Based on Maria Semple’s 2012 bestseller “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” is a mystery-comedy that explores motherhood and mental illness.
Cate Blanchett plays the title character, an agoraphobic architect, once heralded as a genius, now a hermit who hasn’t designed a building in decades. Described as one of architecture’s “true enigmas,” she hates travelling, complains that people are rude and yammer too much, can’t sleep—“Anxiety causes insomnia,” she claims, “and insomnia causes anxiety.”—rarely leaves the house and has poured all her prescription drugs into one jar. “The colours and shapes are amazing together,” she says.
The other moms in the area, next door neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig) and “all her flying monkeys,” don’t like her and Bernadette makes no effort to build bridges with them. “I’m not good when exposed to people.”
The only bright spots in her life are husband Elgin (Billy Crudup), 15-year-old daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) and her virtual, on-line assistant. A series of unrelated but catastrophic events, including a mini-mud slide, an identity theft ring and an intervention, prompt Bernadette to disappear without a trace, leaving Bee and Elgin to figure out where she went.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is more story driven than director Richard Linklater’s recent, more slice-of-life films. In movies like “Everybody Wants Some!!” he excelled in crafting interesting situations for his characters to inhabit. Here the details aren’t so much focussed on the location or building atmosphere, but in creating a layered and compelling central character.
Blanchett applies a light touch here, playing up the funny moments, but still digging in when it comes time to deal with the “formality of life.” It’s a lovely performance in a film that rambles somewhat, but ultimately finds touching moments in the story of a woman who had to get lost to find herself.
CHIPs: It’s a remake, a comedy and an action film and yet it doesn’t quite measure up to any of those descriptors. It’s a remake in the sense that writer-director-star Dax Shepard has lifted the title, character names and general situation from the classic TV show but they are simply pegs to hang his crude jokes on.
The Circle: While it is a pleasure to see Bill Paxton in his last big screen performance, “The Circle” often feels like an Exposition-A-Thon, a message in search of a story.
The Fate of the Furious: Preposterous is not a word most filmmakers would like to have applied to their work but in the case of the “Fast and Furious” franchise I think it is what they are going for. Somewhere along the way the down-‘n’-dirty car chase flicks veered from sublimely silly to simply silly. “The Fate of the Furious” is fast, furious but it’s not much fun. It’s an unholy mash-up of James Bond and the Marvel Universe, a movie bogged down by outrageous stunts and too many characters. Someone really should tell Vin Diesel and Company that more is not always more.
Fifty Shades Darker: Depending on your point of view “Fifty Shades of Grey” either made you want to gag or want to wear a gag. It’s a softcore look at hardcore BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) that spanked the competition on its opening weekend in 2015. Question is, will audiences still care about Grey’s proclivities and Ana’s misgivings or is it time to use our collective safeword? “Fifty Shades Darker” is a cold shower of a movie. “It’s all wrong,” Ana says at one point. “All of this is wrong.” Truer words have never been spoken.
The Mountain Between Us: Mountain survival movies usually end up with someone eating someone else to stay alive. “The Mountain Between Us” features the usual mountain survival tropes—there’s a plane crash, a showdown with a cougar and broken bones—but luckily for fans of stars Idris Elba and Kate Winslet cannibalism is not on the menu. Days pass and then weeks pass and soon they begin their trek to safety. “Where are we going?” she asks. “We’re alive,” he says. “That’s where were going.” There will be no spoilers here but I will say the crash and story of survival changes them in ways that couldn’t imagine… but ways the audience will see coming 100 miles away. It’s all a bit silly—three weeks in and unwashed they still are a fetching couple—but at least there’s no cannibalism and no, they don’t eat the dog.
The Mummy: As a horror film it’s a meh action film. As an action film it’s little more than a formulaic excuse to trot out some brand names in the kind of film Hollywood mistakenly thinks is a crowd pleaser.
