‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’ is Maybe a Little Too Chill

March 21, 2024

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Ghostbust a Move (CREDIT: Sony Pictures)

Starring: Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, McKenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard, Dan Aykroyd, Kumail Nanjiani, Emily Alyn Lind, Celeste O’Connor, Patton Oswalt, Logan Kim, Ernie Hudson, William Atherton, James Acaster, Annie Potts, Bill Murray

Director: Gil Kenan

Running Time: 115 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Paranormal Freakiness

Release Date: March 22, 2024 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Ghostbusting generations old and new are back in business again. And not a moment too soon, because New York City is about to be targeted with some apocalyptic shenanigans. When an opportunistic slacker (Kumail Nanjiani) sells a suspicious orb to Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), the captive spirits in the Busters’ firehouse start acting rather fishy. Well, fishier than usual. It turns out that a millennia-old supernatural being named Garraka might just be trying to make a comeback. And if he has to freeze the Big Apple in the middle of summer to pull it off, well, then that’s just what he’s going to do. Meanwhile, Phoebe Spengler (McKenna Grace) is feeling adrift, because she’s still a minor and can’t fully participate in the family business. So she starts hanging out with a seemingly friendly ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), although Melody may just have her own machinations in mind.

What Made an Impression?: What’s Cooler Than Being Cool?: Frozen Empire is in no rush to deliver on its core premise. The icy villain doesn’t show up in full until the final act, so his ultimate defeat isn’t exactly filled with tension. I couldn’t help but wonder if it would have made more sense to invert this approach. That is to say, let New York freezing over be the inciting incident, and then figure out from there how to thaw it out. Instead, director Gil Kenan and co-screenwriter Jason Reitman (who inherited the franchise from his father while directing 2021’s Afterlife) mostly aim for a hangout vibe, with a bunch of random ghosts creating mild chaos while the human characters chit-chat about their favorite paranormal topics.
The Gang’s All Here: One of the major promises of Afterlife was the return of the original Ghostbusters, but that basically just amounted to a glorified cameo. This time around, Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, and Annie Potts are all actually fully fledged members of the cast, which somewhat downplays the need to just play the greatest hits. So while Frozen Empire isn’t overly burdened by fanservice (give or take a scene of Paul Rudd earnestly admitting that busting makes him feel good), it’s never fully clear what the context of this world is, vis-a-vis the wider public’s recognition or lack thereof that ghosts exist. They sure seem rather ubiquitous, but there are still authority figures (like William Atherton reprising his role from the original) trying to shut down any busting operation, when it feels like the citizenry ought to be demanding that the Ghostbusters be added to the list of government-provided emergency services.
Who Believes in Ghosts?: If there are more Ghostbusters adventures to come, and I think there just might be, why not take an approach similar to that of the Fast and the Furious series and invite back into the fold everyone who’s ever been in a Ghostbusters movie? Frozen Empire kind of utilizes this approach, but the next chapter could take it even further by re-enlisting the likes of the Lady Ghostbusters. Then just focus on crafting a sufficient new big bad and ignore the fight to win over the hearts and minds of the public. That battle’s surely already been won! Frozen Empire hints towards this maximalist approach, but it’s a little too attached to its underdog roots to really run with it.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is Recommended If You Like: Talking to ghosts, but pretending that you’re too cool to talk to ghosts

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Proton Packs

‘A.P. Bio’ Has a Striking Amount of ‘Community’ DNA

July 8, 2019

jmunney A.P. Bio, Community, Television , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

CREDIT: NBC

Over the past few months, the delightful high school-set sitcom A.P. Bio has become one of my favorite shows on the air, but then NBC went a little cuckoo and cancelled it. There’s been some effort on the part of the cast, crew, and fans to find the show a new home, but unless that happens, we will have to be satisfied with two short-but-sweet seasons.

One of the reasons I love A.P. Bio so much is because it shares a lot of DNA with my favorite show of all time, which would be Community, another former NBC sitcom that was constantly on the brink of cancellation (though unlike A.P. Bio, it kept beating the renewal odds). Their premises and central characters are strikingly similar. In Community, Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) is a high-powered lawyer who gets disbarred and must enroll at a community college. Meanwhile, A.P. Bio stars Glenn Howerton as Jack Griffin, a disgraced Harvard philosophy professor who is forced to take a lowly part-time teaching job at a high school in Toledo, Ohio.

