GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE - Not Afraid Of No Glorified Cameo!

Now playing at a haunted, slimy multiplex near you:

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE

(Dir. Jason Reitman, 2021)

Since the 1989 release of GHOSTBUSTERS 2, there have been a head-spinning multitude of attempts to continue the series largely derailed by Bill Murray’s reluctance to revive his wise-cracking character of Dr. Peter Venkman. Yet, Murray did appear, in a different role, in Paul Feig’s 2016 female-led reboot, as did many members of the original cast despite it being a non canon entry.

 

But Feig’s film bombed, and angered fans, so we’re supposed to forget it exists, and embrace what’s being billed as an authentic GHOSTBUSTERS movie, one that exists in the same universe as the first two films, is filled with musical ques from Elmer Bernstein’s iconic score (now rendered by composer Rob Simonsen), is littered with callbacks to the 1984 classic including the reappearance of the Ectomobile (Ecto-1), and, most importantly, re-unites our proton pack wearing, spirit-capturing/entrapping, and beloved buddies, the real Ghostbusters (incidentally the name of an ‘80s animated series – whew, this franchise is ginormous!).

 

Thing is, if you’re buying a ticket to see Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and other returning cast members like Sigourney Weaver, and Annie Potts, you’re going to have to wait through most of the movie to get to them (ok, you don’t have to wait very long to get to Potts).

 

Not that this is a bad thing as it’s admirable that Reitman, and co-writer Gil Kenan wanted to establish a new ensemble including geeky teen Fin Wolfhard (who at times makes this feel like a super-sized episode of Stranger Things, an episode of which even had him wearing the Ghostbusters uniform), his just as geeky sister played by Mckenna Grace (whose hairstyle is overly familiar), and their exasperated mother portrayed by Carrie Coon.

 

There’s also a budding love interest for Grace, Logan Kim who’s named Podcast, for cuteness sake; Celeste O’Connor as Wolfhard’s crush, and, thank the heavens, Paul Rudd, bring the hip charm as a science teacher, who educates the kids about how the Ghostbusters saved New York with their unbelievably powerful paranormal activity.

 

As the kids learn that their broken down Oklahoman farm house (described as “Apocalyptic” by their mother), was once owned by their grandfather, Egon Spengler (originally played by the late, great Harold Ramis), they encounter a round of paranormal pursuits they can call their own.

 

Rudd is plagued by an army of tiny Stay Puff Marshmellow men, and then a terror dog named Vinz Clortho that possesses him, while Coon gets the Zuul makeover. This puts Rudd and Coon into the Rick Moranis, and Weaver parts, which even includes a recreation of the ascending stairway from the first one, though this time up the side of an ominous mountain.

 

So it’s up to the new breed of apparition hunters to take on these supernatural baddies, but don’t worry, they are joined by you know who. Unfortunately the guys that most of us are going to this movie to see only appear in the last 10 minutes, with a minimum of dialogue. Murray only gets four-five one-liners, tops, and we don’t get a story as to how they re-grouped to get there. Any of these guys' talk show appearances is bound to have more substance than their glorified cameo here.

But their appearance does work, and it’s nice that the filmmakers even found a way to include Ramis, who the movie is dedicated to.

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE may lack the laughs of the 1984 effort, and it may rely too much on plot points and story beats from that one too, but it’s a spirited (sorry), and a heartfelt tribute brought forth by a group of likable kids. I do miss some of the edge that was there before, and, of course, wish there was more material featuring Murray and Company, but at least there’s a during-the-credits scene with Venkman and Dana Barrett that’s worth sticking around for.

So this valiant venture to conclude the GHOSTBUSTERS trilogy is a warm and fuzzy follow-up, even if it most likely won’t come, see, or kick anybody’s ass.

Postnote: The picture above is of Murray donning the Ghostbusters outfit at the Spike Scream Awards in 2010. I’m using it here as pics of he, and his old buddies from the new flick are hard to come by.

More later....

3 Poli-Biopics I'm Finally Getting Around To

Apparently because the nation has been enraptured by politics over the last several years, Hollywood has stepped up to produce a number of films covering controversial political figures from years past. Here I’m going to take a look at three of them – in chronological order, both by the years the films were released, and the years in history the movies take place. So that means we begin with:

LBJ (Rob Reiner, 2016) 

Although it skips around through the early ‘60s, Rob Reiner’s 19th film largely concerns Lyndon B. Johnson’s experience in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Woody Harrelson, in heavy make-up and prosthetics, plays LBJ, who is suddenly thrust into the presidency, a position he wanted, but not under such circumstances. Harrelson’s LBJ argues with advisors (at one point while on the toilet), and Bobby Kennedy (Michael Stahl-David), and has a few tender moments with his wife Lady Bird Johnson, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who has a fakes nose that is as pointy and down-turned as Harrelson’s prosthetic.

