monumentally ‘how has he stayed alive this long, seriously how does he feed himself dumb’ that’s it, that’s not a joke. What’s more its ‘offensive’ Janean (no fucking idea how to spell her name) wasn’t dumb, she wasn’t a scientist but she wasn’t a mouth breathing idiot, so why they thought about including a dopey male secretary as a gag I have no idea because there is no romantic sub-plot at all. They don’t even attempt one.
I think the worst part of this movie is that none of the characters seem like real people, they all seem like cartoon characters, every character apart from Charles Danse is just a walking talking silly gag. It’s just tiring and it makes you very aware you’re not watching a movie that has any intention of taking itself seriously so can have no drama or tension or engaging plot at all.

Ok on to the controversy bullshit, I honestly think having women ghostbusters made no difference, there isn’t a cast on earth that could have made this movie work, you could have re-united the old cast bring Harold Ramis back from the dead and they couldn’t have made this movie watchable. So really it has nothing to do with them being women and everything to do with the writing and direction being lacklustre.

On the whole the cast was probably the only thing about it that was any good, I’m not a big McCarthy fan but her character was probably the most interesting I guess. Kristin Wiig is great but she was pretty much the boring straight man. The other girl who was supposed to be Egon was terrible, beyond ridiculous. Lesly Jones was probably the most real character in the movie despite the stupid forced loud black woman jokes that made the world cringe. She was probably the most consistent character throughout.

But the problem really was that there was no chemistry, it was just a bunch of zany characters shoved together whereas the original film felt like a group of friends doing a dirty job for not much pay. It worked, they meshed, these new ghostbusters did not. They didn’t feel like real characters so I couldn’t care about their relationship.

The story didn’t make a whole lot of sense and it didn’t have a pleasing flow, it felt empty. It wasn’t a very satisfying film to watch because there wasn’t really a big arc or any characters you thought were central. It didn’t feel like a cohesive movie, it felt like an overly long and unfunny SNL skit, I know everyone is saying that, but they’re goddamn right.

Overall it wasn’t so bad it was good, but it wasn’t horrible, it was lame, a wet fart of a movie and a pitiful start to a franchise that seems like it’s already dead.

I mean we knew it would suck, it was marketed by idiots who remade a classic movie and intentionally alienated the original fans of the franchise failing completely to secure a new audience, so of course it flopped. This is what you get when you push ideology over actually creating things people will like, which is your job as a content creator. That being said there wasn’t any really overt political or feminist messages in the movie, so I can’t fault it for that.

But still I give it two raspberries out of five.

 

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Ghostbusters failer

Snappy title eh? Bet you can’t guess by that and the comic strip show I feel about this trailer.
It’s about the only thing about this rant that will be snappy, I’m chomping at the bit to keep this short and not devolve into gutteral grunting noises and end it by curling up into the fetal position crying and sucking my thumb. I really have to keep this controlled or I’m gonna write a manifesto and be accused of the dreaded MUH-SOGGY-KNEES!

Ok enough preamble, let’s get up in this bitch… err lady… err ladies… err gender nonspecific pronouns.
The first thing about this trailer and I watched it and I sort of let it just roll over my eyes not really letting it go in the first time I watched it. But subsequently I watched reaction video after reaction video and seriously I must have watched at least fifty different reaction videos on youtube. Just trying to make sure this was real and I hadn’t entered an alternate dimension of pure concentrated SUCK.
So I’m gonna be really anal and not talk about the trailer and instead talk about the reactions to the trailer haha. The first funny thing is almost every male reviewer and male’s are obviously the majority of people reviewing this trailer… COS SEXISM! No. But they almost always (I always get fucking side tracked) had to give the a little caveat before addressing the female cast.
*DISCLAIMER* I am not nor have I ever been a member of the communist party… err I mean I’m not a misogynist.

