Hey, it’s General Tanaka! Tanaka/Maru is my new favorite bromance of the comic.
We went and saw the new Ghostbusters, which I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced. I know people had been up in arms about un-funny trailers, and a lack of continuation of the original films’ canon, but none of that really bothered me. It’s very hard to make a good ‘comedy movie’ trailer, because you don’t want to give away all the best jokes, and a lot of funny jokes require a good set up. Sure, it’s possible to make a really funny trailer, but it’s not easy, so the fact that I wasn’t rolling on the floor from the trailers didn’t bother me. You only had to look at the cast and crew behind this movie to know it was filled with a bunch of very funny, collaborative comedians. And, SURE, they could have put this in the same canon as the original and thought of some fun, creative way for there to be a new group of Ghostbusters getting trained by the original cast, but I think that might have brought about a bloated cast, and rebooting the universe means they don’t have to carry any canon baggage.
And the new cast is great, I laughed through the whole movie! Mileage may vary, as I’m admittedly someone who laughs easily and frequently, but I felt that for every one joke that didn’t work, at least three did. The humor is more improv and wacky than the orignal’s dry and snarky humor, but that doesn’t make it less funny. My biggest problem with the movie is that some of the editing feels sloppy. I was concerned when they tossed up the GHOSTBUSTERS title and started playing the classic Ray Park Jr theme, and then faded it out as soon as the lyrics started. I mean, either fade it out before the lyrics or at least have the first “Who you gonna call? GHOSTBUSTERS!” and then cut it off. Fading it out with “If there’s something strange…” is just a weird choice. The ending of the film is also a little weak in that it kind of loses track of what the characters are doing and why, but only in a subsequent viewing sort of way. And the main villain is never intimidating, he literally turns into a cartoon at one point. But it’s hard to fault the film much considering how highly entertaining I found Ghostbusters 2016 to be, despite all the pre-release negativity. Overall, it’s a strong first film in what’s clearly intending to be a continuing franchise, and I’m excited for the inevitable deluge of sequels!
Published on by Alex Kolesar
