Why isn't Ghostbusters a comedy franchise any more?
Also, can Star Wars be exciting again? And I look at a pair of very fun new horror movies. (yes, I'm one of those Substack people now)
I’m doing the Substack thing…
TL;DR Freelancing is very hard and I have a mortgage to pay!
I started building this thing a year ago after six years as a freelancer, only for everything to change when I got myself a staff job. Unfortunately, the current state of online media meant that particular job only ended up existing for around 10 months (RIP The Digital Fix!), sending me back into the arms of freelancing.
And guys, it’s tough.
The landscape was fragile and difficult 12 months ago, but it’s somehow even worse now. The number of possible places to write criticism is shrinking at an alarming rate because, broadly, reviews and thoughtful analysis don’t drive traffic — and if online journalism is the arid surface of Arrakis, traffic is the spice that everyone desperately wants to mine.
But I’m choosing to be optimistic and hope that at least a few people do want that stuff. And so, here I am.
I’m not 100% sure what this is going to be just yet. Hopefully a few people will read it and tell me what they want and don’t want from it. There will be reviews, there will be essays, there will be hot takes. Ultimately, I’ll be working this all out as it goes along (and I’m not asking anyone to pay for it, yet). Maybe there will be something good in here for you.
But first, let’s talk about why the new Ghostbusters movie is such a strange beast.
Ghostbusters is somehow both nostalgic and blind to its past
Remember when Ghostbusters was a comedy movie? Though the 1980s original did make use of innovative and relatively expensive special effects, it was first and foremost a really funny film. In some ways, the franchise — as it subsequently became — was a victim of its own success. The first film became a cultural behemoth, spawning a number-one song, an animated series, and thousands of items of merchandise. The ghostly genie couldn’t go back in the bottle, no matter how many proton packs you fired at it.
Ghostbusters II raised the alarm by being a step down in just about every way and we all remember the aggro around the female-led 2016 reboot. For my money, that reboot remains a fun comedic ride in the spirit of the original, but it did also have a problem at its core: these movies were now blockbusters.
That problem very much carried over to 2021’s miserable and cynical Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Billed by nepo baby director Jason Reitman as a story that would “hand the movie back to the fans” — gotta get rid of those pesky women, right? — it was a tedious slice of generic Hollywood summer schlock. I hated it. So I have to admit that I was dreading this week’s release of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
And you know what? It’s actually fine.
Frozen Empire picks up with the next generation of Spenglers as they’re fully immersed in their career as ghostbusters. But in Captain America: Civil War style — or Team America: World Police if you prefer — they have their wings clipped by the mayor (William Atherton is back!) after causing a little too much carnage during one frenetic ghost hunt. Teenage Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) is told she has to sit out future missions, which proves to be a problem when a mysterious orb shows up and starts sending ghost scanners haywire.
Let’s start with the good. Frozen Empire mostly makes the OG characters relevant — everyone’s in New York now so they make more sense — and there’s no repeat of the gross Harold Ramis cameo from Afterlife. Dan Aykroyd, in particular, relishes being a main character in this franchise again. Paul Rudd, too, is good value and I could’ve done with more of his genuinely touching plot about learning how to be a parent to the Spengler kids rather than just their buddy.
Grace, too, gets plenty to do and is entertainingly snarky. Her main story thread here will lead to plenty of justifiable queerbaiting discourse, but the film deserves praise for at least giving her a plot with some teeth and emotion at its core.
Unfortunately, this is a franchise that’s still too wedded to nostalgic slop. Why is Slimer zooming around? Why are they still trying to make the tiny Stay Puft dudes happen? Why won’t they let Bill Murray sit at home with a bottle of Scotch and his slippers on like he so obviously wants to do?
More importantly, though, it’s not funny enough. And it’s not funny enough in a very specific way.
There are laughs in Frozen Empire. In fact, there’s a fair few. But the movie isn’t funny like Ghostbusters is funny. It’s funny like a Marvel movie, where there’s a zinger for every few pages of script, but they feel like set dressing and they’re often given to minor characters put there for comic relief (the film criminally blunts all of James Acaster’s uniquely hilarious persona).
If this franchise is going to continue — and let’s face it, it is — it must return to its roots as a pure comedy. Frozen Empire is a step in the right direction, but it’s still too reliant on the glories of the past and there’s no need for anyone here to be trying to make an MCU-level epic. We just want to laugh.
Horror’s pretty good right now, isn’t it?
Can you remember the last time we got one week in which two horror movies as interesting as Late Night with the Devil and Immaculate came out simultaneously? It’s a good time to be a lover of genre cinema.
Let’s talk about the former first. Notwithstanding the (mostly justifiable) outrage over its use of AI for a handful of images, the Cairnes Brothers’ movie has been showered with praise. And rightly so. It’s the first chiller in a long time that has made me check every shadowy corner of my house before I could go upstairs to sleep.
It’s a successor, of course, to the infamous British TV broadcast Ghostwatch and, more recently, the 2018 Inside No. 9 special episode ‘Dead Line’. David Dastmalchian plays 1970s late night TV host Jack Delroy, who’s trying to climb to the top of the ratings after returning to the airwaves in the wake of his wife’s death. In order to do so, he’s put together a special Halloween show packed with occult tricks and nods to the supernatural.