There are also choice turns by Richard Jenkins as the racist Senator Richard Russell, Bill Pullman as the smug, Senator Ralph Yarborough, and the dead on Jeffrey Donovan as John F. Kennedy (Donovan also played Bobby Kennedy in Clint Eastwood’s J. EDGAR). Harrelson does a admirable job as LBJ, but despite his facial embellishments he doesn’t really get lost in the Texan democrat’s persona.

Despite this, LBJ is Rob Reiner’s best film in years (maybe decades), but with its TV movie-style melodrama it’s far from essential.

CHAPPAQUIDDICK (Dir. John Curran, 2017) 

Jason Clarke (ZERO DARK THIRTY, FIRST MAN) portrays Senator Ted Kennedy in this tense treatise that depicts the 1969 (5o years ago this month) accident in which Kennedy drove his car into Poucha Pond in Chappaquiddick killing a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne, played by Kate Mara (House of Cards, American Horror Story, THE MARTIAN). The flames of the budding scandal are fanned by the fact that Kennedy waited 10 hours before reporting the accident, and attending Kopechne's funeral, wearing a neck brace, although he wasn’t injured in the incident.

Clarke’s Kennedy grapples with his guilt versus his ambition as his lawyers, including two comic actors in serious roles - Ed Helms as Joe Gargan, and Jim Gaffigan as Paul F. Markham - who try to convince him to turn himself in. On the opposing side, his father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., (Bruce Dern) says to him “alibi.” Curran, whose seventh feature this is, has fashioned a historical thriller that’s compelling throughout. It’s also a devastatingly dark reminder of how much tragedy the Kennedy dynasty suffered in the ‘60s.

THE FRONT RUNNER (Dir. Jason Reitman, 2018) 

Unlike the previous two films reviewed above, this drama is about a now obscure political figure, Senator Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman), whose chances of winning the presidency in 1988 went down the tubes when his affair with model Donna Rice (Sara Paxton) was exposed by the press. The film features a lot of consultants strategizing about Hart’s campaign, and his indiscretions, while the candidate repeatedly says that it’s none of anyone’s “goddamn business!” Speaking of business, one major factor in Hart’s downfall was a photo of him taken with Rice on his lap on a yacht named “Monkey Business.”

Surprisingly this photo isn’t touched on in this film, except in a few quick mentions. I was expecting a full re-enactment, and repeated showings of it when it got leaked. This surprised me because it was one of the aspects that people (like me) who lived through the scandalous events, most remember. The film’s editing, by Stefan Grube, is often choppy, yet the film is often drawn out and dull – a good 20-30 minutes could have easily been cut out. 

Under his obvious wig, Jackman is fine as Hart, but the part is underwritten with a lot of repetitive dialogue. Maybe that’s accurate to the real Hart, but it makes for some shake your head moments.

But although the movie is the weakest of the three covered in this post, it has the strongest supporting cast. Vera Farmiga plays Hart’s wife, Oletha, J.K. Simmons works it as Hart’s campaign manager, Alfred Molina portrays the Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, Kevin Pollack briefly appears as the Miami Herald publisher, and comedian Bill Burr smarms his way through a role as a reporter. THE FRONT RUNNER doesn’t have enough to say to make it truly worthwhile, but parts of it are watchable, and at least its attempt to make a statement about tabloidism infiltrating the political system show some admirable ambition.

Post note: At one point in THE FRONT RUNNER, Alfred Molina’s Ben Bradlee says to a group of reporters: “I swear this is true. New Year’s Eve, after Jack died, Lyndon Johnson sites down with a whole bunch of us, pulls us in close and says. ‘Boys, you’re gonna see a whole lot of women coming in and out of my hotel suites. I want you to pay us the same courtesy you did Jack.”

Whether or not this is true, it’s an element that isn’t included in LBJ, reviewed above.

More later…

Jason Reitman's Misguided And Meaningless MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

Opening today at an indie art house near me…

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

(Dir. Jason Reitman, 2014)

Jason Reitman’s (JUNO, UP IN THE AIR, YOUNG ADULT) latest film, a comedy drama (I hate the word “dramedy”) examination of relationships in the age of the internet based on a 2011 novel by Chad Kultgen, is easily his worst film. It’s even worse than LABOR DAY, and I hated LABOR DAY.

Just about every bit of it is misguided and poorly written, a pretentious attempt at cultural commentary that comes off like a guy complaining about everybody being addicted to screens and social media, but has nothing to say about it to say but ‘look at all these people on their devices, it’s awful.’ A rant by Bobby Moynihan’s SNL character Drunk Uncle is more profound than this.

