This is true, but it does tend to explain why such a movie gets more criticism than the original - which is the question you posed. When you reboot, the original is still there, acting as a point of comparison.
The makers of a reboot face a damned if you do, damned if you don’t dilemma - make the reboot to similar and the audience yawns; make it too different, and he audience gets annoyed. They have to hit the sweet spot where it is just different enough to be energizing and exciting, without being offputting.
They do reap the benefit of a built-in audience, though. Which explains why the movie making world loves reboots.
Plus, many of the people who saw and loved the original were kids at the time. If you make a reboot (or a sequel) with the same sort of appeal, it won’t have the same sort of appeal to those people because they aren’t kids any more.
You couldn’t be more wrong. The original Ghostbusters works on a level that does last into adulthood - I didn’t see Iron Man when I was a child, but it worked for me as an adult for the same reason Ghostbusters works for me as an adult. And the whole thing is a story about starting a small business - hardly immature fare. Jokes about farts and getting goo in your vagina, that is the appeal that will not last.
Lines like, “Everyone has three mortgages nowadays” make me enjoy the original well into adulthood.
And my favourite:
“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.”
My wife and I just saw the movie today. I admit to having been meh on going to see it, it’s yet another reboot and the trailers looked awful, till I’d heard some good word of mouth. We both loved it. May go back and see it again soon, this was far better than I expected it would be. I’d rank this one up with the original, possibly even higher than the original. Looking forward to the inevitable sequel - it has to be better than the sequel to the first one.
Didn’t mean to imply that it didn’t work for adults (I think both the old and the new Ghostbusters appeal to a wide range of ages)—just that it’s sort of unfair to compare a movie that you first saw (and loved) as a kid to one that you only saw as an adult.
Joke about farts will not last? I beg to differ. From this link:
[Quote=Reuters]
The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today.
It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
[/Quote]
Thought it was a bit dull, honestly. It was OK. I laughed a few times, but did not find myself smiling throughout. I was in a good mood and cheering for the movie. I wanted it to be great. I loved Spy, the previous Paul Feig movies. Hated Bridesmaids, though.
I have no huge attachment to the original Ghostbusters. I like it, but it isn’t one of my favorite comedies. I was very up for a re-do, or at least wasn’t against it.
I’d give this a 6/10, maybe a 5/10. Adequate to fill some time, but nothing amazing. I was disappointed.
Maybe I’ll watch it again on DVD to see if my opinion changes.
No. The majority of the complaints with the trailers had nothing to do with sexism. But the filmmakers decided to focus on the sexists, and try to say that all the complaints were sexist. To the point that James fucking Rolfe was labeled a sexist, when he had nothing bad at all to say about the cast being women, and has been working for years online without any complaints of this nature. And who by but Patton Oswalt–a producer for the movie. You tell me that’s not creating controversy to sell tickets?
James Rolfe does scatological humor and makes fun of video games. He’s never said anything misogynist. I am extremely sensitive to that stuff. I would have personally called him out over it. I don’t care if you are basically Internet royalty.
All he said was that he didn’t like the trailer and didn’t support the reboot. That Ghostbusters was an important part of his childhood, and that the bad trailer meant he wasn’t going to pay to see it. I still think it was dumb to make such a video (just a simple I’m not going to review it would have been fine), but he was not remotely misogynistic.
When all the critics are being labeled misogynists, you can’t blame that on the actual misogynists. It was the marketing department capitalizing on the bare tribalism. If someone didn’t like the trailer, it must’ve been because they were sexist. Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Heck, from the reviews I think I would like this movie. But I will not pay to see it. I am not for this Trump style of publicity.
The weird thing is, as I recall it the original article that brought attention to James Rolfe’s not being ghostbusters as “sexist” explicitly called it “soft sexism.” That is “I don’t think James Rolfe is a bad guy, but he’s watched and reviewed a lot of shitty reboots for franchises he loves like Godzilla. So maybe his refusal to see Ghostbusters is a bit of unconscious sexism” and through the usual game of internet outrage telephone it got warped into “James Rolfe, misogynist web show creator…”
Really, the worst James has done in terms of women is hung out with one or two known internet anti-feminists on his casual vlogging show, but they never once mentioned feminism or anything about women in the videos. In his movie, he also had a major character end up being a “fake geek girl”, which is a bit of a damaging stereotype, but I get the sense that he literally had no idea what connotation that had taken on when he made it. It wasn’t done in some malicious “girls can’t be geeks” commentary way, so much as a really cringy use of a bad trope in a movie filled with those.