The Shack: Bad things in life may be God’s will but I lay the blame for this bad movie directly on the shoulders of director Stuart Hazeldine who infuses this story with all the depth and insight of a “Davey and Goliath” cartoon.
The Snowman: We’ve seen this Nordic Noir before and better. Mix a curious lack of Oslo accents—the real mystery here is why these Norwegians speak as though they just graduated RADA—Val Kilmer in a Razzie worthy performance and you’re left with a movie that left me as cold as the snowman‘s grin.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: Movies like the high gloss crime thriller “La Femme Nikita,” the assassin mentor flick “Léon: The Professional” and outré sci fi opera “The Fifth Element” have come to define director Luc Besson’s outrageous style. Kinetic blasts of energy, his films are turbo charged fantasies that make eyeballs dance even if they don’t always engage the brain. His latest, “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” not only has one of the longest titles of the year but is also one of the most over-the-top, retina-frying movies of the year. Your eyes will beg for mercy.
Wonder Wheel: At the beginning of the film Mickey (Justin Timberlake) warns us that what we are about to see will be filtered through his playwright’s point of view. Keeping that promise, writer, director Woody Allen uses every amount of artifice at his disposal—including cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s admittedly sumptuous photography—to create a film that is not only unreal but also unpleasant. “Oh God,” Ginny (Kate Winslet) cries out at one point. “Spare me the bad drama.” Amen to that.
THE UGLY
Song to Song: I think it’s time Terrence Malick and I called it quits. I used to look forward to his infrequent visits. Sure, sometimes he was a little obtuse and over stayed his welcome, but more often than not he was alluringly enigmatic. Then he started coming around more often and, well, maybe the old saying about familiarity breeding contempt is true. In “Song to Song” there’s a quick shot of a tattoo that sums up my feelings toward my relationship with Malick. Written in flowery script, the words “Empty Promises” fill the screen, reminding us of the promise of the director’s early work and amplifying the disappointment we feel today. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back, the Terrence Malick movie that put me off Terrence Malick movies. I’ll be nice though and say, it’s not him, it’s me.
EXTRA! EXTRRA! MOST COUNFOUNDING
mother!: Your interest in seeing “mother!,” the psychological thriller from “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky, may be judged on your keenness to watch American sweetheart Jenifer Lawrence flush a beating heart down a toilet. Aronofsky’s story of uninvited guests disrupting the serene lives of a poet and his wife refuses to cater to audience expectations. “mother!” is an uncomfortable watch, an off-kilter experience that revels in its own madness. As the weight of the weirdness and religious symbolism begins to feel crushing, you may wonder what the hell is going on. Are these people guilty of being the worst houseguests ever or is there something bigger, something biblical going on?
Aronofsky is generous with the biblical allusions—the house is a paradise, the stranger’s sons are clearly echoes of Cain and Abel, and there is a long sequence that can only be described as the Home-style Revelation—and builds toward a crescendo of wild action that has to be seen to be believed, but his characters are ciphers. Charismatic and appealing to a member, they feel like puppets in the director’s apocalyptic roadshow rather than characters we care about. Visually and thematically he doesn’t push button so much as he pokes the audience daring them to take the trip with him, it’s just too bad we didn’t have better company for the journey.
“mother!” is a deliberately opaque movie. Like looking into a self-reflective mirror you will take away whatever you put into it. The only thing sure about it is that it is most confounding studio movie of the year.
“Downsizing,” the new satire from “Sideways” director Alexander Payne, offers up a proposition that is almost too good to be true. His movie asks, What would you do if you could simultaneously help save the environment and improve your personal finances?
Set in the near future, overpopulation is the biggest issue facing the world. In Norway a team of scientists come up with an inventive, and just a little wacky, way to solve the problem, cellular reduction a.k.a. shrinking. It is, they say, the only safe and humane way to resolve the curse of overpopulation. “Life is unsustainable at this current mass and volume,” says Dr. Jorgen Asbjørnsen (Rolf Lassgård).
