upstill@ucbvax.UUCP (Steve Upstill) (06/18/84)
Agreement on almost every count: Bill Murry carries the show with astonishing skill. This show is a must for anyone who gets pleasure from watching a masterful display of comic craft. I disagree that the effects were integrated comically; my feeling was that the effects were in one movie and the comedy in another, playing off of them. Try and name one funny gag that was isolated in the effects (well, name two). Steve Upstill
steven@ism70.UUCP (06/23/84)
#N:ism70:13100021:000:5320 ism70!steven Jun 15 11:41:00 1984 GHOSTBUSTERS Starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver and Harold Ramis. Also starring Rick Moranis, Annie Potts, William Atherton and Ernie Hudson. Directed by Ivan Reitman. Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. Executive Producer, Bernie Brillstein. Photographed by Laszlo Kovacs. Production Designed by John DeCuir. Edited by Sheldon Kahn and David Blewitt. Music by Elmer Bernstein. Theme Song by Ray Parker, Jr. Visual Effects Supervision by Richard Edlund for Entertainment Effects Group. From Columbia Pictures. 107 minutes. (1984) There is a short but honorable list of the Best American Comedies of the last ten years. From 1974 to the present, we've been privileged as a species to witness A-list movies like: Young Frankenstein Annie Hall National Lampoon's Animal House Arthur Tootsie Airplane Anyway, what I want to point out is that most of the movies I consider the funniest of the lot are real groundbreakers of one sort or another. Certainly Annie Hall is a groundbreaking movie for Woody Allen. Manhattan, Stardust Memories, et al. are pretty much inconceivable without the stylistic backgrounds and concerns set out in Annie Hall. National Lampoon's Animal House spawned a whole sub-genre of raunchy comedies from Porky's to Porky's II The Next Day. Airplane's rat-tat-tat joke style has been widely imitated as well. On the other hand, Arthur is not a groundbreaking film. Neither is Tootsie. Both are stylistic throwbacks to classic forms of movie comedy. Each of those, however, performs its task with exceptional grace and charm. Arthur simply has one of the funniest scripts in recent memory. Tootsie is a model of comedic plotting and misdirection, with one of the very finest comic performances (Dustin Hoffman's) anywhere in film. Ghostbusters has a few merits on both sides. The groundbreaking nature of the film stems, I think, from its extensive use of optical visual effects to carry some of the film's laughs. It's not the first big budget comedy. 1941 had a huge amount of visual effects; mostly, however on the miniature side. The Blues Brothers tried for laughs on a grand scale by making a joke of the huge amounts of manpower arrayed against Jake and Elwood on their final chase. But of the recent big budget comedies, only Ghostbusters has a countervailing force (Bill Murray) that is as interesting as the effects. The effects are sublimated here to another screen presence as well as serving the story of the film. As big as the film becomes at the end, as extensively thought out as that technically complicated a film it must have been, it still gives an impression of being thought out by one wigged-out mind. It uses its effects in a so completely unexpected manner the jaw drops. Those of you who have seen the movie know exactly what I'm talking about. Ghostbusters also has a well constructed script. One test of how well the script works is to say to yourself, "Could this have been interesting if this were played straight?" Are the characters sufficiently interesting and human enough to succeed? I think so. You know where the movie is headed as it opens. Sigourney Weaver's little appliance problem needs solving. When that's solved, the movie is over. It's not an overly ambitious structure, but it gets there in an interesting way. You need to know where the movie is headed in a general way, but you don't want it to be overly predictable. Reitman, Aykroyd and Ramis have included plenty enough funny stuff and spectacular effects to keep you interested and off-kilter, wanting to see more. I mean, did you expect Vin Skloro, Keymaster of Gozer? Which brings me to the importance of star power in this movie. Yeah, the characters of Aykroyd and Murray are a tad thin. One reason is that they are playing "star" roles, i.e. they are playing their star persona more than the role. In an entertainment like this, that's okay. And Murray's role fits him better here than even in Stripes, where he at turns in the film had to be his character, John Winger, wanting to go AWOL, and at other scenes "be" Bill Murray, as when he's inspiring John Candy to enter a mudwrestling contest. In Stripes, without the net of a great script, he showed true star power. He took his larger-than-life persona as developed in Saturday Night Live and gave life to lines like "Cowboy? I wanna party with you." He does the same in Ghostbusters. Simple lines like "You're right. No human being would stack books that way." come alive when Bill Murray says them. It's really movie magic at work. As Dr. Peter Venkman, he's written as a Murrayesque character all the way through. As several reviewers have pointed out, that's a major charm of this flick. Murray talks back to Gozer the Destructor in exactly the same offhand style as he talks to William Atherton. In his blissed-out state, nothing fazes him. All in all, a fine, unexpectedly good effort. Four stars. Thumbs up. Worth the wait. Brave the lines. See it in a good theatre with a good audience; that always makes films like these play better. One last note: Brandon Tartikoff, programming honcho for NBC said yesterday in Variety that he expects to see pilot proposals for "eight to ten" Ghostbusters ripoffs on his desk by the end of next week. I mean, is this a great country or what?