As I watched and grew to love A.P. Bio, I kept noticing more and more Community similarities, to the point that I could detect analogues for all the major characters. So I’ve assembled below a side-by-side comparison of the Greendale Human Beings and their corresponding Whitlock Rams. Enjoy, and let me know if you need help reacting to riding that ram.

(Thank you to my fellow commenters at the AV Club and Disqus for helping me out with these comparisons!)

Jack (Glenn Howerton) = Jeff (Joel McHale)

CREDIT: YouTube

The protagonists who try to act above it all but eventually embrace the crazy scholastic ecosystems they’ve become an integral part of.

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This Is a Movie Review: Sorry to Bother You

July 6, 2018

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

CREDIT: Annapurna Pictures

I give Sorry to Bother You 5 out of 5 Hybrids: https://uinterview.com/reviews/movies/sorry-to-bother-you-movie-review-boots-rileys-mind-blowingly-original-debut-is-one-of-2018s-best-films/

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Nostalgia’ Makes Some Obvious, Occasionally Affecting Points About Nostalgia

February 15, 2018

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CREDIT: Bleecker Street

This review was originally posted on News Cult in February 2018.

Starring: Jon Hamm, Catherine Keener, John Ortiz, Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, James LeGros, Nick Offerman, Amber Tamblyn, Patton Oswalt, Annalise Basso, Mikey Madison

Director: Mark Pellington

Running Time: 114 Minutes

Rating: R for Language Apparently, But It Should Otherwise Be Rated PG

Release Date: February 16, 2018 (Limited)

Nostalgia, the 2018 film directed by Mark Pellington, would like you to know that nostalgia, the sentimality for the past, is a feeling that exists and that people experience. It does not treat this as some big revelation, as this is a common human emotion and the film does not pretend otherwise. But it is so simplistic and obvious, but also matter-of-factly profound, in its explication of the definition that there is this weird mix of pretension and lack of ambition. Mostly, Nostalgia glides along in a quiet, unfussy groove that is occasionally enlivened by tragedy and committed performances.

This is one of those anthology-style, “we’re all connected” movies with multiple discrete-but-actually-closely-connected(-at-least-thematically) storylines. Instead of cross-cutting between each vignette and having them dance around each other, they take their turns and then hand the ball (one time quite literally) off to the next one, with at least one shared character per section. At first it looks like Nostalgia will follow the travails of an insurance agent (John Ortiz) and the people he encounters. That’s a justifiable enough premise, but the execution is strikingly mundane.

The film eventually shakes out instead to more broadly be a series of sketches of people dealing with loss and holding on to and/or letting go of sentimental objects, which is even more nondescript than the insurance agent setup, but there are some dynamic moments. In particular, there is the scene with Ellen Burstyn as a widow selling her late husband’s autographed baseball to a professional collector (Jon Hamm). His appraisal delivers exactly the sort of human touch you want when parting with an item with such high monetary and emotional value. Hamm’s entire section, in which he and his sister (Catherine Keener) are hit with a great loss in the midst of cleaning out their father’s old stuff, is filled with understated power. Its setup is just as lightweight as the other storylines, but it delivers enough poignancy to make Nostalgia just worthwhile enough.

Nostalgia is Recommended If You Like: Jon Hamm swooping in to save the day, Emotional gut punches

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Verified Ted Williams Signatures

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Please Stand By’ as Dakota Fanning Tries on Autism and ‘Star Trek’ Fandom

January 25, 2018

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

CREDIT: Magnolia Pictures

This review was originally published on News Cult in January 2018.

Starring: Dakota Fanning, Toni Collette, Alice Eve, River Alexander, Jessica Rothe, Michael Stahl-David, Patton Oswalt

Director: Ben Lewin

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for A Few Frank Mentions About Bodily Functions and an Emotional Breakdown or Two

Release Date: January 26, 2018 (Limited Theatrically and On Demand)

Early on in Please Stand By, Wendy’s (Dakota Fanning) Cinnabon co-worker Nemo (Tony Revolori) gifts her with a mix CD, which has me thinking, “Do people even make mix CD’s anymore?” As someone who believes in the virtue of simultaneously embracing both new and outdated forms of technology, I do not object to the presence of music on physical media (my own CD collection is still hefty and its recent slowdown in growth is due mostly to a dwindling in space and not a newfound preference for digital), but it does stick out as odd in a film that I am firmly certain is supposed to be taking place in the present day. In general, there are few, if any, clear markers indicating when Please Stand By is set. The best we have to go on is the fact that Wendy has an iPod, which tells us that the time must be no earlier than 2001.

