WHO YOU GONNA CALL?: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

More. What is it good for? Thanks to the internet there’s more of everything, and it is also readily available. Deadly combination. This means there’s more crap readily available, in terms of content out there and way out there.
   That doesn’t mean the crap is evenly distributed. Crap is determined, nay, destined, to go after you. The consumer-seeking missile is piled high with crap, and is knocking on your door, hiding under your bed, and raiding your fucking fridge all in the same electronic breath.
   Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to seek out new forms of entertainment, be entertained by some of it, and filter out the rest. Filter. Burn. Filter out the rest, in a fire. Boldly go where a shit-load of people have gone before, and shit a load of movies and TV shows out of your system. Save time. Sidestep. Swerve. Avoid.
   Once, in the before-times, there was a view: you had to watch something to determine whether or not it was of any use to you as a form of entertainment. Not so much, now. When there’s so much, now. The solid construction of a decent movie trailer is a long-lost art. (Ignoring all the shitty trailers that were made down through movie history. Fuck it, let’s be severely selective here. That is, after all, the point of the exercise. Limit your intake of intake.)
   Movie trailers developed a mutated purpose. They no longer sell movies. Instead, they signal all the shit to avoid. This is how they are built.
   Once upon a film, the trailer sold you on the idea of a fantastic piece of entertainment.
   Twice upon a film, we started to sense the idea that we wanted the people who made the movie trailers to be the same people who’d made the movies. Sadly, the trailer people were not the movie people, after all, and we were sold lies.
   Then, thrice upon a film, we reached NOW. And NOW, the shoddy construction of the movie trailer makes it electronically easy for us to walk away. We don’t need to be in a movie theatre or in front of a television showing adverts to experience the trailer. YouTube saves a lot of effort.
   It’s caustically easy to be dismissive.
   For those wondering about the difficulty of making trailers, there are a few problems.
   One. Showing footage from the movie that never ends up in the finished film. The joke here is that you’ll see a trailer for a comedy and there’ll be five jokes in the trailer but only three jokes in the film. Not one joke a funny jab, either.
   Two. Giving away the plot twist in the trailer. Obviously, I can’t spoil any plots in this text here. Except to say showing the fucking iceberg in that Titanic trailer is poor form. But wait a bit. Why is that guy starting a gunfight on board the ship during these icy shenanigans?
   That addition to the trailer made me realise I wouldn’t be foaming at the mouth to watch a load of old bollocks. Let’s bolt an action movie onto a film about a ship sinking, to, you know, make the story more dramatic. Or something.
   The less said about Avatar the better.
   Hey, Vasquez. Ever been mistaken for a character in another movie?
   Yes. Have you?
   Three. Trying to sell enough of an idea of the movie…without giving away all the jokes in a comedy or twists in the plot of any kind of thriller. Yes, that’s tricky.
   What was my most disappointing experience, after staggering away from a movie trailer? GHOSTBUSTERS. I must add…the 2016 version of the film. The trailer sets up an idea in text. What did we know? New movie. Four women team up to be ghostbusters.
   30 YEARS AGO…FOUR SCIENTISTS SAVED NEW YORK…THIS SUMMER…A NEW TEAM WILL ANSWER THE CALL.
   Stick a knife in the last three words, there. We’ll conduct an autopsy later.
   I instantly thought we were getting the daughters of the original ghostbusters in some kind of continuation sequel. That felt like the set-up, right there in the text.
   It’s a very basic idea for a movie continuation, but it is good enough for government work. If the original actors appear, getting on in years, then they are passing the torch to the next generation of characters. Tired. Worn-out. As plain an idea is it gets. But. Workable.
   Well the text fucking lied to us.
   That expectation was on me, and it’s my fault. No, fuck off. That expectation was mine as I read the text in the trailer. After I’d done so, the rest of the trailer dropped. That text deliberately drove us to the edge of a cliff seconds before an earthquake. And then. The rest of the trailer, sadly. That is what happened, then.
   It’s not as if the trailer gave me an expectation that died when going to the movies. No. The trailer gave me an expectation that died seconds into the trailer. Daughters of the original squad. Cool. We’ll see cameo roles. It’ll be the least-forced cameo run in the history of cinema. Parental ghostbusters. But no. The rest of the trailer dropped off that cliff I mentioned.
