I Ain't Afraid Of No Girls

Year: 2016

Director: Paul Feig

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Man alive, am I glad the remake of Ghostbusters is in theaters so people can finally shut up about it. This needlessly divisive remake has had the one-two punch of taking on the mantle of a virulently nostalgic property and igniting the raging misogyny of certain online cave dwellers, so it has not been a fun time being a member of the horror community. 

As pointless and awful as many remakes are, I’m always willing to give them a chance. Especially when they’re from the team behind Spy, my favorite comedy of last year. Not to mention the fact that Ghostbusters is an iconic franchise with a series of major narrative flaws spiderwebbing across its surface, making it a more or less perfect property to update, if we have to reboot movies at all.

Hollywood certainly seems to enjoy it.

Ghostbusters doesn’t recreate the original plot so much as it sets it back to square one with different characters and sees where they go from there. These characters are Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), a meek doctor of particle physics who has attempted to suppress her belief in the paranormal in a weak stab at getting tenure; Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), her high school best friend and a true believer who has dedicated her life to paranormal research; Jillian Holtzman (Kate McKinnon), a dubiously sane engineer with an anarchistic flair for creating extremely dangerous, untested machinery; and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), a subway worker who is the Ghostbusters’ first client and quickly becomes a part of the team.

As the Ghostbusters jet around New York City investigating apparitions, spirits, and grim grinning ghosts, they realize that a sinister someone is creating devices the amplify paranormal activity (which might explain why it got five sequels). They must figure out his plan and stop him before it’s too late.

Probably how most people felt when they heard this film was in development.

Is Ghostbusters better than the original? No. If you’re here on a hate odyssey, this is your cue to stop reading.

OK, now that the angries are gone, I’m safe to tell you that the remake is actually pretty good! As it should be. This is Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy, not some anonymous music video director and Tiger Beat’s plastic Teen of the Week. Just like the original four Busters, these ladies weren’t chosen because they were sexy, of-the-now superstars. There’s a reason they didn’t cast Margot Robbie, Gal Gadot, Olivia Munn, and hell, Jennifer Lawrence, why not. They cast genuinely funny women who can sell a joke like it’s a Pokémon Go in-app purchase.

And Ghostbusters really is funny. That’s its greatest strength, which is probably good news considering it’s a comedy film. Obviously, humor is in the gut of the beholder, and the jokes are in a vastly, almost unrecognizably different vein from the original, but there’s a lot of great stuff at work here. Chris Hemsworth is an obvious standout because every line he’s given is a joke, but his ditzy receptionist nabs the best scene in the movie, a job interview-cum-Abbott and Costello routine that is delivered with diamond-sharp comic timing. Kate McKinnon is also a magnetic presence, presenting a spectacularly offbeat, unpredictable set of line readings that are always bizarrely fascinating. 

Probably the best overall performance is Wiig’s, because she effortlessly finds the po-faced wackiness in her straight-woman character while maintaining enough of an emotional throughline that she provides us an easy access point to the more out-there characters and developments.

Everyone else is good too, but I can’t just copy-paste the cast list here and call it a review.

Ghostbusters is very funny from beginning to end, but here’s the thing. At a certain point in the second act, it kind of stops trying to be funny. When the jokes come, they’re mostly just as solid, but during the course of its typically vast Feigian run time it slowly starts to kind of take itself seriously, presenting lots of ghostly action and the series’ traditional deus ex machina climax with hardly a glimmer of irony.

Then it attempts to tie a goopy little bow around everything with a series of character moments that strain to pump raw emotion from a one-dimensional well. These characters are great to watch as they quip and bounce off one another, but only Erin and Abby’s arcs have any meat on their bones. Everyone else is far too weak to support the more dramatic turn the film abruptly shifts into in the middle of the finale. Hell, even Erin and Abby are given a scene so heavy with melodrama and a wailing Schindler’s List score that it topples face-first into the dirt.

But after a bit, Ghostbusters remembers what it is and course corrects. It never fully recovers from that massive hit, but it’s still a sprightly, amusing popcorn picture. Once again, the trailers for this Feig comedy dreadfully undersold what it had to offer, so while it was better than I worried it might be, it wasn’t really as great as I’d hoped. Oh sure, it’s unique and hilarious enough to stand on its own two feet in the Ghostbusters canon and its fun cameos mostly avoid incessant pandering (mostly), but it’s not a resounding success to the tune of a Spy or a Bridesmaids.

