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Fart City posted:gently caress yeah, dude. I was going to post this. It's an awesome scene, and really illustrates what makes Ghostbusters special: it's a loving gonzo movie with demon dogs and giant marshmallow sailors, but the characters in-universe still react to everything with legitimate respect and fear. Like even smartass Venkman gets the poo poo scared out of him when Slimer charges down the hall. Ghostbusters, while also being one of the best comedies of all time, is a movie with stakes. The Ray/Winston Judgement Day scene is an example of setting those stakes up, so that when it comes time for them to make the hero play and cross the streams at the end, there is an emotional heft to it. I'm sure a lot of that is because of how young most of us were when we first saw Ghostbusters. I know personally that I was legitimately scared by the movie, it didn't seem like a comedy to me right away. When you're that young the comedy is almost more of a necessary tension release valve that gives you the courage to keep watching. I had many a nightmare about the dog chasing Louis, and that's gotta be one of the most hilarious scenes ever put on film, but if you're the right age it can be terrifying.
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Jul 31, 2018 19:12
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The stakes just aren't there, a ton of effort went into selling the audience on Gozer as a serious world-ending threat, and the remake has none of that. Like, what is there in GB '16 for an 8 year old to be scared of? It's just goofy on goofy on goofy with nothing to mix it up.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:56
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Iron Crowned posted:Aaaand, now I want to watch Ghostbusters again. Is there more than one Blu-ray, and if so, which one is the best one? https://www.amazon.com/Ghostbusters...busters+blu+ray This set is the newest transfer based on a 4k master so it's probably as perfect as the film will ever look. It's cheap now because a UHD version came out recently but the reviews seem to indicate that it's barely an upgrade on the current blu ray just because of how excellent that transfer was.
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Aug 7, 2018 18:00
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Squashing Machine posted:I'd say this is a big part of it, or at least Feig misunderstanding where comedy comes from in a movie. The supporting cast in the original is pretty straight-laced, the closest thing to a wacky character is Louis, and he's largely kind of your standard 80's dweeboid. Venkman's ostensible romantic rival is the nasal-spray-using violinist who's coded as being a stuck-up wet blanket type. There's very few people making "joke jokes" outside of Venkman. The lines you remember from Egon are him being socially oblivious and somewhat disconnected from reality. Contrast this with GB2016, where it's like every person in New York just took the intro course at the UCB. Our main four are just constantly making references and quips, and the writing's afraid to make anything even harmlessly at their own expense. All the supporting characters outside of the Game of Thrones guy are just constantly riffing. It's constant noise, and leaves you without that central lens character to attach to. Even Louis though, his dialogue is not funny in the way that Feig's comedy is funny, even when it works. It's a deeper kind of funny that depends heavily on Moranis' performance and it's rooted in character, not any traditional set-up/punchline structure. Think about the genius of this scene and how it's just completely the opposite of the kind of comedy that GB'16 was going for: Woman at Party : [coming up to Louis during party] Do you have any Excedrin or extra-strength Tylenol? Louis : [opening cabinet] Gee, I think all I got is acetylsalicylic acid, generic. See, I can get six hundred tablets of that for the same price as three hundred of a name brand. That makes good financial sense, good advice... [takes platter back into living room] Louis : Hey, this is real smoked salmon from Nova Scotia, Canada, $24.95 a pound! It only cost me $14.12 after tax, though. [walks up to a hapless guest, speaking confidentially] Louis : I'm givin' this whole thing as a promotional expense, that's why I invited clients instead of friends. You havin' a good time, Mark? [heads across the room, greeting other guests] Louis : How you doing? Why don't you have some of the brie, it's at room temperature! [to the Tall Woman] Louis : You think it's too warm in here for the brie? Tall Woman at Party : [standing] Louis, I'm going home. Louis : Aw, don't leave yet. Well, listen, maybe if we start dancing other people will join in! Tall Woman at Party : [pauses] Okay! [Louis and the Tall Woman begin disco dancing. Suddenly the doorbell rings] Louis : Oh, don't move, I just gotta get the door. [opens door, greeting guests] Louis : Ted! Annette! I'm glad you could come, how you doin', give me your coats. Everybody, this is Ted and Annette Fleming! Ted has a small carpet cleaning business in receivership; Annette's drawing a salary from a deferred bonus from two years ago! They got fifteen thousand left on the house at eight percent.