   Oh, it’s a…reboot/remake with elements of things we’ve seen before and…frankly, from that trailer, effects that didn’t really come across as all that good. With the passage of 30 years, you’d think the effects would look better and not…
   Smoothed over, to cater to a 3D version of the film no one asked for. Ultimately, contrary to expectation, the 2016 movie’s artificial gloss can’t compete with the charm of earlier effects. I expect a 1980s movie to have effects like a 1980s movie. Some movies come across as better when they age.
   For example: THE THING. Its effects are way better than the reboot/prequel/side-by-side movie that landed later. A crying shame that the practical effects in the reboot didn’t have the backing from those higher up in the movie process…leading to everyone getting fucked over on that gig. Watch John Carpenter’s version instead. Not every effect is great. But almost all of those effects add atmosphere.
   You get that in abundance from the effects in the original GHOSTBUSTERS. Sure, it’s a quirky atmosphere, but it is a ghost comedy. Then we jump to 2016. When a trailer pisses on an already patchy movie franchise and shits on its own release, you go with the vibe of that trailer. The vibe ain’t good. Five jokes in the trailer but only three jokes in the film. That kind of deal. Not that it’s a deal.
   I frowned at the trailer instead of smiling or laughing. This is a comedy, and I am not laughing. Well. Damn. And it’s not the four daughters of…fuck’s sake. It isn’t difficult to write the obvious script.
   Unless it’s for 2016 GHOSTBUSTERS, apparently. For once, in the name of cinema, just go with the fucking obvious, take the unoriginality hit, and plough heavily into a well-worked field. Play to the nostalgia, if there’s any nostalgia left. The daughters of.
   But no. Instead. That mess. It’s not a sequel…hell, it’s nowhere near an equal. While I’m briefly on that non-topic, marketing terms of that stripe need to die in a fucking fire.
   When the director spouts nonsense about showing you a film you haven’t seen before but maybe it is a film you have seen before, you know he’s the wrong director. For anything. A lot of people involved in that film patted each other on the back through gritted contractual teeth at the time, or so it felt to me.
   After the original film came out, the basic idea of more films in a series…filtered itself through its own anus, it’s true. It was very difficult to face the concept of a sequel. And after the second film, it was even harder to wade through the notion of GHOSTBUSTERS 3.
   Often discussed. Never materialised. Hoped for. Then not hoped for. Maybe it is for the best that the spectre of GHOSTBUSTERS 3 was exorcised. And yet, somewhere in a musty tomb, there were plans for a continuation of a retread of a rethink of a ghostly return.
   What do we get from GHOSTBUSTERS (2016) as a movie prospect? Cameos from original cast members, sadly. Pointless cameos from original cast members. Also. Never set your movie up for a sequel that isn’t going to happen. That’s another point against it.
   Have faith in the title of your movie. It is GHOSTBUSTERS: ANSWER THE CALL. Apparently. Who you gonna call? Not this director. If you, as the director, object to the movie’s full title and need to have it buried in the movie’s closing credit sequence, you are the wrong director for anything. Including traffic.
   I’ve mentioned the trailer for GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE before. There’s a thing in that trailer that should not be there. Won’t say here. It’s a cool moment that should be part of the movie experience. Not the trailer experience.
   If you plan to watch the movie and you haven’t seen the trailer…just watch the movie. There never was a GHOSTBUSTERS 3. (Which we, now, all suspect would’ve been ghastly.) Instead, we faced a second reboot…
   Someone has to save this cash-cow. Reboot with AFTERLIFE.
   Was AFTERLIFE any better than the 2016 reboot? The 2016 reboot mess just barely wallpapered over the original movie. Then the wallpaper fell off. The misguided attempt to reference the original, while breaking free into “new” characters and cameos one-step-removed…tried and failed to tap into an audience for a much-loved earlier film.
   And then AFTERLIFE…strip-mined the ever-living fuck out of the nostalgia train at an industrial scale, harvesting the feel-good factor all the way down to the nostalgia train’s rails. It was a basic-bitch move. Take relatives of an original ghostbuster and pass the torch on.
