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Ghostbusters Reboot

This morning I am sitting down to write that immediately feels like a dangerous post.  The internet has been charged with drama over the release of the Ghostbusters movie this summer.  From the moment I saw the trailer I knew that for better or worse I was going to see it.  The Ghostbusters franchise was a significant part of my childhood, and I even had a poorly recorded bootleg copy of the movie that I wore out from watching it over and over as a child.  I was just the right age for the phenomena and it was only multiplied by the fact that my cousins were also extremely into the movie franchise.  We had so many quotes from the movie memorized, and even today when delivering bad news I sometimes say “tell them about the twinkie” and this past week I absolutely said “cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria” when describing a catastrophe at work.  To say this movie has left its imprint on me is a bit of an understatement.  All of this said, please do not expect me to devolve into a post about how Paul Feig has stolen my childhood.  My childhood is perfectly fine and intact… and the reason why I know this is that Hollywood keeps mining it to make a quick buck.  My childhood was so damned awesome that even today I can walk down the toy aisle and damned near every toy I encounter has its roots in said childhood.  My childhood is safely guarded by the warm memories that made me a geek in the first place, and continue to interest me in new and quirky movies, games and comics.

Friday was my wife’s Birthday and at the suggestion of my boss I took the afternoon off, and we wound up eating a late lunch and then going to a matinee of new Ghostbusters movie with a friend of ours.  Then as fate would have it, yesterday was this nasty rainy day that caused us to hibernate on the couch… and while there VH1 happened to be playing both of the original Ghostbusters movies.  So as a result I feel like I have both franchises fresh in my memory, and less cluttered by the detail changing dusts of time.  The problem I am having personally is that the new Ghostbusters reboot was in essence two different experiences for me.  The first experience is the phenomenal comedic performances of Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Chris Hemsworth.  The second experience was an otherwise forgettable plot line and a more annoying than sister primary villain.  Because of the first part it feels like the movie works well enough and becomes a fun romp through ghost filled New York.  The second part however annoys me because the cast deserved a much better movie than the one that they got.  So when asked if I like the movie I am torn…  I have to say yes because it was well worth watching, but there is always going to be a bit of an asterisk behind that yes because the plot structure and story were not that great.

The primary point of frustration is that this is a movie without a build up.  What I mean by that is we know immediately who the bad guy is and what he is ultimately doing.  His little mantra of”Charge the lines, create the vortex, break the barriers.” pretty much explains the entire plot of the movie and we hear it extremely early.  There is no suspense or real explanation of what the hell his trash sculptures were or how exactly they worked other than that they emitted pretty purple light and exploded.  The other problem I had with Rowan is that essentially he was every cruel nerd throwback pulled straight from a subreddit.  He was picked on so now he just wants to watch the world burn… that is the entire motivation for his character.  In contrast the whole plot of the original Ghostbusters involved this creepy as fuck Ivo Shandor that we know next to nothing about other than the fact that he build a weird structure designed entirely to act as a conduit for the spiritual world.  So when the movie uncovers this it feels like they are digging down and uncovering a secret truth that has been hidden under our noses, rather than just following the trail of a mad bomber.  Even the second Ghostbusters in spite of all of its problems, provides a sufficiently steeped in history antagonist for us to learn more about as the movie goes along.  Rowan on the other hand feels like a sort of shorthand for generic internet bad guy, almost the emoji version of a proper antagonist.

All of this said Kate McKinnon makes the movie.  Jillian Holtzmann is phenomenal and I cannot wait to see all of the amazing cosplay she is going to inspire at Pax South this year.  Her character was nothing like what I expected, and I was extremely pleasantly surprised.  The only frustration that my wife had was the fact that it seemed like she pulled gadgets out of thin air.  The movie did a really poor job of showing that time was passing, and it felt like every time we made it back to base she had a half dozen new toys for the team to play with.  I would like to think that maybe all of these devices already existed and simply lacked the final polish to hand out…  much like the shotgun that Gilbert tried to use but Holtzmann told her it was not quite ready.  Essentially the thing with this movie is that regardless of the shortcomings of the story itself… the cast of characters makes up for it and keeps it an interesting experience.  I don’t necessarily think this is movie greatness in the making, but the cast saves what is an otherwise forgettable movie.  Having watched all three movies in a forty eight hour period… it unfortunately does nothing to dethrone the original Ghostbusters for me.  However I would say that I like the 2016 reboot considerably more than I like Ghostbusters 2… and that is not to say that I don’t actually enjoy the second Ghostbusters outing.  I mean after all I break out the line “Everything you are doing is bad. I want you to know this.” on a regular basis at work, even if no one has a damned clue where that line comes from.

I guess my big frustration with the reboot is that it didn’t actually need to be one.  What I mean by that is that the cast of characters are of the appropriate age to have been children when the original adventures of the Ghostbusters happened.  In those movies… the relationship between the Ghostbusters and public was tentative at best.  The movies see them jailed and committed to a mental institution for trying to save the city.  There is absolutely nothing unrealistic in thinking that after saving the city and causing the statute of liberty to walk through downtown… that they once again would be swept under the rug by a government that really does not want them to exist.  There are so many ways that they could have set up the new team of Ghostbusters to carry on the torch of the original team without making them part of the original team.  So I would have liked to see this movie be Ghostbusters III or at least directly connected to the original franchise other than the fact that it includes the actors in cameos.  One of the things I love about the Star Trek reboot universe is that it is deeply connected to the original Star Trek universe, and is treated as an alternate reality where certain key events happened differently.  I would have been perfectly okay with that happening as well, but it will always bother me that the movie could have been so much cooler than it ended up being.  Part of me really hopes that the movie does well enough in the box office, especially in the foreign box office that it will warrant a sequel.  This cast deserves a much better movie than this one, because they shine like diamonds in the mess that is the rest of the movie.  So while I have complaints, it still is well worth seeing while it is still available in theaters.  I fully expect to pick up a copy of the movie when it officially releases because I think it will be one of those “better on repeated viewings” experiences as you are allowed to soak in the comedic genius of some of the interactions.

