Mile-High Cinema: Ghostbusters Frozen Empire
Busting makes me feel as if the studio franchise blockbuster is definitively a doomed exercise that has a reached a point of no return.
I give a lot of leeway to films that I watch while flying. Maybe it’s a lack of oxygen to my brain due to the altitude, maybe its the sheer thankfulness for something, anything to take my mind off of the inherent anxiety of flying. Whatever the reason, I am much more forgiving of movies I view at 30,000 feet in the air. Sometimes this means a good movie is even better - I re-watched Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire on the way to Austin to spend Valentine’s Day with my future wife and it revealed new depths of humor and meaning. I had a similarly deepened appreciation for Phantom Thread when I watched it on my first trip to Europe. On the TV side, it was randomly selecting an episode of The Sopranos that initiated my first full rewatch of the show in over a decade.
Usually though, it means being far too forgiving to an utter piece of shit. A brief rundown of movies/shows that I have watched on planes and thought, “That wasn’t too bad”: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Downsizing, the first season of the Frasier reboot. Truth be told I’d rather watch a bad movie on a flight because I kind of want something to only half pay attention to and which won’t be ruined by constant pilot’s announcements and bouts of turbulence.
Which is why, on our recent flight to Vegas, I decided to watch Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Rather than fully review it though - a level of effort it doesn’t deserve - I decided to transcribe here the many thoughts that went through my head while watching.
I should admit that I never watched the previous film, save for the truly egregious ending - and that only out of morbid curiosity, having learned what it entailed. Not only am I just bored of legacy sequels in general, but I just couldn’t dredge up any interest something that treated a comedy in which Dan Aykroyd gets blown by a ghost lady with the reverence of Bible study.
Additionally: My viewing was split almost exactly in half - fifty minutes on the flight in, about an hour on the way back.
For about five minutes or so I caught myself wondering whether this was going to be actually good, not just “plane good.” Unfortunately or luckily, depending on how you look at it, this very quickly revealed itself as Kid Power horseshit in short order.
Walter Peck, the evil EPA agent (hmmmm) from the first film - subject of one of the great movie lines of all time (“Yes, it’s true - this man has no dick.”) is now the mayor of New York. This seems…unlikely? How many low-level bureaucrats end up leading major American cities? Especially ones who unwittingly unleashed a horde of the undead upon the very metropolis they are not attempting to run? Maybe he comes from money.
A better movie would about this primary/election cycle. Were the Ghostbusters trotted out by his opponent?
Sorry, but I’m with Dickless this time - kids should not be Ghostbusters. Safety Shmafety, it’s just incredibly lame. Even when I was a kid I hated it when movies about adults suddenly became movies about kids, or when kids stepped up to do anything. This happens all the time now and seems endemic to a culture that has little desire to grow up.
Podcast (this is the name of a human character) is a child who currently helps Ray shoot his web show and is secretly living in the basement of his used bookstore for the summer (fucking YIKES).
It is hard to make a cohesive movie with this many characters, especially when one of your principal cast members gets lost in an endless Cheeto commercial on the way to set.
I’d say it is time to politely fold up the tables on the Finn Wolfhard experiment, no?
I will soon be introducing a federal ballot measure will deduct $25 million from a film’s overall box office for every reference to a previous movie. If I had done so by the time of this film’s release, the studio would have owed the tax payers roughly 725 million dollars. Think of what we could do with such a windfall other than try to cram an entire season of a Freeform original series into a 2 hour narrative film.
This is also the kind of movie where the characters are not so much familiar with previous events that have taken place in this fictional as they are somehow seemingly familiar with the previous films in this series. Why are people calling Peck Dickless? I would also ask why Paul Rudd’s character knows the Ray Parker, Jr. theme song from the first film, but Part II actually establishes that this song exists in the diegesis of these films when Ray and Winston perform along to it at Jason Reitman’s birthday party.
This is, like most major studio blockbusters today, both incredibly overstuffed and yet also feels completely empty, as if noth too much and nothing at all are happening simultaneously.
Paul Rudd looks good for his age, but he has very clearly aged. There’s a difference between not aging and aging well.
Dan Aykroyd is actually pretty good in this. Ernie Hudson is too, but the character choices there seem like too conscious of a course-correction. Ray Stantz as a sad old kook feels correct - there’s a hint at a version of this character that actually elicits genuine pathos and a real reckoning with the idea of aging and legacy. Unfortunately it’s never more than that because no character could ever get full treatment in a movie this over-stuffed and under-interested in character.
I’m suddenly imagining the Twin Peaks: The Return version of this story where we are only periodically checking in on the old guard - Ray Stantz sitting alone in his bookshop after-hours eating a cup of soup and searching every shadow for the ghosts of a previous life that have long since stopped bothering to haunt him.
Other than a brief scene between Ray and Winston on a staircase, the movie only really threatens to come alive for two of its immeasurable subplots - Kumail Nanjiani learning to become the Fire Master (which is of course a groan-inducing reference to the original film’s Keymaster - he even wears the same colander hat at one point) and McKenna Grace’s story of queer self-discovery as she falls in love with a ghost who accidentally burned her entire family alive (a strange miscalculation as her journey is to be released from this world so that she can see her family once again on the other side of the dimensional rift. If I’m the family, I’m sending every signal I can for her to not rush on over here). There are whiffs of pathos in both, and they’re the only characters who come close to having enough time to engender and develop even a hint of interest, but still not enough to really care.
The McKenna Grace subplot is further hampered by the point above re: kiddie Ghostbusters. Her whole mopey “I want to be a Ghostbuster” arc is rendered moot by my disinterest in seeing anyone under drinking age don the overalls. It is, however, the first time I can remember this franchise walking in the vicinity of its most interesting and unsettling question: if there is an afterlife and we all become ghosts, what is the criteria behind the moral arbitration of who deserves to get “busted” and who gets to travel on to…wherever?
Putting Annie Potts in a uniform is pandering nonsense. I felt the same way about Louis Tully in Part II.
Why are all of these goddamn legacy monstrosities about kids and family and being a parent? Is it because they are all being helmed/guided by people nearing the end of their lives and thus obsessed with legacy? Is it just the latest hack Hollywood trend? I am 1) the father of a four-year-old and a one-year-old and also 2) already a giant, irredeemable sap. And so for this kind of story device to fall so completely flat for me, it must be incalculably hollow.
Carrie Coon is in this movie only to teach Paul Rudd how to be a better step-father to her child.
I seem to remember something about Sigourney Weaver showing up post-credits in Afterlife? She’s nowhere to be found here. A woman of taste.
In forty years, my son will be sitting on a commercial flight to the earth’s moon. He will be slightly buzzed off of a watered-down Bloody Mary, and will be thankful for the retinal implant that allows him to watch movies basically in his own mind, because it means that even though he is somewhat embarrassed, the person he loves and who is sitting to him will not notice, upon waking up from their nap, that he is watching a Ghostbuster legacy rebootquelmake in which a sentient fungus has moved into the firehouse and, with the help of a spry, 95-year-old Paul Rudd and Dan Aykroyd’s head in a jar, reenacts once again this basic plot. Afraid to disturb his companion or attract the attention of the AI system that flies the shuttle and attends to his every need, he will suppress a grimace as a translucent Bill Murray warns the Library Ghost, who now resides within the code of an occult Wiki page, to “back off man, I’m a hologram.” And he will curse me and my generation for allowing this all to perpetuate and not stopping it when we had the chance.
-cs