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A major problem with fandom and franchise thinking is that your frame of reference is reduced to like, in this case, three films and a videogame. We end up in this weird situation where people speculate about whether it's even possible to make a good film about a team of exorcists. It was only done once, in 1984! It's impossible to recapture that magical lightning... There are an absolute shitload of movies about exorcists, including those of the 'parascientific' variety. You've probably seen a few of them. The 2012 spanish film Emergo is the best ghostbuster film, and it's not part of the franchise. Ghostbusters itself makes reference to films like The Exorcist, The Entity, Poltergeist, and so-forth. What Ghostbusters brought to the genre isn't magic. It was just the naked, crass commericalism of the exorcists that was played for 'meta' laughs. The reason you can't have a direct sequel is that the ending of the 1984 is pretty much a break in the fourth wall, where they announce that it's all a movie. The jingle kicks in, and we cut to credits before anyone can note the inevitable consequence - that you end up with for-profit franchise churches bearing the ghost logo cropping up worldwide, facing competition in this new marketplace where psychological problems are zapped away. The sequel to ghostbusters effectively can't be a ghost story, because ghosts - meaning these scrunchy-faced little neon muppet fuckers - are 'solved'. The sequel can only be about how the high wears off, and catching ghosts is no longer an effective distraction.
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Jan 21, 2019 19:11
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 18:41 |
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Mel Mudkiper posted:See, I guess for me stuff like the toys and comics and cartoons are ABOUT ghostbusters but they aren't ghostbusters. Like, for me, the quality of the film is about a lot more than the premise and set design, even with the premise, the film wouldn't have been a classic without the perfect storm of talent involved in the production. Like, it feels like the first film was a great movie about ghostbusters while everything since then has tried to be a great ghostbusters movie/comic/cartoon/etc. The Ghostbusters are called The Avengers nowadays. Hollywood has been making Ghostbusters movies nonstop for like 35 years. Godzilla 1998 is a Ghostbusters movie. It's not a perfect storm or lightning in a bottle. They have dozens of machines that spit electricity into bottles at a steady rate.
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Jan 22, 2019 16:33
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Sure if you reduce the film to part of the wide audience pleasing big budget action/comedy genre which I think certainly covers the surface of the films premise but doesnt actually speak to the appeal of the singular product That is the singular appeal. Ghostbusters was only 7 years after Star Wars. It was the first blockbuster of its kind, and now they’re ubiquitous. The highest grossing films of 1982 and 1983 (excluding Spielberg and Lucas joints) were Tootsie and Terms Of Endearment. Any hardcore Terms Of Endearment fans here? Shirts with the logo?
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Jan 22, 2019 17:12
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Why exclude Lucas and Spielberg Because they are typically credited with the invention of the blockbuster, and my point is to show that what we understand as blockbusters today were rare. You had ET, Star Wars 3, and then Tootsie. Ghostbusters was also a new type of movie that broke from the Spielberg/Lucas mold - being a ‘meta’ film about its own commercial spectacle, mass marketing, etc. In 1984 it was a joke that the characters had their own logo. Now it’s expected. This is the trend that Godzilla 1998 continued, having characters literally called Siskel and Ebert show up and criticize the blockbuster spectacle. The movie ends on a stadium where the monsters are eating popcorn, and so-forth. Tony Stark sells Iron Man merch in the films themselves, plastic masks going for presumably 20 bucks each.
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Jan 22, 2019 17:33
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Mel Mudkiper posted:You are mixing your terms. Top-Grossing films and "blockbusters" are not the same thing. For example, when you say "Terms of Endearment was the highest grossing film outside of Star Wars" you are ignoring that Star Wars made over twice as much money as Terms of Endearment did. Same thing with ET and Tootsie. You’re getting confused. My point is entirely that Tootsie was not a blockbuster. Blockbusters were rare in 1984, and blockbusters like Ghostbusters were nonexistent. If you go through a list of other 1983 films that might qualify as blockbusters, you have basically Jaws 3D, Superman III, Octopussy, and... Krull? Note that one is a Jaws sequel and one is a Star Wars rip-off. The claim is not that Ghostbusters is the first action-comedy.
