William Forrester: Women will sleep with you if you write a bad book (in thick Scottish accent)
Well William, I’m still waiting for women to sleep with me over the screenplay I recently finished. I mean if trash like Anchorman 2 and Swiss Army Man can get people laid, then I am certainly next in line to get a Jessica Alba spread out on my couch with the hopes of getting cast as my next leading lady. With my luck however I’ll probably get a 71 year old Goldie Hawn showing up at my doorstep with a bottle of lube trying to relive her Banger Sisters days. And sadly at this point, I might take her up on it! "Oh Maaaarcus!!!" (That’s a Boomerang reference btw)
Anyway, I say all of that to say this; Paul Feig has apparently made a deal with the devil as he has somehow found an inside line to every woman’s heart in America. I mean how else do you explain movies like Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy making billions of dollars collectively? Even a close friend of mine nearly bit my head off this week when I started talking disparagingly about his latest effort in Ghostbusters. Has Feig really reached Beyoncé level with women? And what I mean by that is, no matter what he says or does, any conflicting view or negative comment made towards his work is met with calls for your balls being cut off and you being burned at the stake.
But what I truly can’t understand is how he gets critics to like his humorless nonsense. One reviewer, whose takes I actually respected before this past week, went completely overboard with his review of Ghostbusters by claiming it was nearly as good as the first one and that anyone who didn’t like it was a misogynistic jerk! Wow. Do you remember that Entourage episode where Vince and the gang sent three incredibly hot hookers to the hotel room of some influential movie critic geek at Comic Con just to ensure that his film Aquaman would get a good review? Well clearly Columbia Pictures and Dan Aykroyd sent an army of women to this clown’s apartment to get him to do an about face when it comes to his usual takes on 80’s reboots. If you don’t like this film you don’t like women? Really?
Now I am sensitive to the fact that women and minorities typically have to be twice as good as their white male counterparts are in Hollywood to get afforded the same opportunities as they do. And this is why I was secretly hoping it would be good in spite of the fact I initially wasn’t a fan of them remaking one of my all-time favorites from the 80’s. The original Ghostbusters spoke to me in a way that most comedies can’t because it somehow got my off the wall humor. So any attempt to modernize that is clearly facing an uphill battle with me. But I’m a fan of Kristin Wiig (even though only 10% of her SNL skits were actually funny) and I also like Melissa McCarthy (even though only about 25% of what she does is actually funny). Both of them can be funny in spots, however their shticks can get pretty old if they are put in a featured role.
Now I won’t waste your time explaining the plot as it’s basically the same story from the original with a few exceptions of course. The writers do an ok job of trying to match up the personalities of the female leads with the old school characters we grew up on while at the same time giving them some flexibility to add their own flavor and unique style to their characters. The problem with that is they try way too hard to be funny. They literally attempted to spit out a hundred jokes per minute while missing on nearly every single one of them. What made Peter Venkman such a cultural icon was the fact that he was naturally cool and funny with everything he said or did, and he didn’t have to resort to terrible dancing or Chris Farley esque physical humor to get laughs. And I love Kate McKinnon but yikes! Chewing gum really hard and putting your feet up on the desk while saying things like "Booyah! Emphasis on the boo!" doesn’t come close to making you cool. They tried so hard to make her the new Bill Murray that it felt like I was watching LeBron James give his best Michael Jordan impression, either you have it or you don’t! And when you don’t it’s obvious and people ridicule and hate you for it.
The special effects looked like they were still using the same technology that Ivan Reitman had available to him in the 80’s, so the ghosts looked pretty lame. And the only truly funny spots came from the moronic receptionist of theirs, Chris Hemsworth and the over the top yet in your face funny Leslie Jones. Well that and the awful excuse for a metal band they had in one scene. Even the cameos by the old stars were lame. Dan Aykroyd stopped being funny the second he signed up for Driving Miss Daisy and sadly Bill Murray hasn’t been himself ever since he was shot gunned to death in Zombieland.
This movie was a disaster in every way imaginable and I hope that this will finally open the eyes of those women who are under the spell of Feig’s evil love potion. At some point they have to realize that all he is doing is shoveling shit in their faces while making them pay him money to do it. And to be honest, I was going to come up with a new low rating for films called Absolute Shit just for this particular movie but I figured that was a little too harsh; so I’ll just stick with the current system that’s in place and give it a rating of unbelievably WACK!
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