   Either you’ll hate that more than the 2016 reboot…or…you’ll embrace the barbed wire of nostalgia in the hope that the distraction allows you to ignore the pain. I recommend swallowing two pills beforehand – the first two movies in the series. Then you’ll be as fresh as possible when it comes to the assault on the nostalgia front.
   And it is a barrage. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a corporate entity dipping into the audience’s pockets looking for those nostalgia coins. And, damn it. I hopped on that nostalgia train knowing the audience was in for a corporate mugging.
   There were a few giant missteps in AFTERLIFE and also in its immediate nostalgia-steeped sequel, FROZEN EMPIRE. As ever, there are rumblings about what happens next. It’s getting harder to care when yet another movie bod is thrown on the pile of people talking up what’s next. Nostalgia is next.
   When does it end? More. What is it good for? GHOSTBUSTERS II is okay. And it did enough money at the time to hold out the promise of closing the movie franchise on a third film. Alas, it was not to be. The second film’s legacy was, at a considerable distance, the revival of Vigo the Carpathian as an internet meme connected to the very red portrait of a man named Chaaalz.
   There is no Chaaalz. Only Zuul.
   Ruh-roh. There’s that word. Legacy. Don’t concern yourself too much with the legacy of a movie that was great on its own and patchy as a franchise. You always have the original. It’s right there. That’s your golden ticket to nostalgia. A crap sequel does not ruin a great film. Even if the people you liked from the first production took the money and ran after filming the later one.
   A bad movie adaptation of a good book doesn’t destroy the book. And a good movie adaptation of a good book…is a movie. What works on the page may have to be condensed on the big screen.
   GHOSTBUSTERS isn’t ruined by GHOSTBUSTERS 2016. Of course, I must add…maybe you don’t care for the first film at all. Or any other films in the intermittent series. This blog post isn’t about your tastes, though. It was about my allergic reaction to a movie trailer, welded to recent movie people talk of where the franchise goes next.
   As movie trailers devolve instead of evolve, I feel there will be more allergic reactions that spare me from experiencing entire franchises. Movie trailers are tailored to phone screens. When movies are filmed on phones, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that movies are set up, in terms of cinematography, to be viewed on phones in a Covid-tainted environment.
   Covid just speeded up the inevitable tumble into the abyss technology periodically provides. They don’t make ’em like they used to. That’s because you used to see movies on the big screen or on TV years after the cinema release.
   The trip from movie to streaming is a short one, now.
   One day, they’ll beam the movie into your brain. And you’ll have a fast-forward function for an extra fee. By fuck, you’ll pay it. You say you won’t, today. Bless your wee cotton socks. You’ll go from sweet summer child to sour winter adult in one swift move.
   GHOSTBUSTERS from 2016 was pre-Covid. It’s difficult to compare box office results for what followed. AFTERLIFE boasted post-Covid box office numbers. The box office returns weren’t too far off each other. Tellingly, AFTERLIFE had a slashed budget. Made it more of a winning proposition for the sorcerers being employed down in accounts.
   We shouldn’t concern ourselves with budgets, box office receipts, or movie companies and their creative accounting. When creators talk to you through gritted teeth for contractual reasons, you tend to tune out the noise.
   What’s really telling, here? Time. With the two movies from the initial run, there’s a gap of five years between releases. Then nothing in cinemas until 2016. I’m aware of the cartoons and the video game that’s the spiritual version of GHOSTBUSTERS 3.
   After the failed reboot, Covid stepped in and changed the landscape. Technically, AFTERLIFE is just barely a pre-Covid film, having finished shooting in late 2019. But Covid dogged the movie’s release. So you had a reboot followed by the release of a reboot five years later.
   If you want to wrap up a trilogy, don’t take more than a decade to release it. Yes, The Lord of the Rings spoiled moviegoers who were into Tolkien’s work. Year on year, Frodo Baggins turned up in winter with the frequency of a pantomime character in search of a fortune.
   Much-delayed sequels deserve our contempt. When you look at the inevitable exposé of what went on behind the non-scenes, there’s only one conclusion to draw.
   The scrip wasn’t right. That had nothing to do with the script. Movie development hell simply means someone in production wouldn’t pad out the pay packet of an actor.