Obviouly not as melodramatic as that but not far off. And I think it speaks volumes about this PATRIARCHY we obviously live in when almost every man on the internet is so shit scared of being called a misogynist they have to prostrate themselves on the alter of feminism and beg forgiveness for the audacity of having a negative opinion about a movie with a holy vagina carier in it.
Ok mini rant ceased!
Just had to get that out of the way and of course there were women reviewers who tore it apart too so no one especially not sony can really claim like they’ve been trying that it’s neckbeard heman woman haters hammering the living fuck out of the dislike button.
Someone even said that even gods of egypt which tanked had a higher like to dislike ratio on it’s trailer, but the new Ghostbusters trailer almost has double the dislikes than likes. So either the world is just full of misogynists and women with ‘internalized misogyny’ or this trailer is a steaming pile of ectoplasm.
What’s wrong with the trailer you ask? What the fuck is right with it? I ask you.
It starts off with this stupid piano version of the old theme ripping off when jurassic world did it. Then it says ‘thirty years ago four scientists saved new york’ and people have rightly latched onto this as bullshit for two reasons.
Reason one; this movie has claimed to be a reboot but is now acknowledging the previous films as if it’s a direct canonical sequel to the other two. And I’ve had it under good sources that the returning cast are appearing as cameos that are completely unrelated to the characters they played in the first, they’re just random guys held at contractual gun point by sony to prance around and bring in more people to watch this mess.
Reason two; there were technically only two scientists, Egon and Ray, Winston was more or less a temp and Venkman was a quack paraspychologist, which is not science any more than crystal skulls are a diet plan.
So the trailer hasn’t even started and it’s poked a hole in it’s own colostomy bag.Then we’re introduced to a recreation of the library scene from the original but instead of this creepy vibe punctuated with sarcastic comedy, we get an instant jump scare gross out visual gag which Feig is known for. The ghost just does an excorcist and pukes all over Kristen Wiig and then a follow up joke is implied when she talks about how the gunk got in all her cracks, haha vaginas and bums, so funny.

But wait that’s only the start of the non jokes. There’s also a joke where Kristen Wiig and the always nauseating Mellissa Mcarthy say ‘let’s go’ at the same time and awkwardly apologise politely and this is a joke, it’s just fucking cringe central.

We’re introduced to the characters in such a cringe worthy way ‘oh what’s her face you’re the best at quantum whatever, oh Egon clone, you do stuff that’s relevent to the plot’ and more to that effect. Oh and the black chick has a car. And of course she is a total token, loud black character ‘Oh lordy, I’m so black and large and loud’. And for a movie sort of aimed at that social justice crowd, fuck the haters progressive bullshit thinly veiled cashgrab, it seemed like an odd choice to not make her a scientist too. Or atleast choose a black actor that isn’t written like a fucking minstrel. And the car is a herse, the original car was an old ambulance, so either they did that on purpose because they’re fucking retards or the people making this reboot didn’t know the ghostbusters car was an ambulance, either out come is bad, it’s all bad folks. It’s idiots all the way down.
The effects look ok, there’s too much cg, I much prefer phsysical effects, even now that freaks me out, puppets and shit man.
Then there’s a joke where one of them wears a wig and a hat, no seriously that’s a joke, that’s a joke in this film. Go look for yourself.
Then there’s some ghostbusting montage and bit of Chris Hemsworth actually making women want to see this movie as opposed to making them all collectively yawn. Then the last joke of the trailer is Mcarthy getting possessed by the ghost of purest cringe. This scene is almost painful to watch as the black ghostbuster Patti basically slaps the ghost jizz out of Mcarthy ripping off excorcist again with such gems as “The power of Patty compels you!”
I mean seriously, you know that movie is forty years old right? So the new generous your trying to appeal to only tangentially understand that that’s a joke at all, not that it is, it’s not funny. And it doesn’t become funnier when you say ‘That’s gonna leave a mark’ after as if stating facts is now humour. I mean fuck that isn’t even a joke but its so old and so tired.
All in all it’s terrible, between the cast and the writing and the feel and Melissa Mcarthy punching ghosts with proton knuckle dusters, to quote tumblr; I just can’t even.
Honestly it’s not even so much the cast, I have no idea who Leslie Jones is but she’s not funny going by the trailer and in the international trailer it’s even worse and they get upstaged by Hemsworth of all people.
The chick who plays the new Egon I have never heard of but she’s like the token hot one I guess but she didn’t seem to do much.
Melissa Mcarthy plays the same character in every movie, which can be summed up in four syllables; FATTY FALL DOWN!
She’s just a female Chris Farly and it was barely funny when he did it.
I actually like Kristen Wiig, I’ve seen her in some pretty funny stuff and she’s actually the only cast member I approve of. But the tone and the writing seems so silly and so jilted and inorganic I don’t see how it can be funny.
I can’t really say my big bugbear is with the cast, I honestly think this movie would still suck even if you had all the original cast including using hoodoo to bring back Harold Ramis, who is as we speak spinning so hard and fast in his grave he’s achieved total plutonic reversal without crossing the streams.
The tone and the feel and the direction is all wrong and I’ve seen a leaked synopsis of the script and it sounds fucking awful. It doesn’t feel like a ghostbusters movie and far be it for me to try and encapsulate what that is in the summation of this blog. But this movie just feels like a summer comedy, it’s like an snl skit that got out of hand and grew into a film like mould.