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Aug 7, 2018 18:27
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The awkward stretches of improv that don't really work also end up making the movie feel a lot longer than it is. I checked the clock thinking "are we in the home stretch here yet?" and the movie wasn't even half over.
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Aug 7, 2018 18:59
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The first few seasons of The Real Ghostbusters did have some very spooky moments though. The Boogeyman and Samhain didn't seem so goofy to me when I was a kid.
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Aug 8, 2018 02:12
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Iron Crowned posted:My dream of this would be more like New XCOM/XCOM 2, where it takes place in say 1992, and a Ghostbusters franchise is setting up in New Orleans, with some overarching voodoo plot. Really I just want to have the Skyranger loading screens replaced with Ecto I. Seriously a modern XCOM-type game with customizable Ghostbusters and various different gadgets and ghost types and abilities would be like the last game I'd ever need. Just make that and wrap it up, the industry has peaked.
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Aug 28, 2018 16:55
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The Ghostbusters game was pretty drat impressive graphically at the time too. Very nice particle effects and lots of attention to detail in with way everything looked and moved.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:40
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As a kid Winston was my favorite because of that scene from Ghostbusters 2 where Ray and Egon are in the dark room and the fire starts. Winston is such a boss in that scene.
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Dec 13, 2018 22:12
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Fart City posted:I think a fundamental building block of a “good” ghostbusters movie is having a legit, true-believer lunatic like Akroyd involved at a script or directing level. One of the things I love about the first film in particular is, although it uses the supernatural for gags, there is always an undercurrent of legitimacy applied to it: the librarian becoming an eldritch horror, Venkman screaming as Slimer rushes him, Stay-Puft’s face changing in anger. Nothing is really treated flippantly. The gag with that dragon thing perched on Leslie Jones’ shoulders? That’s not the tone. You need someone at a foundational level that believes in the supernatural to give it that kind of weird nod to horror that is in the first two films. At the very least someone who knows about the occult enough to write a fictional plot that feels like it could be based on some real ancient text somewhere. It's a subtle I guess but the end result makes a huge difference. Stuff like "The Traveler has come!", Louis rant about the giant slor, name dropping Sumeria, etc. I think its easy to forget how much those things made the original feel like the unique mix of comedy and horror that it was. The 2016 movie came off like just a run-of-the-mill ghost story by comparison, at least Viggo had like a Vlad the Impaler motif going on.
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Jan 16, 2019 20:31
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DLC Inc posted:I'm continuously baffled why loving Ghostbusters keeps getting dug back up in attempts to franchise it when even the the 2nd movie with the entire original cast was pretty much dogshit. A. GB2 wasn't really dogshit and people don't think of it that way. It was underwhelming, nothing more nothing less. B. It made 200+ million in 1989 money C. It set the franchise up as a merchandising cash cow for years to come and was crucial to cementing GB in the minds of late 80's kids who were not born or infants when the original was released in 1984. Yea, why would a corporation want to try to reproduce something like that, a multi-generational money making machine? We all know how corporate honchos hate that sort of thing.
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Jan 16, 2019 22:03
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Malcolm Excellent posted:Who the hell is test firing a proton pack at a barn in the middle of nowhere!? I am assuming it's Ray's family farm they put three mortgages on. There won't be any barn in the movie. They haven't cast anyone yet or shot a single scene yet, teasers like that are the equivalent of Friday the 13th producers getting financing together based on a poster for an idea that didn't even have a script yet.
