Ghost Busters (2016)

I'll be the first to admit that the internet gender war over Ghostbusters isn't particularly interesting to me. Neither the Social Justice Warriors who demand that it is every woman's responsibility to see this movie nor the Anti-Cootie Brigade's demand that it is every man's responsibility to not see it concerns me. After all, at the end of the day the new Ghostbusters is just another in a fairly long line of remakes of movies from the 1980s. Truth to tell, so many remakes of 80s movies have been done in the past 7 or so years that I sometimes feel I am reliving the decade.

Oh, I get that absolutely nothing I write in this review is going to change your mind if you're one of the people who has already decided if this is good or not. The battle lines have been clearly drawn for two years and people who have not even seen it or are even likely to see it already know everything they want to know about it. However, if you're one of those few people in the world with the intelligence to know that you can't really have an informed opinion on a movie without seeing it, please feel free to read on.

The real questions that needs to be asked of this movie--indeed the only ones that should be asked--is "is it good? Is it funny?". If the answer to that is yes, then gender doesn't really matter, now does it?

Point in fact, the answer does happen to be yes. This is a good, funny movie.

Is it as good as the original? Don't be absurd. Of course it isn't. But I would point out that none of the 80s redos have been, either. It helps that its not a beat for beat remake. It does take some ideas and cameos from the original but it is also its own thing.

Dr. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) is about to make tenure at Columbia University when a ghost from her past comes back. In this case the ghost happens to be a book she wrote years ago with a friend, Abigail Yates (Melissa McCarthy). Yates has republished the book much to Gilbert's dismay. When Gilbert goes to ask Yates to pull the book, she gets dragged along to investigate a haunted mansion by Yates and her new assistant Jillian Holtzman (a wonderfully unhinged Kate McKinnon). When a video of the investigation goes viral--ending with a slimed Gilbert declaring her belief in ghosts--the trio gets fired and decides to set up shop hunting ghosts. They are shortly joined by former MTA worker Patty (Leslie Jones) and dumber than a brick secretary Kevin (Chris Hemsworth). Things get complicated by the usual bureaucrats trying to shut them down while a creepy janitor wants to unleash the Ghostpocalypse on the city.

I won't claim as others have that this is funnier than the 1984 original. Then again, the original is one of the top ten comedies of the 1980s with three top comedians at the top of their game directed by a comedy director at the top of his game. It's an impossible bar to measure up to and even the original cast fell short with Ghostbusters 2 in 1989.

That said, this version also has four top comics at the height of their game directed by a comic director at the top of his game. If this film falls short its not for want of trying. Its just that the original is just that classic. But this movie has nothing to be ashamed of. It has plenty of laughs, especially from Hemsworth, who threatens to steal the show from his four co-stars.

All of the surviving stars make cameos along with a few of the ghosts. After a while the cameos become slightly distracting which is probably the biggest knock on the movie. Some of them sort of work while others just plain fall flat. Dan Akroyd's unfortunately falls into the latter category.

But perhaps the most interesting and fun aspect of this is the 3-D. Unlike many modern 3-D movies, this one actually bothers with gimmick shots! Imagine that! Ghosts and Proton beams go flying out of the screen with fair regularity. It's not quite as insane as an 80s 3-D movie and it would look a bit better if it had been actually shot in 3-D as opposed to being a conversion, but it also doesn't shy away from what makes 3-D fun. It's actually well worth watching in 3-D, something that can't always be said nowadays.

But then again, it's just plain worth watching. While it's not going to make you forget the original, it's also not the disaster the ACB was hoping it would be. It's a good, fun time at the movies during the summer that, since it runs under two hours, wisely doesn't overstay it's welcome.

I hope this movie does well at the box office. NOT to vindicate the SJWs and make the ACB look foolish, but simply because it deserves to. 

