Monday, May 23, 2016

Butch Ghostbusters

The second trailer for butch Ghostbusters has dropped, and it doesn't make the movie look very funny. Not a good sign. The best gags are usually cherry-picked for the trailer, to whet your appetite.

It looks like a bunch of sight gags that break up the forced, CGI supernatural malevolence.


Unfunny sight gag # 1. Kristen Wiig gets slimed. Hackneyed. They couldn't think of another way to coat someone with ectoplasm? A rich lady walking her foofy poodle getting slimed would at least merit a chuckle (HAHA that old lady and her stupid dog finally got their comeuppance)!



Unfunny sight gag # 2. Leslie Jones falls down and asks whether it was her blackness or her femaleness that kept people from catching her. Soon, she will be wondering whether her blackness or her femaleness is what's keeping people from laughing.



Unfunny sight gag # 3. Kristen Wiig being dragged kicking and screaming. It doesn't have the same impact as, "dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria."




All that being said, there is a potentially decent movie in there, somewhere. Whether director Paul Feig recognized that potential is another question. One of the things that made the original Ghostbusters charming was the way it played with stereotypes.

The nerdy, socially awkward scientist Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) caught the eye of Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts), who chatted him up. He replied that his hobby was collecting, "spores, molds, and fungus." If Feig were writing to the stereotype, he would make the female scientist character somewhat frigid and sexually repressed.

Wiig's occupation (physicist) and frumpy tweed suit puts her in the right category. Her and Kate McKinnon are the only females in the cast who aren't hideous, but McKinnon is almost always pictured wearing thick green goggles. If there is a character that experiences a sexual awakening, it will be Wiig.

The 2016 version of Ghostbusters also has a damsel-in-distress theme, but they flipped the script. Beautiful blonde Chris Hemsworth plays the damsel, and this sets up some interesting possibilities. Hemsworth experiences a demon possession and starts doing daring stunts on a motorcycle.

He becomes the ultimate bad boy. This is the kind of character that women have been swooning over for eternity, with the current archetype being Edward from Twilight. He seduces Bella, even though Bella understands that to consummate her desire would be to surrender her soul.

In Ghostbusters, there could be a moral choice between a woman's desire and her duty to rid the world of a dangerous phantasm. In the original, the spirit was freed from the damsel. But we'll see. It is 2016 after all.

Prediction: The best ideas will remain in the Ecto-Containment System. The movie is going to be about female empowerment and, since Melissa McCarthy is in it, fat acceptance. Every female character is a Mary Sue who don't need no man. There isn't a single actor in this movie capable of stealing a scene, and the ensemble female cast just means they tried to write an equal number of lines for each one.

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 BUNDY WAS PROBABL TRANS NOOBODY TALKS ABOUT THIS...THEY/THEM LEFT DETAILED NOTES ON THERE/THEM OBSESSESH WITH THE VAG