Being miserable but still wanting to work is frustrating sometimes. I’m not at a loss for things I’d like to write and rant about. Fifteen minutes on any reputable news site or blog yields just as many ideas. SOPA is a good example, but in general there’s more than enough horror in the world to fill this blog with social and political commentary.
It’s about time I took a serious swing at that stuff, and not just allude to it in everything else I write, so you may see a process of experimentation with that type of writing in the near future.
Hopefully, there will be a long vacation from movie reviews for a while. I’m pretty burnt out on them, but I’m halfway tempted to try a short-ish column of some kind.
Then there’s just banging out some free-wheeling observation pieces that I hope will have a decent humorous slant going for them. I still dream of writing for Cracked.com, and this blog is as good a place as any to work out the best voice for trying to do that.
My mind is more erratic with conflicting, warring thoughts than I can ever remember it being. Writing is still a beautiful way of sorting them out. With a little luck this blog should become an awfully interesting scene over the next few months.
So, stick around, put up with the tail-end of this challenge and wish me luck.
Being unhappy for no reason is no excuse for a lack of productivity, or for not trying at all times to find the next thing that keeps you at the table you worked so hard to get to in the first place.
I’ll be twenty-seven the next time I blink for more than a few seconds. I complain constantly to myself of not being where I thought I would be when I was seventeen, eighteen. Moments of the universe’s giddy idea of bad fortune aside I have no one to blame for that but myself.
And, really, weird ladies, disgruntled gentlemen, wouldn’t you like to see me talk about something else besides movies and self-loathing?
**********
30 Day Movie Challenge
Day Twenty-Nine: First Movie You Remember Seeing
Ghostbusters II (1989)
Directed by: Ivan Reitman
Starring: Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, Sigourney Weaver
One of the recurring themes of these reviews is that many of the movies mentioned here are ones that have been favorites for a long time. A lot of things act as markers over the course of my life so far. People, places, certain books, certain albums, TV shows to a very minor extent, and, of course, movies. Some of the long-time personal classics mentioned in past reviews, I can remember the exact time, place, surroundings and even feelings that happened to be around at the same moment. Others are vaguer, and seem as though they have been part of my landscape for as long as I’ve been alive. I’m not going to remember the first time I saw them. That’s fine. It’s usually not important. I would call it a mildly engrossing, self-absorbed trivia of a kind.
Sometimes, I just like to look at the first time I saw a movie, and see how it’s held up over the years in the face of everything else in my life evolving, changing, disappearing or moving past me. I’m interested in seeing how the consistent (my love of movies) moves, alters or endures within the inconsistent (damn near everything else).
I’m going to cheat slightly. I’ve already listed the first movie I ever remember seeing (Ghostbusters). So, instead I’m going with the first movie I ever saw in a theater. Going to the theater can still be a wonderful experience. I don’t go as often as I would like, but some of my favorite memories are that of going to a theater, sitting in the dark, blinking and then being at a complete loss to explain how a couple of hours could have gone by so quickly.
Bad movies can have the opposite effect. You’ll check the time a dozen times, stagger out of the theater as quickly as possible when it’s over and wonder if it’s possible to get the time and money back.
That’s happened to me, but not so often as to sour me on going forever. I’m twenty-six, have been going to movie theaters for twenty-two years, and I still get a nerd rush from going to see a movie at night, completely loving it and then coming out of the theater to the strange blur of the real world. The blur goes away, the evening goes on, but the movie, if it was any kind of impact on you at all, stays with you for a while.
It was a much larger experience for me as a child, but then again, most things were. I’m just happy that I still like going at all.
It makes sense that the first film I would see in a theater would be Ghostbusters II. At that point in my life I was pretty damn obsessed with the whole thing. My parents saw no alternative but to take me. I still remember not being able to sleep the night before. My optimism in those days was pretty solid. There was no way this could end badly. The thought that the movie might be intensely terrifying on the largest screen I had ever watched a movie on, or the possibility of the movie not being very good didn’t even occur to me. I had countless toys, an already-worn-out copy of the first movie on VHS, a proton pack, a trap, the firehouse and watched the cartoon every time it came on.
There was no way this could end badly.
No way at all.