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Jan 16, 2019 22:16
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ConfusedUs posted:I don't think you need a believer for this. You just need someone who is willing to take something inherently silly and play it straight. Slimer, Stay-Puft, Gozer, Vigo...pretty much everything in both original movies is, frankly, silly to some degree. They're just played straight. Yea like I posted before, I think being a believer is less important than just having some basic literacy in these occult subjects so that the horror underneath the silliness feels legitimate. The way Gozer is described in Ghostbusters you'd almost expect to be able to look the name up and find him listed as an actual Sumerian god, it feels very believable in terms of something you'd find in a dusty old book in Ray's Occult.
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Jan 17, 2019 16:42
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I'm curious how the Ramis family feels about future Egon appearances(even if it were animation with a new actor's voice). It's easy for me to sit here and assume, as a life-long Ghostbusters fan, that they'd consider it to be a heart-warming compliment or a way to keep Harold's memory alive and continue his legacy, but the family may not necessarily feel that way.
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Feb 14, 2019 16:43
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Yea I think the way that improv style comedy works just doesn't jive with a well paced movie that's trying to also have a plot worth paying attention to. I remember I was kinda getting bored with the movie, and I was like "ok well let me just check how much time is left on this thing, I'm sure it's only about 30-40 minutes." Turned out that I was barely halfway through and still had an entire hour left. That movie draaaaaged real bad.
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Feb 15, 2019 17:38
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Honestly the most I've laughed at any comedy in the past several years was the Jumanji sequel. That really caught me off-guard.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:25
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The_Doctor posted:I can’t understand that level of potential flakiness where people are basically unsure if he’ll turn up to set on the first day of shooting. He's spent multiple decades crafting and maintaining the image that allows him to behave that way. He's been incredibly successful at it.
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Mar 7, 2019 22:23
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Kemper Boyd posted:Except for that time he thought the Coen brothers were doing the Garfield movie and he signed on as a voice actor because of that. Perfect example, he took an easy money gig with no artistic merit to it and somehow spun that into another hilarious Bill Murray legend. Oh that Bill, what a character!
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Mar 11, 2019 14:28
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And a nice looking steelbook too. There's nothing about this release that I don't love.
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Apr 5, 2019 19:15
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The_Doctor posted:Goddamn, i just bought GB on 4K. Oh well, new extras! My stupid preferences for packaging saved me on this one because I have the nice combo digi book of the "mastered in 4k" versions of both films from a few years ago, so I was kinda waiting to see if a better UHD might come around at some point(the current one is a very standard plastic case with no additional extras).
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Apr 5, 2019 20:09
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man nurse posted:That was a fun game, I enjoyed it and will happily play it again. Why do I feel like they're gonna try to squeeze like $20 out of me for it though? Like, yea I'd enjoy playing it again but the price needs to be right. Remastered or not it's still a 10 year old game.
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May 30, 2019 16:49
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Kevyn posted:The only truly scary parts of the first film for me were the library ghost going nuclear, and Dana getting grabbed and pulled into the kitchen by the terror dog. Yea the arms popping out of the chair and clamping over Dana's mouth gave me nightmares for weeks. Viggo was just a straight-up scarier villain though, at least for me as a kid because he had that face and the scary voice and backstory. I was 5 years old when GBII came out, so for me the finale where he steps out of that painting was 100% serious business. I was not laughing at all. Also an underrated moment is when the dark room catches on fire and Winston has to bash down the door to get to them.
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Jun 20, 2019 14:15
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Der Shovel posted:Yeah, that VHS store lady was way off base on this one -- and I've always been scared SUPER easily. Yea The Real Ghostbusters is legit, and you'll be surprised by the wide range of horror themed episodes there are. Rupert Buttermilk posted:I have to agree with everything said so far, with regards to the scare factor of the first two films. I'll add that the entire library sequence (outside of the actual jokes) was really eerie, and anything regarding the terror dogs were pretty scary as well. I remember not getting the joke when Louis gets possessed at Tavern on the Green. My little kid brain would always think 'WHY DON'T THEY HELP HIM?!?!' I had the same exact experience. That scene was absolutely terrifying to me for a number of years, somewhere along the line I didn't see the movie for a while and then when I went back to it as a teenager I finally understood the joke. That's the genius of Ghostbusters though, it plays as two completely different movies depending on the age of the person watching it.