It’s a medical procedure known as downsizing whereby a person’s current mass and volume are shrunk by .0634%. They take up less space, produce less waste—four months of bathroom waste for a family of four takes up less than half of one garbage bag—eat less and generally are less a drain on the planet’s resources. The kicker? It’s cheaper to live. $83 is an average food budget for two months or could buy a matching conflict-free diamond bracelet, earring and necklace set.
When we meet Omaha couple Paul and Audrey Safranek (Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig) they are at a financial crossroads. He wanted to be a surgeon but when his mom got sick he dropped out of pre med to take care of her. Now he works “in-house at Omaha steaks and “tweeting repetitive stress injuries. She wants to buy a new house but they can’t afford it.
Top realize Audrey’s dream of a new house and life, they decide to get small. The capper on the deal? Their equity of $150,000 translates into $12.5 million at the dollhouse-sized city called Leisureland Estates.
But what happens when one chickens out? “You’re upset!” says Paul. “You’re upset! I’m the one who is 5 inches tall!”
As Paul begins his new miniature solo life he meets his neighbour Dusan (Christoph Waltz), a Siberian wheeler-dealer who brings luxury items to the new small communities and Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a shrunken dissident from Vietnam, jailed for political and environmental activity, who smuggled herself into the United States in a television box.
Paul’s journey into smallville changes his life in more ways than he ever could have imagined. Damon plays Paul as an everyman, a good guy who massages his wife’s neck and gave up his dream to look after his mother. The enlightenment he (eventually) finds comes with the realization that Leisureland Estates isn’t a brave new world but a continuation of the world he left, complete with class struggles, race issues and poverty. “That’s the thing about becoming small,” says Dusan’s friend Konrad (a wonderful Udo Kier), “you become rich. Unless you were poor. Then you’re just a small.”
Downsizing, the procedure, not the movie, it turns out isn’t the answer to the world’s problems. Healing the world is simpler, more primal. It’s about building communities, looking after one another and learning to appreciate what we have.
At least that’s what I think it’s about. “Downsizing,” for all its ingenuity gets bogged down in its second half. The opening hour is inventive, like a light-hearted “Twilight Zone” episode. There are nice details—following the shrinking procedure the newly small adults are scooped up by nurses with spatulas and deposited on to tiny gurneys—and several belly laughs stemming from the situation. When the film halfway abandons the less-is-more concept—in a world where everything is miniature, the opportunity for the kind of sight gags that drew laughs in the first half disappear—it becomes slightly muddled. Is it a romance? Sort of. Is it social commentary? Yes, but about what exactly? The environment? (There’s even an allusion to Noah’s Ark.) Racism? Illegal immigration? They are all touched on but the film flits from one issue to another so quickly it’s like channel surfing between CNN and MSNBC every forty seconds or so.
“Downsizing” may bite off more than it can chew but its an indictment of how man has broken the environment isn’t all doom and gloom. With Paul’s new world, friends and outlook also come a hopeful gaze to the future. You may wonder about the appropriateness of the comic tone of Ngoc Lan’s broken English but will can never speculate on whether the film has its heart in the right place or not.
There are many types of movies about people who deal in death to make a living. There’s the cold-blooded killer story, the revenge drama and even comedic takes on killing for fun and profit. Assassins can be men, women, children and even robots.
In this weekend’s American Assassin Michael Keaton is the teacher, a Cold War veteran who trains undercover executioners. He teaches counter-terrorism operative Mitch Rapp, played by Dylan O’Brien, the ropes of the killing game.
A quick look back at decades of death merchant movies reveals a set of rules and philosophies assassins will always follow.
When we first met John Wick he resembles the Sad Keanu meme. He’s a broken hearted man whose wife has recently passed away. He’s a loner until a package arrives at his door. It’s a puppy, sent by his wife just before she died, in the hopes that the dog’s love will help ease his pain. For a time it works, but when some very bad men break into his house to steal his Mustang, the dog winds up as collateral damage. With the last living touchstone to his late wife gone, Wick reverts back to his old ways as a mad, bad and dangerous to know assassin bent on revenge. We learn that you can quit, but you’ll always get pulled back in.
