by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was the 2016 remake/reboot/whatever of Ghostbusters, directed by Paul Feig from a script he co-wrote
with Katie Dippold and a film which became controversial (and a box-office
disappointment) because the filmmakers decided to make the four ghostbusters
women: physics professor Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig), whose tenure track at
Columbia University is suddenly derailed by the publication of a book called Ghosts
in Our Past she co-wrote years before; Abby
Yates (Melissa McCarthy), who co-wrote the book and after suppressing it for
years decided to publish it as a print-by-order title and an audio book on
Amazon.com to build publicity for her own paranormal researches; her assistant
Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon); and Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones), an
African-American ticket-booth staffer for the New York subway system who gets
drawn into the ghost-busting field when one of the apparitions appears inside a
subway tunnel. Apparently Leslie Jones’ casting was the chief argument against
the film by a lot of sexist idiots protesting it online — as she says in the
movie, when she leaps into a mosh pit and falls to the floor because nobody
would catch her, “I don’t know if it was a race thing or a lady thing, but I’m
mad as hell.” I thought she was the best thing in the movie; her character had
some of the same appealing saltiness Glenda Farrell brought to her parts at
Warner Bros. in the 1930’s (including the reporter she played in Mystery
of the Wax Museum — a gag from which, a
live person posing as one in a row of dummy or severed heads, gets recycled
here after it was recycled earlier by Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman
in Young Frankenstein) and she provides a thorough grounding to a film
that needs one.
I quite enjoyed the 2016 Ghostbusters even though it’s intelligent and amusing instead of
screamingly funny the way the 1984 original was; it’s the sort of remake that you
can enjoy on its own merits as quality entertainment as long as you don’t think back to the incandescent original (which was
one of the few truly great horror-comedies ever made, along with The
Bride of Frankenstein, the similarly titled
Bob Hope vehicle The Ghost Breakers,
The Invisible Woman, and Young
Frankenstein). The plot deals with the
janitor at the Mercado Hotel (one of the characters identifies “mercado” as the
Spanish word for “temple,” when it actually means “market”), which just happens
to be located at the nexus where the two “lane lines” of supernatural activity
in Manhattan meet. The women ghostbusters get called in when the ghost of
Gertrude Aldridge (Bess Rous) suddenly appears in the home of her long-dead
father — in the late 19th century she supposedly killed all her
father’s servants, thereby seriously inconveniencing him when he woke up
expecting his breakfast — and soon a number of other ghosts, including the
Slimer from the first film, appear along those “lane lines” and cause various
sorts of trouble for passers-by. Eventually the ghostbusters trace these to the
Mercado Hotel and in particular to its maintenance person, Rowan North (Neil
Casey), who’s built an elaborate apparatus in the hotel’s basement where he has
a whole host of spirits trapped and is building a machine that will release
them. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, a ghost the ghostbusters have
actually trapped gets away — courtesy of Erin’s attempt to impress professional
debunker Martin Heiss (Bill Murray in the most appealing of the various cameos
from people who were in the 1984 original — even Harold Ramis, who died in
2014, appears via a bust in an early scene set at a university) — and crashes a
heavy-metal concert at which Ozzy Osbourne (who appears briefly as himself) is
the headliner. The ghost materializes during the opening act and, of course,
the audience thinks it’s just part of the show.
In the middle of the movie
Rowan dies, falling out of the window of the second-floor room above a Chinese
restaurant that serves as the ghostbusters’ headquarters because that’s all
they can afford, but of course he
comes back as a ghost. (Actually it's Martin Heiss who falls out of the window; Rowan essentially immolates himself on his own apparatus, confident that he will survive as a ghost even if his body dies.) He briefly takes possession of Abby’s body before
letting go of it and ultimately taking over Kevin (Chris Hemsworth), who seems
to have been patterned after the Swedish receptionist in Mel Brooks’ Blazing
Saddles (or maybe Loni Anderson’s character
on WKRP in Cincinnati): a hot
hunk of man-meat who’s been hired because the women in charge (Erin in
particular) find him incredibly attractive even though he’s stupid. I wish a
film that is as full of in-jokes as this one is would have sneaked in some sort of reference to Hemsworth’s far more famous
role as Thor — in Ghostbusters
Kevin (under Rowan’s possession) is attempting to build a bridge between the
worlds of the living and the dead so the ghosts can conquer everything and make
him master of the universe; in the Thor movies Thor was attempting to rebuild a bridge between mortal Earth
and the Norse gods’ home, Asgard. In any event, Kevin-as-Rowan does succeed in releasing all the ghosts and there’s an
exciting action climax in which, as in the earlier Ghostbusters movies, the good guys end up stalked by a giant
animate figure down the New York streets — in the 1984 Ghostbusters it was a giant Stay-Puft marshmallow man (who
reappears here in a ghostly vision of a 1970’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade —
the ghosts have returned New York to what it was in the 1970’s, including movie
marquees advertising Taxi Driver
and Fists of Fury and a giant
“Happy Christmas from John and Yoko” billboard as well as a number of brand
names that no longer exist — which the ghostbusters blow up with a Swiss army
knife; alas, this doesn’t cover
them in marshmallow cream as I had expected it to); in the terrible 1989 sequel
it was the Statue of Liberty; and here it’s the Ghostbusters’ own logo come to
life to tamp them down until they figure out how to do a reversal of Rowan’s
diabolical machine and send the ghosts back to wherever it is they belong. (At
one point one of them is asked where the ghosts are now and she says,
“Michigan” — the home state of director Feig.)
There are a lot of ways in which
the new Ghostbusters isn’t as
good as the original — the famous “Ghostbusters” theme reappears but it’s
played by a number of modern artists who don’t give it the insouciant charm Ray
Parker, Jr. did in the original, and only in the climactic scene does Feig
managed to duplicate the marvelous combination of a dark, Gothic-noir background cityscape and the slapstick gags going on
in front of them created by the original director, Ivan Reitman — but it’s
still a quite good film, maybe not drop-dead scream-on-the-floor funny but at
least quite amusing, and blessedly for a modern comedy there’s only one fart
joke and it’s on a tape recording. It does seem odd that a film directed and co-written by a man was hailed when
it came out as the make-or-break opportunity for female leads in action roles
in modern films (didn’t that glass ceiling shatter 41 years ago when Carrie Fisher
wielded her blaster in the first Star Wars?), especially since this film flopped and Wonder Woman, made a year later with a woman director and a much
stronger female character lead, was a hit — but on its own merits the 2016 Ghostbusters is a quite entertaining and engaging movie that
didn’t deserve the slams it got from both legitimate critics and online trolls.