It’s just silly, the reason people loved the tone of the original gb is  because it was a film first and a comedy second. If you removed the humour it would still be an interesting film, the comedy is inconsequental, it’s just there, it’s just a result of the tone and natural chemistry between the cast and that’s why it works so well, it’s not forced its organic.
This movie seems to just be a vehicle for terrible jokes, like the story and everything else is just decoration, it’s bridesmaids wearing the skin of ghostbusters without the swearing.

I don’t really begrudge the cast for making it, from what I’ve heard they’ve mostly gone into hiding and the entire cast and crew was forced to sign a second nda to prevent leaks. And there have been no real marketing pushes I’ve seen except a carcher pressure wash ad I just saw with the ghostbusters logo, wow sony, really pushing the boat out.
You know it’s damage control, they know it’s going down like the titanic they’re just trying to save as much money as possibly now by limiting the marketing and telling people to shut up as well as deleting all the negative comments that aren’t also sexist and racist in order to make their detractors all half a million of them look like Donald Trump supporters haha *wink wink nod nod current events*.

Honestly I thought this movie was going to be ok, I mean I knew I was going to hate it because I hate everything, I’m probably the anti-christ or distantly related to Hitler. But I thought it would be ok, like it would be funny, because I hear nothing but benign things about Paul Feig and people seem to suck Mcarthy’s dick but people like Amy Schumer and I want to throw her under a thresher. Fuck can you imagine if they cast her and Sarah Silverman, see looking on the bright side, it could have been worse.

Now excuse me while I raid my cupboards for whiskey soaked coasters to suck.

 

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The new Ghostbuster, a rant.

Ok call me an entitled whiney manbaby all you want, no seriously, get it out of your system, I don’t give a tenth of a fuck. We all know this movie is going to be garbage, every man, woman and child with half a brain who has watched the original films and TV shows (and possibly that shitty game, of which I only played like an hour of because it didn’t have an autosave function, I mean come on, what fucking game doesn’t autosave now, fuck if I’m going back to the start) knows this is unfettered garbage and the man behind it is a fucking shill, but that aside I can’t help but think he’s also a genius.

We know this movie will suck, that goes without saying, no it’s not because of the all female cast, no it’s not misogyny, it’s not the fucking patriarchy, all reboots suck. Find me one reboot that doesn’t want to make your childhood crawl up inside you and choke to death on legos. I watched the remake of Robocop and I almost genuinely cried, I remember going to dig out the old vhs of the original movie and just watching it in the foetal position. Man of Steel was so joyless and boring it was painful to watch, I just watched and laughed out of virtual horror, reeling and asking myself if this was actually a film or someone going back in time and punching Christopher Reeves father in the balls, Dean Cain is weeping softly somewhere as we speak.

Reboots are always shameless cash grabs that nevertheless make money, they’re not good, and they ride the coat tails of their predecessors to trick people into thinking that it’s actually entertainment and not simply unapologetic necrophilia.

But this time it’s different, Paul Feig has been a lot smarter, shifty and shameless and downright fucking reprehensible but smart. I think if I was him and I wanted to do a Ghostbusters remake, I’d punch myself in the face for even thinking it, but if I did it I would do it like this.

Look at it from this perspective; imagine if he did a straight remake? Or he got back the entire original cast to reprise their roles or even if he got an entirely new male cast and just did a straight up reboot. People would fucking hate, it wouldn’t matter if they used necromancy to bring Egon (Yeah I forgot his name sue me) back to life, it would be warming the bottom of the bargain bin. It would suck; it could never live up to the hype of the first two films.

