Ghostbusters 2016 – A Post Analysis Review

A film, an icon to many who've come to admire it and recite many of the lines from it's era, was remade into a load of shit. I thought I wouldn't be so crude but I have to when it came to the new Ghostbusters 2016. At first I felt I must approach this with a sound reason and argument about the merits of the film but as I got to that line, both figuratively and literally, there had to be no sugarcoating the film. With a running time of one hour and fifty six minutes, did I laugh one time? No! Did I register a smirk? No! I was expecting this film to warm up after the first fifteen minutes to get its sea legs and find its rhythm but that never happened. It just kept plodding along.

I went to the Internet bible to the film industry, IMDB, to see what the average person had to say about the film because I wanted to be sure first that I wasn't imagining things and my criticism wasn't being jaded. Well, there were many and the first page held a good sampling with what I had observed. IMDB have star ratings ranging from one to ten. Everyone one of those reviews had given Ghostbusters 2016 a rating of one star and that's the lowest it can go. So I find it amazing that overall the film scored a 5.6 review. Clearly some of those must be people who work for the studios salting the reviews.

Paul Feig and Katie Dippold wrote this malicious mess of a script and Paul Feig directed it. At some point, Columbia Pictures must have had some warnings about this film? The trailer for the film was released on YouTube and it received the highest negative comments of any film trailer that was ever released on YouTube, And then the comments came in and those comments were attributed to misogyny because the film was led by an all female cast. That's debatable because one of the arguments was that chicks aren't funny. They can be with the right material as some of this cast has experienced.

The film has problems, a lot of problems. One major problem is that it had big shoes to fill. This movie was a toddler's size 3 trying to fill in a man's size 11. And I would like to also stipulate that I don't fault the cast. It's the job you are given. You do the best you can with the material that you are given and that material was a big heaping steaming fly swarming load of crap. So you have four women, three who are scientist and white and one who is black and uneducated and a walking stereotype. She worked for the MTA as a booth operator. You may not see it this way but there was the flavor of racism with her part. The thing that stood out for me was her language or rather her use of the language compared to her fellow actresses. It stood out like a sore thumb that she used the word “ain't”. That bothered me because once again, the black person must speak like this all the time because it would be uncool to depict a black person with any level of education and that's why they must always speak with the ignorance that comes with have no education. And it's not about “speaking white” as some tends to fall to in this argument. The dialogue with the other cast is just as bad because the film is peppered with cliches and non-sequitur that don't make any sense. It did nothing to move the script along or add to the meaning of the scene.

Originally I thought did film was to pick up from what the original had done but after seeing cameos from the original cast, it was a blown opportunity to embrace the old with the new. Instead we get Bill Murray, I guess, getting killed and Ernie Hudson in the mortuary business. The music even sucked. At least create your own music instead of remaking the original into an ear splitting fiasco.

And while some talked about those who had their negative opinions and the implications of misogyny, let's talk about the misandry. Chris Hemsworth portrays the adequately stupid receptionist. He's even more than an imbecilic moron, he's the walking dumb with a six-pack. He's playing the Annie Potts character and if the same had been done to her when she took the role, the women advocacy groups would have shut the film down for depicting her as an airhead. Annie brought a sense of purpose to the role and defined it with honor. She was no buffoon at all but Chris is an embarrassment so why does his role gets accepted without a whisper of controversy? Some would say so what, but if we are to move forward in our society, we can't keep throwing back to old vestiges and stereotypes and expect them to be overlooked for the sake of some lame comedy.

Watching this film wasn't a fun watch. With the original, you had lines you could quote, “He slimmed me!”; “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together”; “Don't cross the streams.”; “That's gotta be some cockroach.” See, that was a fun film. There were no lines worth quoting with Ghostbusters 2016 because it wasn't fun to experience and there lies the crust with some films today, you jut don't have the fun experience anymore. I thought the Kate McKinnon character would be a fun watch but it was just the opposite. The lines she kept spewing out were too much of gibberish that she and Kristen Wiig kept describing when it came to the equipment and soon that became just white noise. At the end of the film I was hoping for some silly outtakes that Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy is known for but even that let me down. None of it was funny. How do you make a classic original comedy and turn it into a liquefied diarrhea filled slog fest of savage abdominal pain turning your hole raw in the process and expect people to be entertained. You don't.  

Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?

Someone once said

A loaf of bread cost a quarter

Each generation's music

will mark its time and slowly fade

Young pop stars and young actors

Becomes old pop stars and old actors

Wrinkled, gray, fading glory, lost curtain calls

Speak with fondness of the era that becomes bygone

Foresight is never bestowed on youth

Live in the moment with foolish pride

Learn that wisdom comes with age

Never fear the coming tide

Of uncertainty, of insecurity

Of misogyny, of predictability

Of infertility, of opportunity

Of gullibility, of masculinity

Of gravity, of culpability

Of domesticity, of eventuality

Of possibility, of equanimity

Of negativity, of celebrity

Of minority, of liability

Of immunity, of humanity

Of morality, of impartiality

Of heredity, of equality

Of fidelity, of eternity

Of banality, of audacity

Of atrocity, of vulgarity

Of stability, of viability

Of sexuality, of profanity

Of stupidity, of maternity

Of spirituality, of hostility

Of mendacity, of integrity

Of disparity, of authority

Of duplicity, of community

Of brutality, of absurdity

Of fraternity, of generosity

Of immaturity, of serendipity

Of immortality, of femininity

Of pity, of clarity

Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio

A generation consumed with that passage

Looking backwards to pause time

Never being able to reset the moment

The Day the Cops Stopped Me While Riding a Bicycle – Twice

There are moments when time and distance tends to let things escape our collective thoughts. We've long since have forgotten about them sometimes because it's a recurring thing and sometimes it's just so plain innocuous. But then there are times when those recurring and innocuous things get a memory jog from some of the recent events surrounding police officers and American black males. One of the headlines that I read was “Why do cops stop black drivers more than white?” As simple a question that may be, it is beset with more complicated issues involving race and trust and profiling. In my case, I began to recall a couple of incidents where I was pulled over by the police when I was on a bicycle. The first such incident occurred at night at 2:00 a.m. in the morning.

