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Oh Well, Lady ‘Ghostbusters.’ You Tried

Not too offensive, not too feminist, it’s not too much of anything. Still, there are spectres of a decent flick.

Dorothy Woodend 18 Jul 2016TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

There’s good news and bad. Which would you like first?

The good news is that the remake of Ghostbusters isn’t terrible. Its heart is in the right place, and it’s winning enough that one can be occasionally bemused, if not genuinely amused. Although I could count the number of real laughs on the fingers of one hand, it was better than I expected it to be, which is not to say that it’s actually any good.

And so, the bad news...

The new estrogen-laced version of Ghostbusters is pretty much the same as the original (the testosterone version, let’s call it). It’s vaguely entertaining, with a few good lines and some comedic interplay from four funny people. Put another way, the first film had “outies” and the new film has “innies,” but other than that there isn’t too much difference. If that’s enough for people, that’s fine, but for all the Sturm und Drang that precipitated the film I was hoping for something slightly more interesting.

But before we get to the business of understanding why the film is vaguely disappointing, let’s deal with the story itself. Kristen Wiig plays Erin Gilbert, an uptight academic on track for tenure at Princeton. Awkward and stiff, Erin is the kind of woman who wears the world’s smallest bowtie and often seems caught and strangled in her horrible tweedy suit. But there is more to Erin than a boring haircut and a beige-brown straightjacket with a peplum skirt. When her past comes back to haunt her in the form of a book on the supernatural, penned with a former friend and colleague named Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), the wheels creak into motion.

Unlike Erin who has tried to go straight, Abby is still plugging away on their once-shared passion for ghosts. In a somewhat dodgy academic institution, Abby and a fellow scientist named Jillian Holtzman (Kate McKinnon) are bent on finding ways to prove the existence of another (spookier) realm. Erin wants Abby to bury the book, as it threatens her chance to go legit, but Abby is not interested.

Things like failed friendships, betrayed loyalty and complex emotions are sketched out. But before you can say, “Ugh, squishy lady feelings,” the women get the call that there has been a Scooby-Doo type visitation at an old museum. It only takes one encounter with a miasmic entity and Erin is sucked back into the life, covered with green goo and screaming, “Ghosts are real!” into a camera lens. After the video of her ectoplasmic session is splashed all over the Internet, the trio is drummed out of the hallowed hoary halls of academia. Since no one has a real job any longer, they decide to start a business dubbed the Department of Metaphysical Examination atop a Chinese restaurant, as one does.

A transit worker named Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) who has endured her own mysterious encounter in the New York subway system is their first client. Because she comes with encyclopedic knowledge of old New York and a handy-dandy hearse, Patty is made a full member of the team. Add in a man-candy receptionist named Kevin (the toothsome Chris Hemsworth) and a nasty men’s rights advocate named Rowan North (Neil Casey), and we’re all set! Rowan’s evil plan is to unleash a vortex of hell, free the undead, and set them loose in NYC to tip over postal boxes, refuse to pay subway fare and generally cause a ruckus. Bring on the ghosts with the most. And that is precisely what happens, with few big surprises.

Repackaged nostalgia

McCarthy and Wiig pretty much reprise the roles of Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd. Like the original film, a person of colour is added to provide some street cred. At least Leslie Jones, unlike Ernie Hudson before her, gets to be a fully functioning member of the team. But the comedic timing of the four leads, in particular McCarthy and Wiig, clumps along when it ought to jazz riff. The filmmaking itself is also weirdly off-rhythm. Some scenes end so abruptly, it’s like they were chopped off with a knife. Others linger so long that I was tempted to have a quick kip.

One must also endure the requisite corny cameos, which are almost universally unfunny. They are trotted out like a medley of golden oldies, an Aykroyd here, a Murray there. A few jokes land, but most just kind of float along. Strangely enough, the film almost succeeds by trying too hard, being super chipper and good-spirited. Now, ain’t that just like a woman? Except that director Paul Feig is still sporting a penis, apparently. My hopes for Mr. Feig have dwindled with each subsequent film that he has made. Bridesmaids was plenty of fun, but The Heat, Spy (horrific) and now Ghostbusters have been mostly a series of diminishing returns.

Is there any more to be said than that? Not really. It is curious to read some of the early reviews of the film. You can almost see critics shrugging as they write their pieces. There was a minor kerfuffle over early scores on IMDB from dudes giving the film low marks before it had even been released. In contrast, women have organized screening parties to fight back and give the film a strong opening weekend. Overall, the critical consensus has been quite gentle. Even the strongest critiques have little more to say than the film is repackaged nostalgia with a feminist twist, so marketed and pre-tested that no one could really get their panties in a twist.

One bright light

Who cares, really, other than a few trolls who live with their mothers under a bridge? The film gives the trolling types some comeuppance with a few pointed jokes. Each of the actresses is allowed to strut their stuff, although it must be said that Kate McKinnon tucks the film in her back pocket and easily strolls away with it. As Holtzmann, a goggle-wearing, vaguely androgynous science nerd with more than a dash of gunslinger, McKinnon seems like she is operating on a different plane from the other women. She channels unusual comedic rhythms and plays with the beat of jokes so that they never land quite where you would expect. She also owns the only genuinely exciting scene in the entire film. During the final climactic showdown, Holtzmann deploys a battery of whizzy new gizmos and coolio weapons she has designed against an army of the undead. She also gets the best lines, to wit: “Safety lights are for dudes.”

Certainly it is nice to see women be heroes. I just wish the film had a few more of these more innovative moments. The entrance of something original instead of regurgitated provides a glimmer of hope, but it doesn’t last long. The film lapses back into a lukewarm pudding of warmed-up jokes and tired plot tropes, and one goes back to sleep, both metaphorically and figuratively speaking. This something that I have come to think of as the Star Wars feeling, that sense of watching two films simultaneously, the remembered version and the newest iteration. Together they create some strange form of cognitive dissonance, where everything that was once new is seen again, through the lens of nostalgia, which softens and warps.

But if I had to pick one thing about the film that is most depressing, it is that it plays it so safe. It is careful not to be too offensive, or too feminist, or too much of anything really. It’s a nice girl movie, and somehow that makes it weirdly defeatist, in that girl power/spice lady way of taking something that was once radical, terrifying and revolutionary, and pulling its fangs out so that it can only gum you. Is that too much like a woman to complain, when you get the thing you supposedly want?

Like so much of contemporary culture, the drama that surrounds a thing often obscures and inflates what is essentially something simple, and often kind of dumb. Think Chewbacca Mom, or whatever current Internet meme has snagged the collective attention of the populace. We bat at the new shiny thing for a while and then we get bored and move on. Yes, there were some squeaks and squawks about people, well, men, having their childhoods destroyed by an all-female Ghostbusters crew. But as a wise woman once said, “People forget that the original film was just another stupid ‘80s Bill Murray comedy.”

Leave it to one of the dudes exiting the theatre where I saw the film to sum it up. As the backwards-baseball-cap-wearing male remarked to his buddy, “I thought this movie was gonna suck, but it kicked ass. I can’t believe you liked Avatar more.”

From the mouths of bros.  [Tyee]

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