Bill Murray knew it, that’s why he refused to do Ghostbusters 3, it would have been futile after the drop off between one and two, three would have bombed and brought down the whole series. Two movies were all it needed, then the TV shows and yada yada yada, t-shirts, toys all that bullshit.

If a Ghostbusters sequel ever had a chance it would have been then, now the fans are older and more cynical they would tear it apart like soft garlic bread on a sharing platter at Tess Holidays birthday. They would annihilate it.

So I don’t know if Feig is aware or not of this cultural backlash in regards to toxic ideas of feminism infiltrating all aspects of popular culture but he has picked the perfect time to capitalize on that particular dogma. But all that spaghetti aside, rebooting it with an all female cast is genius.

It’s genius because rather than trying to pander to the old fans that will never be happy he’s completely alienated them. Which not only created its own media firestorm, thousands of angry neckbeards like me raging about it over twitter and facebook and wherever, it attracted a whole new generation to see what all the fuss was about.

Women and hipsters drawn by the pangs of agony of nerds like me, like that of a predator hearing an injured animal came in droves to support a movie that caused this much butthurt to a whole generation of people. And they realised exactly what Feig wanted them to realise; that he made this movie for them.

There has to be a whole generation of young men and women that have never even seen Ghostbusters but it still enters their cultural lexicon, despite being too dated for them to actually watch and enjoy. So this appeals to them as not only a fun comedy but a shinier newer version of a movie that was in the background of their childhoods but never quite came into focus. This is their Ghostbusters, just like most people in my generation probably won’t have seen the original nutty professor with Jerry Lewis and instead watched Eddie Murphy do one and a half hour repetition of the same fart joke playing every character and possibly the garden furniture.
It both brilliantly cuts ties with the old movie but keeps enough elements to garner the outrage and the cash the name Ghostbusters might bring. I mean in all essence he could have just called it Spectreslappers or Ghoulgapers or anything who gives a fuck but he didn’t because he wanted this media hype, this media war to rage on giving him all the free publicity he needed.

They must know they’re pissing off a whole generation of people with this and only the most benign and banal of beta males and women that show a passing fancy for the original films but are not really diehard fans are on the fence or like the idea. I mean Emma Stone knew which is why she turned down a role in the film, she knew there would be a shitstorm and she wanted to stay out of it, but the ever one note (hurr hurr I’m a fat chick, aint dat furnny hurr hurr I done fell over) Mellissa McCarthy was chomping at the bit to make some money off this heap of pure heresy.

I only wish Amy Schumer could have been in just to add that extra hint of crap on this enormous faecal cake.

But and this is the big one; they are still going to make a killing. A fucking killing, the only way this movie could flop is if they cast Adam Sandler as Slimer and even then most of his films make shitloads of money despite circling the toilet bowl for the last fifteen years. There’s just too much hype around for it not to make money. Now I’m not saying it’ll do well review wise, it’s most likely going to be roundly binned or at least just indifferently shelved but I’m talking about cold hard cash here.

So I almost stand in awe of the sheer majesty of this media puppetry, either Paul Feig is just an incredibly lucky idiot or an evil marketing genius. My final conclusion as someone who prides himself on freedom of speech I would never call for a boycott or have the movie banned, you can’t ban a movie just for being bad. And at the same time I want to see how bad it actually is, I want to see it destroyed by people who loved the original films.

But in the end this isn’t ‘our’ movie, it’s the current generations movie and maybe just maybe it’ll capture a glimpse of the magic of the original films packaged and processed by the greedy grave robbers at Sony (you know the people that did that fucking god awful original Spiderman series gak!). We don’t have to like it, but it doesn’t and can’t really take away from the originals so what harm does it really do? It’s fucked up but what can you really do about it? If at least one kid walks out of that movie and says ‘Wtf was that pile of crap?’ and then goes and digs in his parents vhs collection and doesn’t find 80’s porn but comes across an original Ghostbusters movie, it’s done its part.
I’ve decided after careful consideration to give zero fucks from here on out.

Check out more of my little strips about Jeffrey Dahmer.

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