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Jun 20, 2019 16:48
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AFewBricksShy posted:I'm dense, but what is the joke other than "New Yorkers are jaded?" Yea, nothing complicated but when you're 4 or 5 years old all you think about is the giant loving demon dog that's about to maul Louis so the fact that there was a joke there didn't even register until years later.
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Jun 20, 2019 18:17
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Iron Crowned posted:I didn't realize that Ray was getting a ghost blowjob until I was about 21 and someone explained it to me. Probably my favorite "hidden" joke where I saw the movie about a hundred times without noticing it was the scene where Peter is giving the hotel manager the pricing and he has no clue what they should charge so Egon is standing to the side giving him the prices with his fingers.
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Jun 20, 2019 18:42
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:I think Rudd could actually pull off a pretty good version of Ray or some similar character so he'd be a good fit with the right co-stars, but holy poo poo are all these promos super desperate to push the message "This time we'll be mega respectful of the canon, we're so sorry about the last film, please don't hate us again!!!" I see him more as the Venkman type.
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Jun 27, 2019 17:52
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:I guess I see him more as a guy who gets "well meaning but naive doofus" roles, he doesn't feel sleazy enough to be a Venkman to me. I'm thinking more Anchorman than Antman
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Jun 27, 2019 18:13
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:He was still a naive doofus in Anchorman! Just one who thought he was sexy. Murray is(or was, depending on your opinion of his current career) a generational talent so it's no surprise that he'd be the toughest to replace. But Ray and Egon also have their nuances that go beyond just the archetypes, so really trying to fit a new cast into those molds is probably a mistake.
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Jun 27, 2019 19:23
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It's not Ghostbusters 3 if it doesn't have Rick Moranis.
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Jul 14, 2019 13:48
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The_Doctor posted:She exists in the comics, working at Ray’s bookshop, and later as a GB in her own right when the guys go MIA in time. It's just the way the movie was made. Not much to be done about it outside of a few specific shots where I think the grain could've been reduced somewhat. But that's just the overall look of the film, it's a dark and grainy holdover from a more 70s style of filmmaking versus Ghostbusters 2 which came along 5 years later and is much more slick and modern looking.
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Jul 15, 2019 00:35
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There was a discussion of it in the Physical Media thread I think, but a lot of it is about the film stock that was used. I'm not enough of an expert to explain it in detail but a certain type of film was used to shoot Ghostbusters in 1984 and then by 1989 the industry had moved to a different standard. Yea it was that thread, Here's the gist of it from that conversation: VoodooXT posted:Ghostbusters was shot on Eastmancolor 5294, which was a notoriously lovely film stock. It was super grainy even if you processed it as normal without pushing and it had terrible blue/green separation so you couldn't use it for compositing work. VoodooXT posted:It was the fastest film available up to that time, so it meant you didn't need to use as much light if you wanted to shoot scenes in low light and night urban exteriors, and Ghostbusters sure had a lot of those. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Jul 15, 2019 |
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Jul 15, 2019 02:34
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The_Doctor posted:Yeah, thanks for all the fascinating info! So basically we’ll never get a crisp clear GB84, and the Blu-ray version is kinda superior for clarity? Unfortunately 4k is one of those things that just isn't as simple as like when we made the jump from VHS to DVD or even DVD to blu ray. When it shines, it really can be a stunning format and for me it was totally worth the money I spent on upgrading, BUT you can't just automatically re-buy all your old blu rays in 4k and assume it's gonna be a clear upgrade. You kinda have to pick your spots, read reviews, and learn the strengths and weaknesses of the format. So like, with Ghostbusters one thing that hurts the UHD is that there was a somewhat recent "mastered in 4k" blu ray release that looked really really good. So this isn't a situation where the UHD came along and replaced an aging blu ray from 2007. And that situation shows up with a decent amount of popular older films, like Goodfellas, which also got a really nice new blu ray transfer within a year or so of the UHD release. Then you throw in something like the specific filmstock used(for GB) to shoot the film not being ideal in terms of grain, and the UHD just isn't really that great compared to the already excellent blu ray. Then, even within some films you have to accept some ups and downs if you want to enjoy what 4k has to offer, because they can be a bit uneven. Take the Predator UHD for example, there are a few scenes early on that I'd consider overly grainy to the point of being a distraction......but then that kinda resolves itself and the majority of the movie looks fantastic. So for a movie nerd it's actually kind of a fun format because there's lots of factors to evaluate and pay attention to but not every release is a no-brainer upgrade, and that's without even getting into upscaled digital intermediates. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Jul 15, 2019 |