Those are the only two things I can think of. His show is surprisingly apolitical, most internet creators I can at least guess at their politics from random things they say, but for all I know James could be a Trump supporter, a Bernie or buster, a diehard Hillary fan, or he wants to tear down the system and watch the world burn. He never talks about any real world issues, and aside from the single fake geek girl thing has basically never said anything really obviously, outwardly racist or sexist in the years he’s been online.
I don’t know why I’m spending so much energy defending him, I’m not a huge fan of his shows, though I watch them on occasion. It just seems crazy that suddenly he has this reputation for basically being Thunderf00t.
I’m a 44-year-old male who saw the original Ghostbusters in the theater rather than years later on video. Between being a man and the original Ghostbusters being part of my childhood, I should have hated this movie. :rolleyes:
But I really liked it. I laughed out loud a lot. It worked in all the cameos and references to the original that most people expected – and they did work, didn’t seem forced – but was also its own movie rather than a mere copy. Nobody in the original was quite the same as mad-technician Holtzman. Nobody in the original was like lone-layman Patty, she wasn’t merely a female Winston.
I really liked the details of the haunted Times Square. As far as I could tell, someone went to real effort to recreate real billboards (Canadian Club! BOAC!), theater/movie ads, and stores (Bond clothiers!) from the '20s through the '70s. Minor criticism: I would have liked the movie to give NYC-history-buff Patty a moment of gleeful awe at the surroundings before the attack began. An impressed and happy “Oh, shit!” turning into a fearful “Oh, shit!” when the ghosts arrive.
The theater where I saw it Saturday was fairly full, despite (or maybe because of?) a driving rainstorm. I heard lots of laughter at various points in the movie, not just once or twice. Most of the audience stayed for the credits; dancing will do that.
I’m a 48 year old who also saw the original in the theaters. I saw the new one over the weekend with my daughters. We all liked it a lot. We had actually watched the original the night before, which helped with the sly references & cameos, and pointed up that the new characters were definitely not a one to one correspondence to the originals. The only thing I’d say was a negative in comparison was the absence of Ghostbusting as a business. It’s a shame that it’s probably not making enough to generate a sequel.
I just saw it and enjoyed it. I’d probably give it a 7 out of 10. It was much better than I would have expected from a summertime unnecessary sequel/remake (not a high bar to cross), and a pretty solid comedy/action movie in its own right. As others have said, Kate McKinnon’s performance was a delight, and IMHO would have been enough to justify a lesser movie.
There was a group of teenage boys sitting behind me in the theater, which I was a bit concerned about to be honest, particularly since they seemed a bit rowdy during the opening commercials and previews. But once the movie started they seemed totally engaged, and were laughing hard at every joke.
I loved the original Ghostbusters as a kid but my mother taped over it when I was still fairly young (:mad:) and I’ve only seen it once or twice on TV since then. So while I have fond nostalgia for the original, I don’t feel I remember it clearly enough to do an accurate comparison of the two. It’s my recollection that the original had more jokes, but I think the remake has a tighter and more coherent plot. My biggest criticism of the new movie is literally that there wasn’t more of it – there were a couple of points where it seemed obvious that scenes must have been cut. (One does show up as part of the closing titles.) On the other hand, the running time was just under two hours, and longer than that may well have seemed like too long.
Ha, that’s just what I was thinking, only I don’t know that the scene in the original movie even qualifies as a joke. It’s just there for no reason, and indeed appears to be a dream and not even “real” within the context of the movie.
I was not particularly pining to see it, and probably would have been happy to wait for it to come on Blu-Ray or streaming, but my wife wanted to see it in the theater.
It had me laughing right from the opening lines. The tour guide, describing the 19th-century mansion, notes that it had a face-bidet and an anti-Irish security fence.
I thought the actors all did a great job, but Kate McKinnon was a standout for me. It’s not exactly a movie that will linger and get turned over and over in my mind, but i had a good time, and it was two hours well spent.
It’s been years since I saw a movie twice in the theater, but I’m seriously considering catching Ghostbusters again just because Kate McKinnon is so great in it.
Nobody in the original was like lone-layman Patty, she wasn’t merely a female Winston.