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Jan 22, 2019 18:04
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Mel Mudkiper posted:There were four blockbusters in 1984 and one of which was explicitly a meta action-comedy I have been talking about blockbusters as a genre, which is why I’ve been consistently referring to genre elements within the films. I brought up Tootsie to illustrate that no films in 1983 resembled Ghostbusters. Recently, on the other hand, Suicide Squad parodied The Avengers and was consequently a fairly obvious spin on the Ghostbusters template. An alien god with an army of drones opens a spectacular apocalypse-portal in New York, so this team of quirky characters has to team up to save the planet. You’ve seen it a hundred times. Godzilla substitutes a lizard (with drones), and ID4 has UFOs (with drones), but those are minor variations. Basically every film with a big apocalyptic laser beam shooting up into (or down from) the sky is referencing Ghostbusters. Amazing Spiderman has the doomsday device on the skyscraper roof that turns everyone into lizards. Ninja Turtles, yep. Transformers 3, yep. These obviously aren’t just ‘fun movies with action’. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 19:04
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Then you are going to have to articulate your criteria for the genre I did. I am talking about blockbuster movies similar to Ghostbusters. These are movies about their own commercial spectacle, mass marketing, etc. In the Ghostbusters films, the point is that they literally dispel ‘bad vibes’ by making people feel good. Typically these ‘bad vibes’ take the form of an alien god with an army of drones who opens a spectacular apocalypse-portal in New York, so this team of quirky characters has to team up to save the planet. An implicit point I’ve made is that these are usually superhero movies. An example is The Avengers, which ends with a montage of people celebrating the restoration of status quo by buying Avengers merch. The genre is also criticized in the darkly comedic Watchmen, where the alien god is framed for the destruction of New York by The Crimebusters, ultimately so that the Tony Stark analogue can sell such as Crimebuster action figures. Films like Star Wars are a clear antecedents. Some films are Ghostbusters-adjacent, like Jurassic World. You lost track of the argument, which is not quibbling over the definition of a blockbuster but simply that these sorts of films are ubiquitous now. There is a massive glut of ghostbuster movies, and movies commenting on those movies - but that fact hasn’t made fans any happier. So, in your case, you insist that you specifically want a movie with ‘the lightning’ - a sci-fi movie called Ghostbusters about Reaganomics made in 1984 with a young Bill Murray. And not the one that actually exists and is instantly viewable at any time of the day, because that’s no good either. That’s innocent enough, I suppose. But then you have this Polanski-praising weirdo believing that ‘the lightning’ comes from Aryan skull shape. Nerdism is bad. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 02:06
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I expected better from SMG than to contradict himself within the same sentence There’s no contradiction there unless you don’t perceive a difference between the phrase “blockbuster movies similar to Ghostbusters” and “all blockbuster movies ever”. I even gave an example of two blockbuster films that are significantly different from Ghostbusters (Jurassic World and Star Wars), and films that are similar but not blockbusters (e.g. Emergo).
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Jan 23, 2019 03:05
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It’s also crossed out, so gently caress that guy.
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Apr 20, 2019 00:40
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You gotta admit that the victory of the fringe-science hucksters is pretty gauche in the age of COVID-19
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May 24, 2020 17:52
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:The fringe-scientist-as-hero/protagonist trope is old as balls (although the huckster element was never quite as pronounced as in GB), going back to at least Dr Serizawa in '54 Godzilla in cinema but going way further back in literature via Jules Verne and similar authors. It was also pretty widespread in early 50's B movies before it became a lot more common for them to be cast as villains/antagonists. And of course there a whole bunch of real life examples like Tesla and Galileo. Whole lotta brave scientists willing to stick it to The Authorities and go it alone. Of course that's a trope, but the idea is typically just to illustrate the concept of a paradigm shift. The scientist works in the darkness, searching through some unexplored territory, and then makes a startling discovery with worldwide consequences (either good or bad). In Ghostbusters, though, the characters start selling their services before any testing or research is done. They bypass scientific institutions altogether, and the result is a very unscientific public debate. People tend to ignore this part, but there's there's widespread speculation that the ghosts are caused by the Ghostbusters' own (dangerous, experimental) equipment: "Hi, this is Larry King. The phone-in topic today: "Ghosts and Ghostbusting." The controversy builds, more sightings are reported, [and] some maintain that these professional paranormal eliminators in New York are the cause of it all." ...and that's never addressed. The concern is raised, then forgotten. Walter Peck of course goes one step further and insists that Spengler is involved in a conspiracy to drug the population of New York, which is obviously wrong - but that's based on the genuine widespread concern that all these unlicensed nuclear accelerators are having side effects. He's not just being a jerk; he genuinely believes Spengler's machines are hurting people. (And let's be honest: is the belief that the proton packs are the cause of "ghosts" really any different from the belief that the culprit is a skyscraper acting as a radio antenna?) As noted previously, the Ghostbusters movie is canonically a diegetic fiction with actors loosely reenacting the 'actual events' that affected New York - like Mac & Me, but with a fictional franchise instead of McDonald's. So: is this movie an accurate depiction of the 'actual events', or is it designed to rehabilitate the company's image? Note how the Ghostbusters are otherwise-inexplicably seen as frauds in the sequel, and their incredible discoveries have had absolutely no impact on the world.