“People keep asking if I’m back and I haven’t really had an answer,” says Wick. “But now, yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back. So you can either hand over your son or you can die screaming alongside him!“
Charles Bronson, as the skilled slayer in The Mechanic teaches his young protégé, played by Jan-Michael Vincent, some basic hitman lessons. “Murder is only killing without a license,” he says, adding that when you shoot someone do it right. “You always have to be dead sure. Dead sure or dead.”
That’s key killer advice, but slow down, there is a progression to becoming a hitman.
In The Professional Leon (Jean Reno) details the system. “The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use,” he says, “because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn.”
Along the way movie assassins also learn that relationships are verboten.
Remember what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie)? “Your aim’s as bad as your cooking sweetheart,” taunts John to Jane, “and that’s saying something!”
Day of the Jackal’s would-be Charles de Gaulle assassin (Edward Fox) adds, “In this work you simply can’t afford to be emotional,” although sometimes feelings inevitably get in the way. Just ask Prizzi’s Honor’s Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) who memorably said, “Do I ice her? Do I marry her?”
Once they’ve learned the ropes, one question remains: Why do movie assassins kill?
Max Von Sydow plays one of the great movie killers in Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Lumet’s classic story of conspiracies and murder. His reasoning for doing what he does is chillingly simple. “The fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation,” he says. “Someone is always willing to pay.” The Matador’s Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan) agrees, “My business is my pleasure,” he said.
Your interest in seeing “mother!,” the new psychological thriller from “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky, may be judged on your keenness to watch American sweetheart Jenifer Lawrence flush a beating heart down a toilet. Doesn’t appeal? Perhaps get your pulse racing with “It” instead. If it does, read on.
Lawrence and Javier Bardem are “mother” and “him,” a May-December married couple living in a remote and rambling countryside Victorian mansion. It’s a house with a history. Partially destroyed by a fire—which also claimed him’s first wife—the place has memories. Him, a poet, has been blocked ever since the fire, but finds solace in one of the few things to survive the blaze, a crystal that he now displays in his home office. Despite mother’s efforts to make the house a home—“I want to make a paradise,” she says.—a pall hangs over her wannabe Eden.
The weird factor amps up when a man (Ed Harris) shows and is invited by him to stay the night. He’s oddly antagonistic and inappropriate—“Your wife? I thought it was your daughter!”—but him treats him well, like a long lost friend. She feels like a third wheel in her own home.
The next day the stranger’s wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives, making herself at home. She asks unusual, probing questions—“Why don’t you want to have kids? I have kids. That is what’s gonna keep your marriage is growing.”—and likes to booze it up during the day. Mother, unable to understand the new guests or her husband’s behaviour toward them, is further alienated when their aggressive, argumentative sons (real life siblings Brian and Domhnall Gleeson) show up. It begins to feel like a home invasion rather than a visit.
Paranoia grows as Mother becomes pregnant and a celebratory dinner turns to violence and murder. That’s not a spoiler. ‘mother!” is so bonkers mere words on a page can barely do it justice. Is that my failing or the film’s?
Aronofsky makes movies that refuse to cater to audience expectations. “mother!” is an uncomfortable watch, an off-kilter experience that revels in its own madness. As the weight of the weirdness and religious symbolism begins to feel crushing, you may wonder what the hell is going on. Are these people guilty of being the worst houseguests ever or is there something bigger, something biblical going on?
Aronofsky is generous with the biblical allusions—the house is a paradise, the sons are clearly echoes of Cain and Abel, and there is a long sequence that can only be described as the Home-style Revelation—and builds toward a crescendo of wild action that has to be seen to be believed, but his characters are ciphers. Charismatic and appealing to a member, they feel like puppets in the director’s apocalyptic roadshow rather than characters we care about. Visually and thematically he doesn’t push button so much as he pokes the audience daring them to take the trip with him, it’s just too bad we didn’t have better company for the journey.