Of course, you’ll know that it all goes wrong eventually, but the genius is in how effective the TV milieu is. The movie is unafraid to allow huge swathes of time to pass by in relative normality, making the chilling set pieces land even harder. It’s a triumph of tone above all else, never letting the viewer’s discomfort subside, helped by the fact it all has the feel of an unearthed videotape, which is always scary.
It’s my horror of the year so far, and a rare example of a film I actually think is more effective on the small screen. Fortunately, Shudder has picked up the rights and so it won’t be long at all.
Immaculate is a very different piece of work, slotting squarely into the “spooky nun” genre, but given extra oomph (and more cinema screens) by the presence of Sydney Sweeney. She’s taken a momentary break from saving society with her breasts (can you believe this discourse is a thing in 2024?) to play a new nun arriving at an Italian convent, where she almost immediately falls pregnant in what appears to be an immaculate conception: a miracle.
The atmosphere is effectively creepy, helped by some red-masked nuns (their presence is never really explained) and some blistering blasts of gore that recall the most grotesque moments of Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Sweeney keeps things on track with an expressive performance in which her body attempts to remain stoic and devout around the convent, but her terrified eyes give the game away.
Everything hits the fan in a third act that delivers some audacious gore and is willing to dive refreshingly deep into the well of B-movie carnage. In an era in which we all have to listen to filmmakers blather on about “elevated horror”, it’s nice to see someone like Michael Mohan — who also directed Sweeney in 2021 erotic thriller The Voyeurs — throwing his blood-soaked arms around the trashier side of the genre.
Next up for horror fans? Oh shit, it’s a prequel to The Omen. Did anybody want that?
I cried at a dog being friends with a robot
In a busy week, this sweetly devastating animation will likely be crowded out of cinemas. But Robot Dreams really deserves your time. It’s a wordless ode to the heritage of silent comedy, following the intense and heartfelt friendship between a lonely dog and the robot companion he buys for himself. The animation is simple but utterly charming, and you absolutely won’t be ready for the emotional punches it lands with gusto throughout.
It’s well worth seeking this one out, especially if you need something different to nunsploitation and Paul Rudd gurning at CGI ghouls.
What do we actually want from Star Wars?
I don’t know whether I care about The Acolyte or not. I’ve watched the trailer for the upcoming Disney+ series a handful of times and I just can’t bring myself to be all that excited, regardless of the social media buzz. And I don’t know what anyone can do to fix that.
Broadly, I’m more positive about recent Star Wars output than most. I had a lot of time for the third season of The Mandalorian and I enjoyed most of Ahsoka, right up until they just gave up and forgot to resolve any of their plot threads. And yet, I still can’t summon even a flicker in my lightsaber (that sounded grosser than I wanted it to) for The Acolyte just yet.
Ultimately, I’m just burned out. I’ve had to spend a lot of time caring about small screen Star Wars in the five years since that incredible fanfare last rang out on the big screen. The cinema is where this franchise should be and, when they serve up the next multiplex Star Wars offering, I’ll be the first one to buy a round of blue milks. In my front room, though, the galaxy far, far away feels a bit small. And that’s the last thing your sprawling sci-fi universe should feel.
The Acolyte might be great, but the trailer just seems… fine. It looks like every TV series we’ve had from both Star Wars and the MCU in recent years, with a pretty poor hit rate. For everything as genuinely impressive as Andor, there are a handful of utter chores like Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Somehow, we need these things to stop feeling like obligation viewing and start being exciting again. The solution might be for them to just sod off for a while and give us the chance to pine for the world of Wookiees and Skywalkers again. This is the way.
Help, I can’t stop watching Poor Things!
Poor Things is my Roman Empire. I think about Yorgos Lanthimos’ stunning oddity — and Emma Stone’s unique, fearless and now Oscar-winning performance — at least once a day. I’d seen it twice before this week, but never on the big screen. So with a raft of new screenings in the wake of its Oscars success, I decided to buy a ticket.
Look, I could bore you all to tears with the reasons I love this film. Every frame is constructed to perfection, whether beautiful or ugly, and it was entirely right for the Academy to garland James Price and Shona Heath’s lavish, inventive production design and Zsuzsa Mihalek’s remarkable sets. Tony McNamara’s ear for oddball verbosity marries perfectly with Lanthimos’ trademark deadpan, while Mark Ruffalo is utterly revelatory in one of the most ridiculous screen performances I’ve ever seen.
But, of course, it’s Stone who truly shines. On this third watch, I was struck profoundly by the fact that the woman who returns to London and God’s house in the movie’s third act is so palpably and entirely different to the woman who left at the beginning of the story. Stone carries that in every facet of her performance — both verbal and physical — helped by Holly Waddington’s outstanding costumes.
And if you’re after a fascinating piece on how Bella Baxter can be framed as a representation of neurodivergence, here’s a terrific bit of writing by Lewis Powell.
That’s it. Please let me know which bits of this you liked (if any) and whether or not I’m wasting my time by trying to make this into something. See you same time next week for more reviews, opinions and film-y stuff!