This is going to be a bit of an odd post given that I am making it at 4:30 in the morning.  Friday we had to move completely out of our cubes at work, which meant disconnecting everything in it and toting it elsewhere in the building temporarily.  They are in the process of swapping out the carpet squares, and it was my hope that they would have been done by yesterday so that I could maybe go up and hook everything back up.  However I spoke with my boss who tried to do the same thing, and they had yet to get to our aisle.  So as a result I am getting up silly early this morning and planning on going in and trying to get everything hooked up and ready to go before most of the office gets in.  This post will also be odd given its content.  It was a bit of an emotional roller coaster of a weekend, and those that follow me on twitter might have a clue as to why.  Friday evening we lost our eldest cat Chloe, because it was time to make the hard call.  A little over a month ago we discovered a tumor that was growing beneath her jaw, and after getting her checked out the vet said there wasn’t really much we could do other than palliative care.  Given the fact that she was fourteen, and given the fact that it had already consumed part of her jaw… there really wasn’t much that could be done to truly “fix” it.

So we took her home not really knowing how much time we would have for her.  For the first bit things seemed pretty okay, and I had a false sense of hope that she would just be the normal cat we have known and loved all these years…  well with a big growth hanging off her jaw.  However the tumor continued to grow and the first sign something was wrong was that the right side of her mouth started pulling open causing her to drool.  So we spent quite a bit of time chasing her around with a wash cloth trying to clean up the constant string of drool following her around.  Around about this time she also started having trouble grooming herself, but my wife being off work for the summer was awesome and did an amazing job of trying to help her out.  Friday night however she had developed what I can only describe as a parkisonian tremor, and instead of just drool for the last several days there had been a pretty constant bit of drainage of some sort along with it.  She had been picking at food at best, and each morning it seemed like she was spending less and less time at the food dish and more and more time laying down… or hiding under the bed.  When she has started scratching herself and making her jaw bleed, I felt like it was time to go back to the vet.

I feel so damned guilty about that too, because I knew going back to the vet was going to ultimately mean them suggesting that we put her to sleep.  I’ve spent much of the weekend agonizing over this fact, that I was the one who ended up deciding it was time.  The vet did his best to reassure me that it was more than time, and even described an anecdote of him going through something similar with his own animal.  I realize that it was supposed to be comforting but really in the end it didn’t help much.  I mean it was  time… I am absolutely certain of that fact.  They administered an anesthetic and the vet took the opportunity to let us look inside of her mouth.  The entire lower jaw had essentially been consumed by the tumor, and instead of just extending down and out… it was also extending up under the tongue to a point where within a few days it was probably unlikely that she would have been able to swallow at all.  All of this doesn’t really help though, because I feel the guilt of having to say goodbye to one of my babies.  No amount of logic or evidence is every going to make me feel less horrible about the conclusion of events.

Cats switch allegiance throughout their lives, and for the last little bit Chloe had been mostly my wife’s cat following her around and sleeping on her pillow.  However she started off her life as very much my little buddy, and there were absolutely times where that was still the case.  All of our babies have been rescues of one sort or another, and Chloe was no exception.  I don’t even remember the circumstances of her arrival other than the fact that we went to a veterinary clinic on Utica avenue in Tulsa to look at a bunch of kittens who had been found abandoned.  I had wanted a tuxedo, because I had always been pretty fond of them.  I college we had an amazing stray that hung out around our trailer that we ultimately named Pepper, and that my parents adopted.  However when I got to the clinic there was this adorable little reverse tuxedo, that pulled at my heart and made me know that we had found another cat.  Thinking back now… we had signs early on that something was up but they only really make sense now in retrospect.  One of the defining characteristics of Chloe was her good nature, and her often times annoying habit of licking quite literally anything within range.  I mean to the point of using her paws to pull something closer to her face just to lick it.  This meant often times hiding your face or arms under the covers to keep from constant barrage of kitty slobber.  The thing is… about two months ago the licking largely stopped, which makes me wonder if that was about the point which the tumor started bothering her.

There have been many a raid night that she was draped across my arm.  As far as we have been able to figure out, she was more than likely a ragdoll mix of some sort given her habit of plopping down and almost melting into the ground.  As she got up there in age she couldn’t really jump up onto the bed or the couch, so we started putting pet stairs around the house to help her ascend.  She was also among the most social cats we have ever had.  She never really had trouble with any of the other cats, and when someone came over she was always among the first to greet them… and likely annoy the hell out of them with attention until they finally resigned themselves to being licked.  The funny thing is… she was not entirely a pushover.  There have been a few times our current youngest Kenzie pushed her a little too far, and unleashed a flurry of attacks… but then moments later she would be back to normal and grooming her again.  I think she groomed other cats more than any other cat we have had throughout the years, so it wasn’t only human beings that got licked… it was pretty much anything, she even tried grooming the ferrets.  This mornings post has been difficult to write, but also at the same time I think maybe it helped.  I had all these pent up feelings all weekend long, and while I have cried a little while writing this morning… it has almost helped to commit things to the page.  I want to thank all of the folks on twitter who flooded me with support Friday night.  I just didn’t have it in me to respond to each of you, but know that every single message meant the world to me.  Tomorrow we will be back to normal posting, or whatever passes for normal on my blog.  However today I just had to get this post out of me.