It starts with voice-over narration by Emma Thompson telling us that while the Voyager satellite, which we see via CGI, is venturing through space carrying international music, pictures and greetings to extraterrestrial life, back on Earth, Adam Sandler is having trouble masturbating to internet porn.

Sandler, following the Robin Williams handbook by having grown a beard for this dramatic role, is an unhappily married family man who has to use his son’s computer because his computer is too infected with malware to use. Finding that his son has his own secret sex site fetish, Sandler reminiscences about how he discovered porn in his youth. Yeah, pretty creepy so far.

From there we head to the local high school (the film was shot in Austin, Texas) where we meet Kaitlyn Dever, whose mother (Jennifer Garner) obsessively monitors every instance of activity on her phone and PC, Elena Kampouris an anorexic high-school girl pining to be popular, Olivia Crocicchia, whose mother (Judy Greer) is always taking pictures and videos of in hopes of making her a star, and Ansel Elgort who gave up football for online gaming (in particular, the game “Guild Wars,” which I hadn’t heard of before).

Garner’s character is the film’s heavy, a cold, self righteous control freak who hosts an Internet Safety Parent group meeting in her home and deletes messages on her daughters account before she can see them.

While these threads weave in and out of each other, Sandler and his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), both inspired by a commercial for AshleyMadison.com that turns their heads away from their laptops in bed, begin affairs at exactly the same time, but luckily at different hotels. While Sandler hires a high price escort (Shane Lynch), DeWitt arranges a date with Dennis Haysbert, credited only as “Secretluvur.”

Meanwhile, Sandler’s son (Travis Tope) is itching to have sex with Crocicchia, who’s his partner on a class project about 9/11 (yep, they went there too), while a relationship blooms between Dever and Elgort, who’s dealing with learning (from a social networking site, of course) that his mother is remarrying. But that’s good news for Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris as Elgort’s father, who begins dating Greer. Reitman regular J.K. Simmons is also on hand as the anorexic girl's kindly father.

There’s a lot of internet meddling by parents – Greer decides that selling soft-core pictures of her daughter online isn’t such a good idea after it gets them rejected by a reality show, Norris cancels his credit card so Elgort can’t play “Guild Wars” anymore, and Garner freaks out when she finds the one site that Dever had secret (Tumblr), ransacks her room, and drives Elgort to suicide by intercepting his messages to Dever and telling him she’ll block him if he texts again.

It’s all so heavy handed and incredibly cringeworthy in its whole ‘internet bad’ statement, and overuse of bubbles for texts (or sexts), and blocks of chat cluttering up the screen. Yeah, I get that its point is that these things are cluttering up our lives, but with its flashy aesthetics and Voyager imagery, something seems off in its thematic ideal that too much technology is threatening our interactions with other people.

And Thompson’s narration so much recalls her writer role in STRANGER THAN FICTION, that I wanted the characters to yell to the heavens for her to shut up.

The film seems to oddly elaborate on a joke in Woody Allen’s 1977 Oscar winning classic ANNIE HALL in which a flashback has the 9-year old version of Allen’s character Alvy Singer explaining to his physician and mother that “The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” His mother says that because of this, “He’s even stopped doing his homework,” to which the young Alvy replies “What's the point?”

Blending that cosmic comic comment on insignificance with Carl Sagan’s “Tiny Blue Dot,” which both Elgort and Thompson quote in the film, must’ve seemed like a poetic notion to Reitman, but his awful, drawn out, and uninspired execution here makes for an excruciating experience. Come back, Diablo Cody! Everything is forgiven. (YOUNG ADULT, which I was a bit mixed on initially is looking better and better every day).

In its wanting so desperately to be a movie of the moment, as well as an ensemble rom com, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is a dreadful mash-up of AMERICAN BEAUTY and CRAZY STUPID LOVE. It’s for sure, the most meaningless and hard to stomach 119 minutes I’ve spent in a theater this year. 

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In YOUNG ADULT, Charlize Theron Can't Go Home Again

YOUNG ADULT (Dir. Jason Reitman, 2011)

With Mavis Gary, a divorced writer of young adult fiction, Charlize Theron has her juiciest role since…well, MONSTER. It’s a doozy of a pathetic character that spends most of the movie looking like she’s gone to seed slouching as she shuffles around in sweat pants, Hello Kitty t-shirt, and a hoodie, but when she dolls herself up, a process we see in excruciating detail, she can still bring it as a head-turning beauty.

Theron only brings it in hopes of stealing back her high school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson), who is happily married with a new baby. When she hears about the newborn, Theron travels back to her small Minnesotan hometown to relive her teenage glory years, and put her misguided plan in motion.