On this particular day, I was involved in the film community by being an extra in films that were being shot in the Houston area. I had a friend who was a casting director and she knew that I was a writer who pursuing a career in screenwriting. She had told me if I wanted to learn the business that I needed to know the business of film. With her help, I jumped into the arena of doing extra work and at the same time, studying the intricacies of film making. I wasn't interested in being in front of the camera and wanted to know more about what went on behind the camera. However, I had this face that was good in expressing itself and I was tall. So, on this particular day, I decided to ride my bike to the set. Now keep in mind that film shoots last easily to twelve hours. You go over take after take after take. And once a scene is done, you set up for the next shot. It is a business of patience. As day turned into night, that day of filming finally wrapped up. I decided to head to my mailbox to check the days mail. It was the early morning hours and there was no traffic. My travels was not hindered by any oncoming vehicles. As I went through Bellaire, Texas, my travels did become hindered.

As I rode along, there was no traffic on the road. I stopped at the intersection and then proceeded forth. As I crossed through the intersection, I noticed flashing lights behind me. I was being pulled over by not one cop, but by three cops. As I stopped, all three cops got out of their patrol car and approached me. One was clearly in charge and clearly loaded for a conflict. I don't recall what I had said but the officer said that I had ran a red light. Now I do know what I said when he said that, “ On a bike?” That had me stymied. Here I am on a bike, traveling x-amount of distance and there is no traffic at all on the road and I am suppose to wait 45 seconds for the light to turn green. I wasn't on a motorized vehicle, I was on a ten speed bike.

As I faced three Bellaire cops, I kept my calm. I was toting a satchel that contained my clothes that I wore on the set. In the film, I played a cop. Ironic, isn't it. They asked if they could search my satchel. Let's see, three cops and one of me on a bike. Sure. So they searched and as they did, they found all of these police baseball caps that I had brought to the set. There was a New York City police cap, a San Francisco police cap, a SWAT police cap and a plain police cap that was used on the set. They also found a slingshot that I had forgotten about. The aggressive cop freaked out and said that was a weapon. Now here, you're tempted to be a smart ass because you want to say that you never heard of anyone holding up a 7-11 store with a slingshot. But I don't see this guy having a sense of humor.

Now there are talking points of late about deescalating a situation. While this one officer was getting riled up, a second officer was figuring things out as the number of police caps that I had became a question. He pulled the other officer over and they started talking. The aggressive officer took a pause and returned my stuff and I was allowed to leave without a ticket. As I left, I figured that if I didn't allegedly ran that light, they would have found another cause to stop me.

The second episode occurred when I was in downtown Houston. At this time, it was during the daytime. I was heading through downtown and as I recall, I had stopped on the sidewalk after getting something from a Randall's grocery store. As I was waiting on the sidewalk, I noticed a HPD patrol car circling the block. Now if you're black in America, you already have that sense that you are about to be confronted by the cops for some unknown reason. Sure as shit, as the expression goes, the cops pull up to the corner where I was about travel. In this patrol car were two cops dressed in black T-shirts with the words 'Houston Police' written across it. One officer was black, the other Asian. The black one was the aggressor. When he pulled up, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Where did I get the bike from?” It wasn't stolen and I don;t think any calls came through about a stolen bike. This bike was unique. I used to produce a top morning radio program in Houston. WE did a lot of charitable bike runs for different causes. A local bike shop gave me one of their surplus bikes as a cross promotion that was normal. This particular bike had the word “police' stenciled on it. I rode that bike for months without a peep from anybody in law enforcement as I rode it in front of many officers in the past. This time it was different.

When the cop asked me where I got my bike, I knew he was looking for a justification for stopping me. The tricky things is that when you know some of the law, you're doomed for failure when you are put in the position of defending your rights. I knew that even with the word 'police' on the bike, it was not illegal because the word 'Houston' wasn't on there. The officer made the claim that the word 'police' was illegal to have on the bike. So as they ran my information, you felt even more violated because they are digging into your life. I had nothing against me. He had ordered me to scrap the word 'police' off of my bike. He was asking me to deface my own bike for something that was not illegal. And while he and the other officer stood over me, I took a small blade and proceeded to remove the word off my bike in four places. It didn't feel right whatsoever. It was becoming a bike that had no meaning to me. I don't know why but it just did. Somewhere along the line, I feel like my constitutional rights had been violated. Once I had done that, they left. It still bothers me to this day.

If there ever was a reason to understand why the community is at odds with the police force, it is situations like this, unnecessary harassment that lingers and festers lie a scab on an old wound. You want to voice your thoughts while you are under their thumb but they use the law in such a way that you, unless you have a law degree, are unarmed and defenseless to their authoritarian tactics. And as I was minding my own business, not violating any laws, I get harassed and more than likely, profiled in this situation. I know that all cops aren't like these that I experienced but it is these types of cops that sullies the image of the cops that are out there doing the honorable thing. It is a hard job but it shouldn't be made harder by the cops who already have their minds made up.