Entries in the Category "ghostbusters"
Entertainment Weekly's 100 New Classics: Summed Up
I’m coming closer and closer to finishing up the AFI lists—with the most minimal effort it will happen this week—but before that happens I thought I would sum up the EW list with my two favorite things, opinions and statistics.
Here’s how I felt about the list:
Least enjoyed: Blue Velvet, Drugstore Cowboy, Evil Dead 2, Fatal Attraction, Natural Born Killers
Most enjoyed: A Room with a View, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Ed Wood, Glory, Hannah and Her Sisters, In the Mood for Love, Schindler’s List, The Incredibles, The Lives of Others
Most enjoyed (pre-list favorites): Back to the Future, Clueless, Donnie Brasco, Edward Scissorhands, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fargo, Ghostbusters, L.A. Confidential, Lost in Translation, Memento, Men in Black, Moulin Rouge, Office Space, Rushmore, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Naked Gun, The Silence of the Lambs, The Truman Show, Thelma and Louise, Witness
Additionally, I’ve been compiling a list of Notable Omissions--movies which were released between ’83 and ’07, and thus eligible for the list, but which are unaccountably absent. The list will appear in a future entry (or, if it keeps expanding, in two of them).
Here’s some stats that interested me:
The breakdown of the list by decade is 30 films from the 1980s, 45 from the 1990s and 25 from the 2000s. Even so, the majority of the films I watched were from the 1980s, which is easily enough explained: while my movie coverage has been adequate in the ‘90s and ‘00s, I’m still playing catch-up to movies that came out when I was a child.
The directors whose films I watched the most of were Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee, Alfonso Cuaron, Sam Raimi and James Cameron, at 2 films each. Cameron actually had 3 films on the list, but I had already seen Titanic (January 1997, the afternoon after I took my SATs, in case anyone cares). Other twice-appearing directors were Tim Burton, Rob Reiner, and Paul Thomas Anderson--each of whom had one movie I had seen previously and one movie which I watched this summer for the list--and Martin Scorsese, Peter Weir, Ridley Scott and the Coen brothers, each of whom had two films I had already seen.
One benefit of the EW list which I have mentioned previously is that its horizons extended beyond American-made movies. Another feature of the list, which I didn’t notice until I began compiling these stats yesterday, is that the EW list includes female directors--only five of them, but that still trounces either AFI list at zero and zero, respectively. Three of the female-helmed movies were massive hits: Shrek (co-directed by Vicky Jenson and Andrew Adamson), Clueless (Amy Heckerling) and Big (Penny Marshall). I had seen all of those movies, multiple times on multiple occasions.
The other two were critical darlings, and represent the only two Oscar nominations for Best Director that have ever happened to women. Ever. [Edited to add: I have since checked IMDb and realized that I misread Jane Campion's biography. One other woman received a Best Director Oscar nomination, Lina Wertmuller in 1975. My indignance is, I think, still warranted.] Those movies are The Piano (Jane Campion, in 1994—this was a list movie) and Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, in 2004, already seen). Though neither woman won the directing award, both took home the same consolation prize: Best Original Screenplay. At this rate, another woman should be due to lose Best Director in another five years. That’s not a fault of the list, of course, but of Hollywood standards in general.
One final observation: the Entertainment Weekly list feels, in general, darker and more gothic than the AFI lists. It seems densely populated with drug movies, mob movies, serial killer movies, sci-fi creature-on-the-loose movies. I don’t think this is necessarily because those darker genres are being made more of today. Look again at my Ed Wood entry and all those movies Bela Lugosi made.
The difference is that genre movies are becoming increasingly more respected; probably Francis Ford Coppola started things off by making operatic mob movies (popular since the 1930s) which so effectively utilized the concept of the American dream that the Corleones became a part of our cultural fabric. These days, any serious director can make a critically-acclaimed crime movie (see last summer’s The Dark Knight, or, from two summers ago, Zodiac). On the flip side, so-called “feelgood” movies are losing respect. Too many brainless romantic comedies which force two patently unlikeable characters to kiss in the rain and get married as the end credits roll, too many of those disposable kids’ movies where the kid discovers his dog can fly and that helps him stand up against a bully, or whatever.