Deadpool (2016)

Deadpool is not your grandfather's comic book movie. For that matter, it's not your father's comic book movie. In fact, I'm not entirely sure who's comic book movie this is. It's raunchy, gorey, hyper-violent, foul-mouthed,outrageous, hilarious and quite possibly the most fun comic book movie since the 1966 Batman! It is quite possibly the most R-Rated movie I've watched since Pulp Fiction. In short, I loved every bawdy, over the top moment of it. I will warn, the rest of this review may not exactly be Safe For Work.

You know you're in for something different when the opening credits read "some douchebag's film", "produced by asshats", and "directed by an overpaid tool". The movie concerns Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds, "God's Perfect Idiot"), an ex-Special Forces operative turned mercenary. He meets and falls for a hooker named Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, "a hot chick"). When he finds out he's dying of cancer, Ajax (Ed Skrein, "a British Villain") offers him a chance to be part of an experiment that will cure his cancer. The experiment, in a vile and disgusting secret base, ends up giving him regenerative powers but makes him look like "an avocado had sex with an older, disgusting avocado". Wilson takes on the moniker of Deadpool and goes out for bloody revenge. Along the way Colossus (Stefan Kapicic, "A CGI Character") tries to make him give up his murderous ways and join the X-Men, something Deadpool consistently flips off.

Ryan Reynolds played Wilson for the first time in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That movie is mostly okay, but the character of Deadpool was completely wasted. Especially since they decided to sew his mouth shut, eliminating one of the character's biggest traits, his non-stop wisecracking. Reynolds loved the character enough to keep pushing to get his own movie. Reynolds is hysterically funny in this, cracking wise, drawing childish pictures of the villain, and generally breaking the fourth wall again and again. Actually, this movie doesn't so much as break the fourth wall as it burns it down, scatters the ashes all over the place and farts in it's general direction for good measure. There is literally a fourth wall break inside a fourth wall break in this movie, something not even Groucho Marx ever did.

The rest of the cast somehow manages to keep up Reynolds. I'm not sure how they do it, but they do it. While Baccarin is ultimately reduced to Damsel in Distress, her early scenes with Reynolds are touching and funny, as is the scene where she unmasks him at the end. Skrein's Ajax, real name Francis (a fact Deadpool loves reminding him of) is appropriately nasty. His henchwoman Angel Dust (Gina Carano) as is gorgeous as she is deadly. She gives Colossus a good run for his money in the fight department at the end. Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead is the one character, however, most equipped to meet Deadpool on equal terms. Their back and forth is an absolute highlight of the film.

I would say that this tops the earlier Wolverine movie, but there's really no comparison. They're two movies on completely different levels of filmmaking, which is weird since they sort of inhabit the same shared universe. Deadpool is clearly supposed to be part of Fox's X-Men Universe. Besides Colossus, there are several scene at Professor Xavier's School. Mercifully, you don't need to have seen any of the other movies to enjoy this one nor do you need to see this one to enjoy the other movies. It stands on its own gloriously and wonderfully. And at under 2 hours, it isn't as bloated as other superhero movies so it doesn't overstay it's welcome.

Good thing, too. Although if you did need to see X-Men to enjoy this or vice versa, there would be a lot of disappointed children since there is no way any child should see this. There were reports of parents taking their children to see this and being outraged by the content. To them I say: "Hi. There's this little thing known as the internet. Maybe you heard of it? Lets you check out the content of movies before seeing them? Yeah, maybe you should look into that in the future." For the rest of us, however, this is one wild trip.

Little Miss Marker (1934)

When I heard this morning that Shirley Temple had passed away, it occurred to me that the only one of her movies I had ever seen was Fort Apache, done when she was an adult and near the end of her film career. So I knew I had to watch one of her earlier films in salute. Being a Damon Runyon fan, Little Miss Marker was the natural choice.