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Jul 15, 2019 14:37
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Drink-Mix Man posted:I kind of just wish they would spend the effort into massively retooling the lady Ghostbusters into something good and run with that instead. Not sure what the point would be, like you said it would take a major overhaul of everything that they did in GB'16 to make it work, and everyone involved in that movie seemed like they made the movie they wanted to make(i.e. a non-stop improv quipfest). It just wasn't even close to what Ghostbusters fans wanted, but I think it was a case of trying to force a square peg into a round hole, so why use the same square peg again?
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Aug 19, 2019 18:34
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Yes! Exactly! In my kid brain, I'd rather imagine the whole beam than have some sort of poor tangible version. So I just took it out, and lost it forever ago. See also: every crappy toy lightsaber I ever owned
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Sep 16, 2019 17:39
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Probably the easiest gag to miss watching Ghostbusters on t.v. was the scene where Egon is giving Peter hints about how to negotiate the price with the hotel manager. He's standing off to the side so with pan and scan he got clipped out.
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Oct 23, 2019 19:44
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Timby posted:The best part about that is Louis, because he has no social instincts whatsoever, literally telling everyone that Ted and Annette are broke, because Ted's carpet-cleaning business is bankrupt and their only income is Annette's deferred bonus from two years ago (and they have an absurdly high mortgage rate). Or the way he openly mentions how he "invites clients instead of friends" so that he can write off the expenses, oblivious to the fact that people would either A) be offended by that or B) see how obvious it is that he doesn't actually have any friends.
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Oct 23, 2019 20:33
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Ehud posted:Louis explaining how he risked his life to try and turn Dana's TV off is an underrated moment. It's an amazingly accurate portrayal of the type of guy who will go to the ends of the Earth to win over a girl but the ONE thing they can never ever do is actually ask her out.
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Oct 30, 2019 20:17
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:It's also wonderful that Vinz Clortho, the KEYmaster, possesses the body of someone who is notorious for locking himself out of his own apartment. Yea that's one that had to be pointed out to me. I could've watched the movie a thousand times and never put that together on my own.
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Oct 30, 2019 20:31
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Looks like my wish that they dive right into Gozer stuff instead of using it as sequel bait may come true.
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Dec 9, 2019 17:35
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The original definitely walks that tightrope better that almost any horror/comedy ever made. It's a combination of a lot of things. For one, Reitman insisted that the special effects had to be top notch so that the audience could take it somewhat seriously during the important moments. The idea of going to people who'd done effects for Star Wars and Poltergeist and paying top dollar for a goofy comedy was something he had to push pretty hard for, if I remember correctly. Then there's Murray, who manages to play his character absolutely perfectly in terms of the goofy sarcasm but with a sense of gravity when the moment required it. The scene with Weaver floating above the bed for instance, you can see Venkman start out as his normal self and he maintains that throughout the scene but you can also see him get more and more concerned as he realized that something Not Good is going on with Dana. The other characters are more or less the same just to different degrees. There are aspects of their personalities that are funny, and it leads to comedic moments, but they are also well written and well acted enough to make the serious moments work. Of course, the word "serious" is relative, nobody would confuse the serious moments in Ghostbusters for Cries and Whispers or anything like that.
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Dec 9, 2019 19:31
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