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May 25, 2020 14:57
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The_Doctor posted:
Uh, Winston is their assistant. I understand celebration of Ernie Hudson as an actor, but the entire point of the Winston character is that he’s horribly underpaid because he’s black. The Ghostbusters are exploiting their sole employee (besides Janine), because they’re libertarian small businessmen. Pretending that they’re some kind of progressive institution is actually doing Winston a disservice, by paving over the race issue.
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Jul 10, 2020 23:11
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That’s marginally worse than the kids book adaptation of the film which denotes Winston as merely ‘their assistant’.
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The Cameo posted:I mean in Reagan’s America that was exactly what was going on there Right, you have to be really willfully ignorant of it. As with perhaps most 1980s comedies, the protagonists are not-good people. Half the jokes in the movie involve for-profit exorcism being a horrible loving idea. And, in this movie about exorcism, Winston is the first and only character to seriously bring up Christianity. Peter and Egon are notably absent when Winston openly speculates that these ghost sightings have a socioeconomic cause. And, if that’s the case, is for-profit exorcism helping or hurting? (Remember that the ghosts are literally made out of bad feelings. What might be causing bad feelings in 1980s America? Like, I can think of a thing or two.) The nuance of Winston Zedemore is that, despite being a black Christian, he’s consciously working with the bad guys. It’s initially just to survive but, in his words, working for this company is making him ‘turn white’ - the obvious double-meaning being that he’s willing to accept an unholy alliance with the white libertarians to stop the immediate threat posed by Gozer. But, once Gozer is dead, the socioeconomic issues that caused all these ghost attacks have not been addressed at all. The film just suddenly ends, as if to avoid Winston spoiling the parade - and it still hasn’t ended, despite all the sequels, remakes, and spinoffs. I guess he just went to university?
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Jul 11, 2020 03:10
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Guy A. Person posted:I went looking for the deleted scene Karloff posted about earlier and another cut scene had Winston waiting in front of Janine while she tells someone roughly "we can't get to you until next Friday, my advice is just stay out of your house until then" while Winston raises a concerned eyebrow. This is obviously even more on the nose with that theme. There are still a lot of jokes like that, that fans don’t recognize as jokes. Like, instead of helping these restless spirits to pass into the afterlife, they pump them into this industrial waste storage facility. In slightly updated terms, the Ghostbusters startup is ‘disrupting’ the Christian faith - and it’s awful!
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Jul 11, 2020 03:57
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Sockser posted:I downloaded a fan Ghostbusters film yeeeeears ago, I think about west coast Ghostbusters, and this was like, the core plot of the film, was the church getting mad about the Ghostbusters doing stuff, which is a neat concept to explore, but probably not a script that would get greenlit as a real feature film It did end up being a feature film - it’s just that, besides Winston, the characters are completely thoughtless about what they’re actually doing. Like, I’m not really concerned with the churches. The people seeing ghosts are dealing with anxiety, grief, trauma, etc., so the Geek Squad rolls in and starts manipulating their brain-energies with untested experimental technology. That’s not better than, like, psychotherapy.
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Jul 11, 2020 14:27
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The movie does imply that they give at least some of their potential clients brain scans and a quick psychological test to make sure they're not delusional, which to be fair I'm quite sure at least some of them are. It seems pretty professional- saves the Ghostbusters from wasting time and directs the clients towards more appropriate help. Ok, so then you have a government agency dedicated to the elimination of badthought - sidestepping the question of why there are ghosts in the first place. While there are a lot of jokes about Ghostbusters’ bad business practices, the point isn’t for the company to become more ‘ethical’ (with a nice benefits package for Winston, humane treatment of the ghosts, etc.). The fact that they can rule out chemical imbalances or brain damage seems to confirm Winston’s psycho-socioeconomic hypothesis - and Ghostbusters of any stripe are fundamentally unable to deal with these systemic causes of ghosts, in the same way that police don’t actually exist to ‘stop crime’.
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Jul 12, 2020 18:55
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Just seems really weird he wouldn't be there, y'know... supporting his friends and coworkers. This is veering towards my observation that the Avengers aren’t friends, and ‘friendship’ is often deployed to depoliticize such as labour relations.