Little Miss Marker concerns a bookmaker who goes by the name of Sorrowful Jones, so named due to his most unhappy disposition. Mr. Jones lays a G on a race that is somewhat fixed by the gambler Big Steve. Big Steve is planning another, bigger fix which will net him 10 to 1 on a $10,000 bet. During the course of the first fix, a gambler leaves a marker with Jones in the form of a small doll named Marthy. Marthy's mother went to the Big Racecourse in the Sky already and when the gambler loses the bet, he decides it would be more advantageous to him to join her than to attempt to come up with the $20 he owes Jones for Marthy. So Jones and his friends find themselves stuck with the little doll whom they end up nicknaming Marky. The big plan seems to be to make the authorities think that Marky owns Big Steve's horse so that Big Steve can place his bets and win his money. But while Big Steve is in Chicago placing bets, his doll Bangles starts to fall for Little Miss Marker and Sorrowful. Sorrowful himself falls for the kid and starts to change his ways. Unfortunately, Sorrowful's friends are a not very good influence on Marky and she starts to become more than somewhat cynical and tough. So it comes that Bangles and Sorrowful conspire to turn Marky back into the nice doll she once was so she can eventually end up with a good family.

My apologies for my attempt at Runyon-speak, but it seemed appropriate for the movie.

Temple, of course, is Marky and it takes all of five seconds of her on the screen for one to realize why she was such a big deal in the 1930s. She absolutely bursts with personality in a way that no child star before or since her has. At the age of five, she could do everything a veteran adult performer could do: sing, dance, and act. Not mug--act. Her antics could crack you up, but when she turned on the dramatic moments, she could break your heart. The scene of her telling Bangles (Dorothy Dell) about the death of her mother is particularly touching. She switches gears mid-scene frequently and does it effortlessly. I have no idea how directors got the performances out of her that they did, but those performances are a marvel to watch. What's doubly surprising is that this is one of her earlier films.

On the adult side of things, we have Adolphe Menjou as Sorrowful. Menjou was a talented actor best known for this and the 1931 version of The Front Page. Ironically, Walter Mathau would star in remakes of both movies, both times in Menjou's part. Menjou doesn't play Sorrowful as sad-faced as Runyon described him, but he does marvelous in the part. Dorothy Dell is Bangles. This was one of only four movies she was in before she was tragically killed in a car accident at the age of 19. That's a shame as she had a great singing voice and shares a fun duet with Temple. Charles Bickford is de facto villain Big Steve. He's not in the movie a lot, but his final scene makes the character. And Lynne Overman's character Regret steals scenes whenever he shows up.

Anyone who has read Runyon's stories and watched the movies made from them know that most of the movies simply take the short story as a jumping off point and make huge changes to them. Part of that comes from the fact that many of Runyon's tales are more tragic than they are funny. The short story of Little Miss Marker in particular is a heart breaker. However, there were certain things you didn't do in 1930s Hollywood and the tearjerker ending to Runyon's tale was one of them, especially with Shirley Temple in the lead. The changes to this one are good and at least the germ of the story was there.

Ultimately, this is one of the best Runyon adaptions, especially as it isn't a pure comedy like most of them. It has a pathos to it which showed an understanding of the source material. A large portion of that pathos is set by it's irrepressible star.

Rest in peace, Shirley Temple and thank you for films like Little Miss Marker. Your films helped make the world a better place in the 1930s and they still do today.

It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

After several years of making serious--and somewhat depressing--message films, director Stanley Kramer decided to try to make THE comedy of all time. So he gathered most of the greatest comedians of the day, took a huge script that by legend was two scripts--one for dialogue and one for action--and gave us It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a film that originally ran almost as long as The Ten Commandments. Point in fact, the first actual cut was, according to legend, 5 1/2 hours. It was trimmed down to 210 minutes (3 1/2 hours) before being cut back to 202 minutes. It played at that length for four weeks before being trimmed down to 163 minutes. 9 additional minutes--consisting of the overture, intermission, entr'acte, and exit music were then cut out leaving the movie at 154 minutes. For roughly 30 years, this was the only version possible to be seen. It was the version I first saw when a local station would run it on New Year's Day. And they cut it even further than that, even lopping off the very ending of the movie.