YOUNG ADULT re-unites the duo behind 2007’s sleeper hit JUNO, director Jason Reitman and Oscar winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, but thankfully this time there’s less snark and more edge. This is largely due to Theron’s fearless portrayal of a highly unlikable embarrassingly immature woman, and the odd connection she makes to Patton Oswalt, as one of her former class-mates, who has to walk with a crutch because during his not-so-glory high school years, he was beaten severely – a victim of a mistaken hate-crime.

Oswalt is the voice of reason, telling Theron she’s crazy for trying to rekindle a long gone romance, but she, of course doesn’t listen. Once again playing a grinning dolt, Wilson is oblivious to Theron’s motives; in Elizabeth Reaser he has a good wife (who’s coincidentally on the show The Good Wife), with plenty of stability, so why would he want to get tangled up in his ex’s messy world?

So Theron crashes face down drunk on her hotel bed night after night, and we wonder if this cringe-inducing selfish nut will ever be redeemable. While we contemplate that, Reitman includes shots of the generic landscape of strip malls, chain restaurants, and cheap hotels, that are attempts at making a statement about the homogenization of America (Wilson boasts about a Chipotle opening in town as if it’s big news), but they still don’t serve as much more than backdrop to wallowing in Theron and Oswalt’s desperate existences.

It’s a standout performance for Oswalt, who tops his intensity in 2009’s BIG FAN simply by being himself – a self aware geek with a cutting remark for every occasion.

That said, there really aren’t that many satisfying laughs in YOUNG ADULT, and the predictability of the storyline is annoying, but spending time with these risky characters is extremely appealing during this Christmas season clogged full of overblown fantasies.

Even during her most despicable moments I was still rooting for Theron, who embodies the part so completely you will actually feel sorry for her, but not to succeed at winning back Wilson, but to move on. Obviously the woman isn’t familiar with Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, but after this disastrous trip she should definitely take it to heart.

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UP IN THE AIR: The Film Babble Blog Review

UP IN THE AIR (Dir. Jason Reitman, 2009)

George Clooney's third film of the last quarter of 2009 has "the last movie star" (Time Magazine's words - not mine) in a much more recognizable role than his last 2 efforts. It's not just because he's not a mustached military man or an animated fox, it's that he has a more recognizable character arc: slick professional who believes he has all the answers glides through life until realizing that there's emptiness to it all which he desperately and clumsily tries to remedy.

This is also the character arc of director Jason Reitman's first film THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, which UP IN THE AIR closely resembles at times especially in its opening introductory montage. Clooney's voice-over narration, accompanying aerial shots of many American cities, tells us that he is a corporate downsizer.


Clooney flies all over the country to conduct formal sit-downs with employees to tell them that they are being laid off. He is very good at his job and prefers the 322 days of the year that he is on the road to the 43 that he is home in his sterile white walled rental unit of an apartment in Omaha.

Clooney's frequent flyer lifestyle is threatened when his boss (a lightly bearded slightly jaded Jason Bateman) brings in a young consultant (Anna Kendrick) who has plans to replace the face-to-face meetings with video conferencing. Bateman sends Kendrick on the road with Clooney so she can be shown the ropes.


Clooney hopes this will show her the flaws in what he believes to be a flawed inhuman media method, but you just know that both will be taught essential life lessons by one another.


In a hotel bar meet-cute earlier, Clooney literally charms the pants off fellow frequent flyer Vera Farmiga. She nicely compliments his no-strings-attached philosophy and provides a counter balance to Kendrick's wet behind the ears romantic idealism.


After Kendrick's boyfriend back home dumps her by way of a text message, Clooney can't help but to make a wise-crack: "That's kind of like firing people over the internet." Farmiga offers, with much more sensitivity, some solid advice about how it won't feel like settling by the time somebody is right for her.

These relationship insights blend into the travelogue mosaic of cards being swiped, more aerial shots, and the many firings, yet we just know that they form the crucial crux at hand. 


For example Clooney has the annoying task of taking along a cardboard cutout of his sister (Melanie Lynskey) with her fiancée (Danny McBride) to be photographed at famous landmarks for a wedding collage - this draws our attention to his ostensible freedom in contrast to his sibling's ostensible stability with neither coming out on top.


The first half of UP IN THE AIR is breezy and amusing, but the second half descends into mawkish sentimentality with soul searching acoustic balladry in the background broadcasting what we're supposed to be feeling. Clooney's charisma is so pleasantly palpable that he makes the film appear better than it is while we're watching it, yet its superficial effect evaporates once we leave the theater.


Still, most audiences are sure to find this film a likable lark. It's well made and has a shiny gloss to it that often outshines its predictability. It also benefits from not having a neatly tied up conclusion - sometimes it's best to leave some things right where the title says they should be.

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