“mother!” is a deliberately opaque movie. Like looking into a self-reflective mirror you will take away whatever you put into it. The only thing sure about it is that it is most confounding studio movie of the year.
Hot on the heels of family-friendly cartoons like Zootopia, The Secret Life of Pets and Finding Dory comes an animated movie that definitely isn’t for the whole family… unless it’s the Manson Family.
The high concept of Seth Rogen’s NSFW Sausage Party was, I think, best summed up by twitter user @ByChrisSmith who wrote, “So that Sausage Party trailer… Toy Story for food with swears?”
It’s the kind of food porn you won’t see on the Food Network. “We started to think ‘What if food had feelings?’ said Rogen after a sneak preview at the South By Southwest Film Festival. “That really is what inspired the whole idea: What if food thought one thing happened and discovered another thing happened?”
The story begins at a supermarket called Shopwell’s. Frank the Sausage (voice of Rogen), his hot dog bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig) and all the other foods—including Mr. Grits (Craig Robinson), a tomato (Paul Rudd) and Teresa the Taco (Salma Hayek)—live in hope that one day a customer will choose them. When they find out what happens after the customer takes them home, however, they fight to avoid their fate.
R-rated and raunchy, Rogen says he showed an early cut of the film to Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen. “Sausage Party appalled him in some ways,” adding that Cohen, cinema’s reigning Prince of Provocation, called the movie “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Someone who might not have been surprised by Sausage Party is Ralph Bakshi, a legendary animator who once said, “None of my pictures were anything I could ever take my mother to see. You know it’s working if you’re making movies you don’t want to your mother to see.”
Bakshi began his career his career in traditional animation, working for Terrytoons, home to cartoon characters like Heckle and Jeckle and Mighty Mouse but left television to make first animated film to receive an X-rating from the MPAA. Loosely based on a character created by cartoonist Robert Crumb, who later disavowed the film, 1972s Fritz the Cat is a trippy counterculture flick about a streetwise feline who smokes dope and has run ins with the Hell’s Angels and the Black Panthers. Extremely controversial—New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote, “[there’s] something to offend just about everyone”—it became the first independent animated film to gross more than $100 million at the box office.
More adult animation came with the R-rated Heavy Metal. An anthology made up of eight stories bound together by an intergalactic traveller described as the sum of all evil, the movie’s tagline promises to take audiences “beyond the future into a universe you’ve never seen before. A universe of mystery. A universe of magic. A universe of sexual fantasies. A universe of awesome good. A universe of terrifying evil.” Rotten Tomatoes calls the movie “sexist, juvenile, and dated,” but says it “makes up for its flaws with eye-popping animation and a classic, smartly-used soundtrack.”
Both Fritz the Cat and Heavy Metal were successful enough to spawn sequels. The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat and Heavy Metal 2000 both tried and failed to recapture the success of the originals. When asked if there might be a sequel to Sausage Part Rogen said, “What’s better than one sausage? That would be dope. All we do are franchises now.”
“Sausage Party,” the new animated film for adults from Seth Rogen, is the kind of food porn you won’t see on the Food Network. The high concept of this NSFW cartoon is, I think, best summed up by twitter user @ByChrisSmith who wrote, “So that Sausage Party trailer… ‘Toy Story’ for food with swears?” It’s that for sure—don’t take the kids—but it’s more than just a one-joke double entendre about wieners and buns.
The story begins at a supermarket called Shopwell’s. While on the store’s shelves Frank the Sausage (voice of Rogen) and his hot dog bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig) live in hope that one day they will ascend to the “Great Beyond” and finally consummate their relationship. “When a bun this fresh is into you,” says Frank, “all you say is when.”