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Jul 13, 2020 21:18
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As with many or most 80s comedies, the entire joke is that the Ghostbusters are terrible people who are allowed to ‘get away with it’ under a thin justification of “slobs versus snobs” or whatever. There’s no need to rationalize away all the problematic content; Venkman is a conman who likes to abuse whatever limited authority he has over people, and that’s amusing for the same reason it’s amusing that they unleashed deadly atomic weaponry in the middle of NYC.
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Aug 8, 2021 18:25
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8one6 posted:"The Ghostbusters are evil" is some real CineD brain worms poo poo. To be clear, the ghostbusters aren't cool enough to be evil. They're just garden-variety bad idiots. The fact that they're bad idiots is not some hot take; that's like two-thirds of the jokes in the original movie. "We're doing bad, stupid things!"
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May 5, 2022 15:44
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Alan_Shore posted:So, we're agreeing that Venkman isn't a gaslighting, abusive rapist? Venkman was found guilty, by a jury of his peers.
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May 10, 2022 01:22
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The problem of Ghostbusters is, straightforwardly, that it's about ghosts. The ghosts are specifically a manifestation of New York City's collective bad mood coming out of the 1970s, which is fought with 'empty' pop-patriotic spectacle by these libertarian conmen-turned-entertainers. The story is "let's put on a show!" - but there's only so many times that you can douse the mean ol' government agent in liquid sugar before the concept runs up against its limitations. Ghostbusters 2, in its redundancy, states outright that baby Oscar will grow up to be the antichrist unless these children's entertainers (literally birthday clowns) descend as guardian angels to teach him Liberty. What sort of Liberty are we talking about, here? Ghostbusters 3 was consequently about the vital importance of introducing your kids to this Reagan-era sex comedy because...? Ghostbusters is still relevant, baby!
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Nov 25, 2023 21:29
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Insane that there are people, in this world, who genuinely believe that the Ghostbusters theme song isn’t intentionally about cum.
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Nov 27, 2023 01:16
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Ray Parker Junior's literally singing "hey single ladies, if you're so unhappy in bed that you're imagining sex with a freaky ghosts, you can call me and I'll show up at your apartment and improve your mood. I'm confident that I can outperform your ghost fantasy because I love cumming so much." And this is not even subtext. As with many movie-related songs of the 1980s, the theme is basically summarizing the plot of the film, where Venkman tries to convince Dana to sleep with him instead of putting Vinz Clortho's key in her gate. "If you're seeing things running through your head, who you gonna call?" "Ooh, I hear it likes the girls." "Don't get caught alone, oh no, when it comes through your door... unless you just want some more." Why is Ray Parker Junior insinuating that the prospective customer might want to get caught alone with a girl-loving ghost (that also only exists in her mind)? Because, in the movie, Dana is overtaken by a supernatural urge to gently caress Lou Tully.
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Nov 27, 2023 19:06
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Venkman very obviously began as a psychologist and then went into parapsychology in order to duck any sort of oversight while he hits on his test subjects and otherwise abuses his position. As part of the Ghostbusters, he’s vaguely acting as a (unlicensed?) psychologist while also administering medication and - again - attempting to seduce his client. Pretty much everything he’s doing is unethical. It’s worth noting that, besides the Thorazine, the Ghostbusters’ proton packs literally work by directly manipulating people’s ‘psychic energies’, and might as well be treated as akin to drugs. It’s not at all far off from Peck’s speculation about nerve gasses and whatever.
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Nov 28, 2023 23:30
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Alan_Shore posted:I'm begging people once again to not take the worn out SMG bait. People already ‘took the bait’, discussed the themes of the movie Ghostbusters, and nothing happened. Meanwhile, you saw something strange in your neighbourhood, and then failed to call anyone more brave to assist you!
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Nov 29, 2023 02:20
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Ghostbusters 1 is canonically a fictional movie made about the Real Ghostbusters - but that presumably-more-accurate version is, of course, presented to us in the form of an exaggerated cartoon show. We consequently don't know what actually happened in New York, since we're only shown a sort of propagandized version - and that, later, the filmmakers felt compelled to address the actual Ghostbusters' PR woes when they're washed-up celebrities dismissed as frauds only a few years later. So, we're left to conclude that the events of Ghostbusters 1 were not actually that impressive, if they even happened at all.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:33
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Kevyn posted:I can’t wait to see all the hijinks the mini stay pufts get into! Buying 7-8 proton packs, in anticipation of this!
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Feb 29, 2024 00:13
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It might seem crass now, but it’s gonna be epic when the other three actors die.
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Mar 11, 2024 22:10
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