The only thing I will concede to the haters is that the FallOut Boy cover of the Ghostbusters thing is truly dreadful (they also donated the worst song of 2014 to Big Hero 6), but the filmmakers know what’s up and they give Ray Parker, Jr. more than enough airtime. Anyway, go see it! It’s a dizzy, fun summer movie the likes of which haven’t really been packing multiplexes this year.

TL;DR: Ghostbusters is a wholly decent remake that isn't better than original but offers a unique enough entry to be worth watching.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1003

Reviews In This Series
Ghostbusters (Reitman, 1984)
Ghostbusters II (Reitman, 1989)
Ghostbusters (Feig, 2016)

A Real Stand-Up Guy

Year: 2014

Director: Chris Rock

Cast: Chris Rock, Rosario Dawson, Gabrielle Union

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

With the cinema of diversity, there's always a line being toed. Top Five is part of a massively important movement in fringe Hollywood, allowing non-white performers to take major positions in front of and behind the camera. Their continued success is vital in paving the way for change in a rigidly biased economic and artistic system. That said, anybody of any race can make a film with wan comedy, meandering storylines, and an unskilled aesthetic, and that is unfortunately exactly what has happened here.

When your film literally opens with outtake footage, it's hard to care a tremendous amount about the structure of the rest of it.

Chris Rock's third directorial feature stars himself as Andre Allen, a washed-up comedian and recovering alcoholic who is struggling to turn his wacky film career in a more serious direction. His impending wedding to reality star Erica Long (Gabrielle Union) is weighing on him, as an eternal commitment to a shallow materialist broadcast nationwide is wont to do. When he is paired up with Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), a reporter with a heart of gold, they stroll around the New York streets together experiencing a series of comic-lite vignettes while she interviews him about his his career hopes, dreams, and fears.

Throughout their day together, Chelsea and Andre learn a lot about each other and their relationship deepens as they visit a series of cameos who pop in and out for a scene or two. There is the constant looming threat of the wedding two days from now and the bachelor party that night, but other than that there is next to no narrative drive at all. It's the Once of ensemble comedies.

It's perfectly fine for movies to be in this more relaxed register (read: Once), but the largely improvisational structure of Top Five leads to some jarring continuity in the editing, and the film as a whole really isn't funny enough to sustain the format for longer than ten minutes at a time. There are some pristine moments to be sure, including a series of interviews, a couple fantastic stars playing themselves, and any moment where Rock is actually allowed near a comedy stage, but the rest is tepid, blah, or grossly prejudiced.

You mean a movie about vapid reality stars, hoes, and closeted gays who just crave a good fingerbang is misogynistic and homophobic? What?

When it's not being actively gross or offensive (J. B. Smoove plays a character whose entire personality is based around him aggressively catcalling overweight women), it's indulging in underwhelming chatter between actors who have admittedly solid chemistry, but nothing much of interest to say. Most of these guest players are other stand-up comedians taking day trips to the set, with varying degrees of success.

Sherri Shepherd and Leslie Jones shine in brief roles, but Tracy Morgan looks like he's so bored, he decided to astrally project his consciousness to a theme park while he recited his lines. The leads are similarly mismatched. Rosario Dawson keeps the reality of the film in check with a solid, down-to-earth performance, but Chris Rock turns in a piece of work that I can only assume stems from a family crest that reads "When in doubt, bug out your eyes and shriek."

He settles into his role by the halfway point, as does the cinematography (which up until this point, leans heavily on a quasi-documentary handheld aesthetic that looks more like reality TV by way of the SyFy network), and the movie is generally more enthusiastic about its characters from that point on, but it's a slog to get there.

At least we can gaze upon Dawson's rad as hell haircut during the slower moments.

Perhaps one of the most inhibiting elements of the film is the score. When it's not endlessly repeating co-producers Jay-Z and Kanye West's single "N*ggas in Paris" like a surly white teen with tattoos on his knuckles is in charge of the jukebox, it's bleating music that wouldn't be out of place in a hotel elevator. I'm pretty sure I was put on hold to one of the songs when I called Jamba Juice customer service (don't ask). It reduces the tone of the whole thing to that of a crackerjack commercial.

It's a pleasant enough film to watch, but it's utterly inconsequential. The narrative beats are relentlessly predictable, nothing of much import happens, nothing of much humor is said, and even the title is halfhearted. "Top five" refers to a game Andre and his friends play in which they list their five favorite rappers. I imagine this particular diversion gets old after the first round, and it's a lackluster choice for the film's namesake.

Although perhaps it's perfect, because the film as a whole is pretty lackluster too.

TL;DR: Top Five is underwhelming, dull, and occasionally offensive, though it's not grating to watch.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I'd think not.

Word Count: 843