After a jar of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store he relays horrifying stories about what actually happens to food on the outside. When they are finally chosen, ie: thrown into a shopping cart by the “gods,” Honey Mustard sets them off on an existential journey when he leaps out of the cart. “There ain’t no way I’m going back,” he screams as he splats on the floor. Left in the grocery aisle, Frank and Brenda, along side Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton doing his best Woody Allen impression) and a Middle Eastern pastry named Lavash (David Krumholtz), try to find out if the gods really are the bloodthirsty animals Honey Mustard described in grim detail. Outside Shopwell’s Frank’s friends—like the hapless Barry Sausage (Michael Cera)—try and make their way back to safety on the store’s shelves.
Is “Sausage Party” OK for kids? Let’s get this out of the way first. It looks like a children’s flick. The wieners are adorable and the other characters—including Mr. Grits (Craig Robinson) and Teresa del Taco (Salma Hayek)—look like they wouldn’t be out of place in a movie like “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” but make no mistake, this is not for the little ones. Why? I can sum it up in three words: used talking condom. And that is the least of the adult material. This is über-NSFW and will likely blister the ears of anyone not accustomed to Rogen’s liberal use of the seven words you can never say on television.
So, no children, but will adults like this? It depends on how adult you want to be. The film isn’t as funny as you might expect, given its pedigree. Written by the team behind the very amusing “The Night before” and “This is the End,” it is intermittently hilarious but as often as not it relies on juvenile outrageousness rather than actual wit. The idea of cursing bagels and sexualized tacos quickly wears thin but it is the film’s sheer audaciousness that keeps it interesting. A treatise on everything from cultural relations to gen pop’s tendency to take the easy way out, it’s a timely look at Trump Time, the unique moment in our history when belief outdoes facts. The food items are so pliable that the words to their national anthem, a wild psalm to celebrate the “gods” written by Disney stalwart Alan Menken, change as political affiliations change. “Today was there a verse about exterminating juice?” asks Firewater (Bill Hader).
“Sausage Party,” with all its unhinged humour may be the most subversive movie of the Trump candidacy. There are no walls here, just the barrier of a somewhat self-indulgent, silly story that values cussing as much as the jokes. On the plus side, however, it relishes its ideas and there is no expiration date on its message of unity over division.
Alfred Hitchcock made three of his greatest films with Grace Kelly and tried to lure her back to the big screen long after she retired. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have a seemingly unbreakable cinematic bond and the world of movies would be far less interesting if Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski had never met. John Ford and John Wayne inspired one another to do their best work and Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s shared eccentricities gave us unforgettable nights at the multiplex.
Muses inspire their directors to aspire to new heights, to push the limits of their creativity.
Add another to the list: Melissa McCarthy.
Over the course of four films — including this weekend’s Ghostbusters — she has upped director Paul Feig’s game and in turn he gave her the roles that broke her out of the TV sidekick treadmill and turned her into a big screen star. “It’s not even like we go, ‘We’ve got to do the next movie together,’” Feig says.
“It’s just that suddenly the next movie will pop up and I’m like, ‘You know who would be great for this?’ So it’s funny that people think we have an agenda to keep doing this.”
Agenda or not, their creative chemistry is undeniable.
Feig describes McCarthy’s audition for the first film they made together, Bridesmaids, as a “religious moment.” She was less sure.
“The whole ride home from the audition,” she says, “I was thinking, ‘I got too weird. Should I turn the car around and do that cheesy actor thing of I can do it better! Give me another shot!’”
The director cast her in the scene-stealing role of Megan — imagine a feral, female Guy Fieri — and it was her flashpoint.
Her wonderfully weird performance, complete with sexual hijinks and an explosive bout of diarrhea —“It’s coming out of me like lava!” — stole the show out from under other, better-known stars like Kristen Wiig — and earned her an Oscar nomination.
Next up for the dynamic duo was The Heat, an odd couple, buddy cop movie set in Boston co-starring Sandra Bullock.
McCarthy plays a tough-talking street cop who forms an unlikely alliance with the uptight Sandra Bullock to bring down a murderous drug dealer.