In retrospect I blame my parents. My four-year-old perspective was not ready for Vigo or the part where Ray, Winston and Egon go into the sewer to find the river of slime. I had seen horror films up to that point, but this was different. This was at a movie theater with a screen the size of a small island. Speakers roared and shook the darkness with music and sound effects from every corner of the room.
I wasn’t especially crazy about the dark back then.
My parents realized they had made a mistake pretty early on, but I’ll always remember that sewer scene. I wasn’t handling it very well, and my parents used the moment when the gang decides to go back and get their proton packs as a last-ditch effort to calm me the hell down. I would imagine the other patrons in the theater were pretty sick of me at this point. I’ve dealt with freaked out kids at movie theaters, and I’ve wanted to hit whoever brought them with a sock full of quarters.
My parents managed to calm me down, and then Ray had to go and finally track down the river of slime.
That didn’t please me a whole lot. I turned to my mother and echoed one of Ray’s lines from the film. “Why aren’t they going back?! Why aren’t they getting their proton packs?! They NEED their proton packs!”
And so forth.
It was a long time before my parents took me to see a movie.
Not even Bill Murray’s pscyhic powers could save me.
I loved the movie though. I thought it was just as good as the original. Over the course of my childhood I watched it just as many times. Things like Vigo became a good deal less frightening as I got older.
Almost twenty-two years later, and I still watch it every once in a while. It hasn’t aged perfectly, but it’s holding steady. I’ve come to realize through the years that it’s not nearly as good as the original. There’s a lot of great things in it (like Peter MacNicol stealing every scene he’s in as Vigo’s lackey, and the whole completely left-field romantic subplot between Rick Moranis and Annie Potts), but it just doesn’t have that lightning-in-a-bottle sense of fun that the first one had. The writing and cast can barely hide the fact that they’re pretty much just trying to repeat the magic. There isn’t a lot of originality to be found.
Does that really matter though? I don’t think so. It’s a good formula, and it would have been foolish to mess around with it too much. Ghostbusters II is still an incredibly entertaining movie. Murray asking Akroyd if he’s been sleeping with the slime, followed by Akroyd looking entirely too uncomfortable, is still one of my favorite bits from either movie. The same goes for Murray, and his horrible TV show, Ernie Hudson’s encounter with the ghost train and Ramis’ great deadpan line, “We had part of a slinky, but I straightened it.”
Another endearing quality of Ghostbusters II are the small, distinctive roles filled out by actors like Kurt Fuller (whose interactions with Murray are fun), Kevin Dunn as a psychic, Ben Stein, Philip Baker Hall, Cheech Marin and Brian Doyle-Murray as the psychiatrist who wearily listens to the Ghostbusters’ pleas to be let out of the madhouse before Vigo ushers in his “season of evil.” (I would argue that’s every Christmas, but I’m not the ghost of a 17th century warlord).
I also didn’t know until recently that Max Von Sydow did the dubbing for Vigo. That’s worth a couple of brownie points for the movie right there. I’ve often wished my own life was narrated by a man whose voice probably makes God nervous.
This movie has plenty to enjoy. It just doesn’t stand on quite the same level as the first one. I can live with that, and I can therefore enjoy the movie on its own terms.
There’s a good story, too. I dig the idea of a long-dead European tyrant haunting a painting, drawing energy from a river of slime beneath the streets of New York City, and how this pulls the Ghostbusters out of litigation and obscurity, and back to work (the courtroom scene, with Moranis as their sublimely incompetent lawyer, is great). I’ve seen worse examples of a follow-up to a classic going through the paces. Could it have been better? Maybe. Should it have been made at all? That’s up to individual opinion. Probably not, but I’m glad they made it anyway. Ghostbusters is one of those things I unapologetically can’t get enough of. As long as the entire gang is on board they’ll have my complete attention.
Ghostbusters II at least deserves credit for one thing, even if you hated the entire thing. It got Bill Murray back after a four-year exile from acting, with the exception of 1986′s Little Shop of Horrors, after the failure of the underrated Razor’s Edge. I’m certainly not going to complain about that. I don’t even blame him for wanting nothing to do with Ghostbusters III (the last time I checked). Two movies just might be pushing it. This sequel will always have a place in my library and geekdom memories. I’m not going to weep if all we have to enjoy is a great movie, a good movie, a fantastic video game, a memorable animated series and an assortment of books and comics. Why do we need anything else?