In 1991, roughly 20 minutes of 70mm trims were found and put back into the movie along with the overture, etc, bringing the movie up to 182 minutes. That version was released on VHS and Laserdisc (remember those?) and became, for the most part, the fan favorite version. However, MGM never properly restored the footage, so when the DVDs and first Blu Ray came out, it was the 163 minute version. Fans howled for the longer version and it looked like it would never happen. However, this past week, The Criterion Collection, through the efforts of Film Restorationist Extraordinaire Robert A Harris, put together a 197 minute version, which is probably as close to the original Roadshow as we're ever going to get.


The movie involves a group of motorists who witness a horrific (but spectacular) car crash on a California road. They try to help the driver of that car, a gangster named Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante), but he's already dying. Before he (literally) kicks the bucket, he tells them about $350,000 he's hidden under a "Big W" in Santa Rosita State Park. The motorists fail to tell the cops (one of whom is Norman Fell) about the money. They decide instead to go dig the money up themselves. At first, they try to work out a plan where everyone gets shares. But it takes no time at all for them to decide that it's every man--"including the old bag"--for himself and a wild chase for the money ensues. Unknown to the participants, they are being watched by the police, especially Santa Rosita Capt. T.G. Culpepper (Spencer Tracy), who wants someone to lead them to the money. Others get involved, wanton destruction of personal and private property ensues and the film just gets more and more frantic as it goes along.


Like quite a few epics from the 1960's, this film is rife with cameos and guest appearances. Not quite everyone who was someone in comedy is in it, but it comes close. If you know anything about classic comedy from the first six decades of the 20th Century, you'll be delighted at spotting all the actors. The principals were mostly TV actors at the time--Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Buddy Hacket, Jonathan Winters, Dorothy Provine, Edie Adams, Ethel Merman, and Mickey Rooney are the primary motorists who kick the whole thing off. Phil Silvers, Terry Thomas and Dick Shawn end up entering the race, as does Peter Falk and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson. Along the way, there's appearances by Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Sterling Holloway, Paul Ford, Edward Evert Horton, The Three Stooges, Don Knotts, Buster Keaton, Carl Reiner, Arnold Stang, Marvin Kaplan, Leo Gorcey and Jim Backus. On the side of the cops we have Alan Carney, William Demearest, Harry Lauter, Roy Roberts, Zazu Pitts, and Madalyn Rhue. Selma Diamond is the voice of Spencer Tracy's wife. And the list goes on.


Some people have complained that all the cameos make the film distracting to watch, much like The Greatest Story Ever Told. Frankly, I find the latter film much more distracting with it's cameos. It's hard to take a movie about Jesus seriously when you have the actor who played Klinger as one of his disciples, Sidney Poitier helping to carry the cross, Charlton Heston screaming "Repent!" for ten minutes as John the Baptist, and John Wayne as a Roman Centurion wearing a wristwatch and saying "Truly this man was the son of God". In Mad World, the cameos fit. The only sad thing is that many of the cameos will be lost on a lot of young people. It's like watching The Muppet Show nowadays--some of the stars may be remembered and quite a number of them get the question of "Who?". Yes, if you know classic comedy, then almost everybody in the movie will pop out at you. If you're under a certain age, however, it's possible that the only people you may recognize now are Jonathan Winters, Peter Falk, The Three Stooges and Jim Backus. And even poor Jim Backus is a little shaky in this day and age. Actually, you might be surprised to that you would know more of the people than you would think, For instance, Jimmy Durante is the narrator of Frosty the Snowman (Jonathan Winters did the same duty for the awful Frosty Returns). Sterling Holloway was the voice of Winnie the Pooh (and Kaa the Snake in The Jungle Book). Edward Evert Horton narrated Fractured Fairy Tales on Rocky and Bullwinkle. Selma Diamond was on Night Court and in the Steve Martin movie All of Me. Don Knotts did a couple of movies with Tim Conway for Disney like The Apple Dumpling Gang. Jack Benny did a Looney Tunes cartoon spoofing himself (Rochester was in it, too) called The Mouse That Jack Built. Ethel Merman is in Airplane! as herself. Dick Shawn voiced The Snow Miser in The Year Without a Santa Claus. Carl Reiner is in the Clooney Oceans 11 trilogy. Sid Caesar is the gym teacher in Grease. And so on. Do a little research and you may be surprised.