The role riffed on McCarthy’s signature character, the aggressive but damaged comedic persona. “I’ve played a lot of characters who are very vocal, very aggressive,” she told me in 2014.
“For the women I’ve played there is a reason why they are so ballsy and it is nice when you see the crack in the veneer and you realize, ‘It’s part of their insecurity. They stay loud so nobody yells at them.’”
Feig knows when to let McCarthy off the leash — there are some wild slapstick scenes here — but he also knows when to pull her back and let the script do the work.
This week McCarthy headlines Feig’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot alongside Bridesmaids co-star Kristen Wiig.
Will that be their final collaboration? Don’t count on it.
Feig is reportedly writing a Spy sequel as we speak.
“She’s so good,” he says, “and we just really have the same sense of humour.”
Director Paul Fieg and Company are not the Ruiners of Your Childhood. Your youthful “Ghostbusters” memories are alive and well, in your head, in your DVD drawer or digital download file folder. Ghostbros, upset their 1984 favourite is being rebooted with an all female cast, flooded the internet with low-to-no star reviews. As it turns out, the time they spent trying to torpedo a movie they had not yet seen, might have been better spent making room on their basement shelves for the new “Ghostbusters” figurines. Feig hasn’t desecrated a classic, he has added a new chapter, creating a light and fluffy concoction that moves the franchise into the future while paying homage to the past.
When we first meet Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) she’s a professor at Columbia trying to hide her past as a paranormal investigator. When a ghost-hunting book she co-wrote with Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) comes to light she is let go. Like Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler before her, she leaves academia and becomes a professional New York City ghostbuster alongside Abby, proton pack engineer Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and former subway worker Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones).
After making a name for themselves they uncover a major plot hatched by hotel janitor Rowan North (Neil Casey). Upset his genius has been ignored by the world, he plans on unleashing an army of undead to come back and “pester the world” in an event he calls the Fourth Cataclysm. He has created a vortex that will allow whatever it is on that plane to come crashing down on this plane and flood New York City with ghosts. By the climax the movie dissolves into regular summertime C.G.I. tomfoolery as the Ghostbusters battle spirits in Times Square.
There is a sense of déjà vu hanging heavy over “Ghostbusters.” The new film doesn’t continue the original story, it reboots it, taking us back to the origins of the group. In other words, it’s a lot like the 1984 movie. From class four semi-anchored entities and proton streams to cameos from Slimer, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Annie “Ghostbusters, whaddaya want?” Potts plus a glimpse of a Harold Ramis statue, the movie feels familiar but has been freshened up.
The cast doesn’t try to imitate Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis and Hudson. The new characters are just that, new creations plunked down into an existing world.
McCarthy and Wiig, reteamed for the first time since “Bridesmaids,” are solid and Jones is a formidable presence but most interesting is McKinnon as engineering nerd Holtzmann. She is unapologetically weird, as strange as her unruly asymmetrical haircut and a glorious addition to the “Ghostbusters” family.
Also welcome is Chris Hemsworth as the dippy receptionist who doesn’t have glass in his eyeglasses and says things like, “An aquarium is a submarine for fish.” He’s a walking non sequitur and very funny.
Like the old Abbott and Costello horror comedies, “Ghostbusters” doesn’t have any real scares but it will make you laugh. The script, co-written by Feig and “Parks and Recreation” writer Katie Dippold, is funny, if not exactly in a slap the knee kind of way, then in a slow boil constant giggle respect. Is it an out-of-this-world hit like Feig’s “Bridesmaids” or “Spy”? No. It occasionally suffers from a weird rhythm where scenes end suddenly and at least one of the cameos feels wedged in, but the overall effect is one of a respectful resurrection of a beloved franchise.
Best of all, it is self-aware. Reading on-line comments Erin comes across one that reads, “Ain’t no bitches going to hunt no ghosts.” Later Abby says, “Don’t read what crazy people write in the middle of the night online.” Are you listening Ghostbros?