Basically, it’s hard to scrounge up the sincerity that elevates a movie like It’s a Wonderful Life above its Hallmark-y premise, and they just don’t do it that much anymore.
Why I will always love Ghostbusters
This may sound utterly ridiculous, but seeing Ghostbusters on the big screen last weekend has really prompted me to realize how terrific a movie that really is.
It’s a comedy, and a silly one, at that, which is an immediate disqualifier for some people. Not for me, of course, because smart-silly is my absolute favorite brand of comedy.
But let’s look at the facts:
The script is perfect. The narrative progresses perfectly, with a relatively slow build to the establishment of the ghost-busting business, the period of success with just small hints of obstacles to come (in the form of the EPA guy, the big supernatural event on the horizon) and then the grab bag of problems that hit them in the third act which they have to work through to reach the film’s resolution. And just when the audience is begging for a climactic moment, we get a giant marshmallow man stomping through the streets of New York City.
Speaking of which, this movie loves New York City. The film’s got sort of a gritty look to it, like they didn’t clean up the garbage in the streets before filming, and all the extras look like real people. Compare this to the New York of some glossy chick flick like The Devil Wears Prada—that’s a young, sleek, rich, clean New York and it’s not real. But when these guys battle with the mayor for the chance to be allowed to save the city, it’s truly affecting. This same theme cropped up—much more literally (supernaturally animated Statue of Liberty, anyone?)—in the sequel.
Also, the movie is sort of legitimately scary. I mean, I can remember watching this movie without any fear at the age of like, six. But in the theater I was really struck by how effectively ominous some moments are—like Ray and Winston talking about Judgment Day, and Egon describing the rituals that rendered the building possessed by spirits.
I also love that that backstory is so plausible—I mean, for what it is. The movie sets up only one “just go with it” conceit: ghosts are real. And everything else is completely logical within that conceit. OK, a worshipper of this ancient god built the building as a conductor of supernatural energy. A door between dimensions has been opened. They’ll reverse the streams, and send the energy flowing back where it came from. It sounds preposterous, but in this world that they’ve established, it all works!
And the way the characters talk to each other—they really sound like scholars, bouncing ideas off one another. They sound like people who know how to do research. They talk like scientists, weighing evidence and making logical conclusions.
“Ray—pretend for a minute that I don’t know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics.” “You never studied.”
Do you think any character in the average (for example) Adam Sandler movie even knows that there are such things as metallurgy, engineering, or physics?
Jeremy asked me at the end where on my “best movies of all time” list this movie falls. I said it had to be top five, at least. It’s just so, so good, and so, so funny—and the good serves the funny, and vice versa. Here's a 3.5 star review from Roger Ebert (circa 1984) which says some more about what separates this movie from the rest.
And I promise the next post will not be about Ghostbusters.
Tally of accomplishments, vol. 5
That's right, my Shakespeare paper finally got finished (except for some little editing things, like citations and stuff that I'm going to fix tomorrow) and I went ahead and celebrated that accomplishment thusly:
YES! I went to cult film night to see Ghostbusters, and it was incredible. An entire theater of people chanting along with Bill Murray as he says, "The flowers are STILL STANDING."
Here's that scene.
The theater was showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight, too, so the lobby was full of Ghostbusters people and Rocky Horror people mingling (you could tell who was who because the Ghostbusters people had greasy hair and glasses, and the Rocky Horror people were wearing fishnets).
In addition to seeing the movie and the nine hours I spent finishing the Shakespeare paper (really), we also signed a lease this morning! We are the proud renters of the first floor of a house in Cleveland Heights! Such a full day. Incidentally, the house is right around the corner from my new favorite movie theater.