It is fitting that Wendy’s story has a somewhat out-of-time quality to it. She is autistic and accordingly sticks to a strict routine, one that she has probably spent years firmly establishing. (That still doesn’t explain why her friend from work is still into CD’s, but whatever.) I believe that autistic characters have been well-represented enough in film and television that any single character does not have to bear the burden of representing ALL autistic people. And that is helpful, because while Wendy’s autism does play a major part in her story, it is specific in ways that go beyond that.

Ultimately from a certain angle this is a pretty simple road trip movie starring a girl and her chihuahua. They are heading out to California so that Wendy can hand-deliver her 500-page Star Trek script to Paramount Studios for a fan contest. She missed the mailing deadline due to stress involving family, and now her sister (Alice Eve) and caretaker (Toni Collette) are tracking her down to make sure she’s okay, seeing as she’s never been on her own before. This is a story of fandom, focused around a fan with an unfathomably deep interior life.

There is not all that much unique about Please Stand By. There are plenty of stories about obsessive fans, as well as ones about autistic people who struggle to connect with those around them. And it is no surprise that when you combine those two elements, you get someone who identifies deeply with Mr. Spock, as we have seen that plenty of times already as well. My Star Trek knowledge is sporadic (I’ve only seen the reboot films and the first episode of Discovery), but I believe I know enough about the major themes to say that Please Stand By does right by its inspirations. This is the sort of film that gives what is mostly a cameo outsize billing, but it feels justified: Patton Oswalt plays a police officer who speaks Klingon and makes the sort of day-to-day connection that Wendy has always been looking for. It is not instantly transformative, but it is the crux that represents the film’s easily digestible, reaffirming, humanistic message.

Please Stand By is Recommended If You Like: Star Trek (especially if you identify with Spock), Little Miss Sunshine, Patton Oswalt Cameos

Grade: 3 out of 5 Mix CD’s

This Is a Movie Review: The Circle

April 27, 2017

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This review was originally published on News Cult in April 2017.

Starring: Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, Karen Gillan, Patton Oswalt, John Boyega

Director: James Ponsoldt

Running Time: 110 Minutes

Rating: PG-13, Because When You Have Cameras Everywhere, You’re Gonna See Something

Release Date: April 28, 2017

As the tagline to The Circle informs us, “Knowing everything is good. Knowing everything is better.” As the plot of The Circle demonstrates to us, nailing a tone is good; nailing several different tones is really hard.

This film’s titular company should feel intimately familiar to anyone alive and plugged-in in 2017. The Circle is basically Google and Facebook combined, and considering the extensive connectivity in today’s major tech and social companies, that combination is not exactly far from reality. Throw the NSA and its massive data collection into this stew, bandy about disturbing maxims like “secrets are lies,” and you’ve got yourself a formula for a relevant paranoid (or not so paranoid) thriller.

Success in such an endeavor requires a protagonist that makes sense or at least one whose motivations can be tracked. Alas, Mae Holland (Emma Watson), the Circle’s latest recruit, swings wildly between suspicion and full-bore acceptance of the surveillance state. She is wildly uncomfortable in a standout early scene when she is indoctrinated into the corporate culture, but soon enough she is working alongside the company heads (Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt) and pushing forward their most privacy-invading initiatives. A mysterious Circle employee (John Boyega) warns Mae about the dangers of what lies ahead, and it is never clear if she trusts him or completely ignores him. Ultimately, she seeks to expose those at the top, but an oddly pitched final shot prompts the question, “To what end?”

The one unqualified success of The Circle is the series of online comments that populate the screen at various points. Mae volunteers to record her whole life to demonstrate her belief in putting cameras everywhere, and her online followers chime in with their various observations. Most of them are along the lines of “You go, Mae!” or “Should we be watching this?” But every tenth one is some hilariously banal declaration like “making a sandwich” or “time to go poo.” This type of humor hits you sideways and buoys The Circle – if only this sort of controlled unpredictability could have been maintained throughout.

The Circle is Recommended If You Like: Nerve, Evil Tom Hanks, YouTube Comments, One More Chance to See Bill Paxton on the Big Screen

Grade: 3 out of 5 Cheeses From Last Year