Everybody who was in the movie was a great in their field. Spencer Tracy is one of the finest actors who ever lived. He's essentially playing the straight man in this and he's terrific as Culpepper, whose life slowly unravels during the course of the movie. He holds our attention whenever he's onscreen, even when he's just walking around. As for the comics...well, what can be said? Everyone will have their own favorite among the leads--Jonathan Winters seems to be the biggest favorite, with his hysterical destruction of Kaplan and Stang's gas station one of the best set pieces in the movie. It is to be hoped that should young people actually watch this that they may seek out other works from these great comedians to see what they've missed. I'm probably dreaming there, but I'm allowed.


Funny enough, there's nothing really in the movie to actually date it. Most comedies, even the truly great ones from the past forty years like Blazing Saddles and Airplane! have humor or other elements that firmly put them in their era. It can be argued that Airplane! is funnier than Mad World, but the disco scene--funny as it is--makes it a product of 1980. But the only thing outside of the cars to date Mad World is the appearance of pay phones. Everything else is timeless. The movie could literally have been shot at any given time. That could be why it still works so well and remains so funny. The complete lack of topical humor is the genius of the movie. You could watch it two hundred years from now and the jokes still wouldn't date. Two hundred years from now, people are going to watch Airplane! and scratch their heads at the disco scene (sadly). I'm not knocking Airplane!, mind you. I love the film and it's one of only a few comedies I bothered getting on Blu Ray (I by and large don't need to see comedies in hi def), but the reality is that it's already dating badly while Mad World manages not to.


Oh, and for the young people who wonder why Ethel Merman just doesn't pull out her cell phone to call her son, the answer is they didn't have them back then.


The Criterion Collection Blu Ray is a joy for fans of the film. It includes the "general release version", that is the 163 minute version in gorgeous high definition. But it also includes the reconstruction of the Roadshow version. Now again, this is a reconstruction, so parts of it aren't perfect. Remember, MGM didn't restore the trims, so Criterion could only do so much with them. As a result, there's a noticeable shift in quality whenever the film goes to restored footage. Some restored footage has burned in Japanese subtitles, which are fortunately a little light and small and not particularly obtrusive. Sometimes they have picture but no sound, so subtitles show up. And in at least four or five scenes, there's audio but no picture, so stills get used instead. That, to use Dick Shawn's slang, tends to bug some people, but I'm fine with it. None of those sequences are particularly long and at least three of them explain certain things that happen within the movie. At least one is full on hilarious and never should have been cut and one has a major plot point in it. It's also loaded with great extras, including the most fascinating commentary track I've ever heard. The track not only has great info on who was in the movie but who wasn't in the movie. Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Ed Wynn and Groucho Marx among others were penciled in but didn't make it.


The Blu Ray also reinstates the police calls that played during the films intermission. Those radio calls are interesting since they clear up a couple of plot points in between the two acts. The history of those calls is that they were piped in throughout the theaters during the original Roadshow engagement until a little old lady complained that they made her think strange men were with her in the ladies room. I'll leave the snarky comments about that to my readers.


This Blu Ray is an absolute joy. Like Twilight Time's Man in the Dark release this week, it's a must buy for anyone who owns a Blu Ray player. The restoration by Robert Harris truly adds to this wonderful movie. All of the general release footage is amazing to look at and the reconstructed footage, though not as nice, doesn't look that bad either. There's some great extras, including a five minute piece on how the restoration was pulled off. Being a Criterion release, the disc is a little pricey--49.95, dual format DVD and Blu Ray, but then again it is 5 discs, so that works out to $10 a disc. "And that's tax free money, my friend." At any rate, it's well worth the purchase. Extremely highly recommended.