KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, in other words (or the same words, just more of them) these are the films Kent watched this week.
This Week:
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024, d. Gil Kenan - Crave)
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024, d. Guy Ritchie - AmazonPrime)
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014,d. Mark Hartley - Tubi)
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I *really* wasn't expecting much out of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire following its nostalgia-soaked-to-a-fault (let's call it "nostalgia-slimed") predecessor Afterlife. That film was cringe-inducing and I did not like it, and I vehemently did not want a repeat experience.
Frozen Empire did modestly well at the box office, repeating a pattern for all Ghostbusters films since the original. There is a brand name there, but it doesn't have the same cache as a Spider-man or James Bond. There's a loyal, devoted, multicultural, omnisex fans out there who are just eager to have more Ghostbusters in their lives, but they're a niche group (who aren't the same group as the toxic manbabies who shouted down everything 2016 Ghostbusters (aka Answer the Call) and threatened to kill the property in the process). Bigger than, say, the Avatar fanbase, but smaller than the Stars Trek or Wars die-hards, they're not enough of an entity to keep the Ghostbusters brand alive and active in the public consciousness between films, even when we've had the shortest gap between Afterlife and Frozen Empire in 30 years of ghost busting.
Something like Star Trek and Star Wars has a strong enough fanbase and large enough franchise universe to build entire major streaming services around. Ghostbusters isn't that. It needs to entice the public in, seemingly each and every time. As much of a nerd for nerdy things as I can be, I'm one of those people who needs to be enticed. With a promising teaser trailer, Frozen Empire piqued my interest, but then the subsequent trailer had me wary of it just being more nostalgia-slime, and the middling reviews at time of release seem conflicted on whether the film was or wasn't caked in it.
Having waited for it to go streaming on a service I already pay for, I was quite happy to find this second entry in this new Ghostbusters era had moved past non-stop, nonsensical nods to it's 1984 originating film, and instead embraced and incorporated the characters into its narrative in a much more organic way. Mostly.
The Spengler family, consisting of mom Callie (Carrie Coon) and siblings Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) have moved from buttfuck nowhere to New York City as practicing Ghostbusters, living and operating out of the classic firehouse and taking charge of the classic Hearse, Ecto-1. Their ranks now include Callie's boyfriend Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) who's still sussing out his place as part of the family. The firehouse is owned by rich industrialist and former 'buster Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson) who also is the bankroll behind the Ghostbusters, now a bigger organization with more scientists and researchers.
The mayor of New York City is former EPA agent Walter Peck (William Atherton), who still has a bee in his bonnet about the 'busters. The thing is, here, as in 1984, he's not entirely wrong to be concerned, but his resistance to understanding the greater threat is what makes him such a dick(less). But after a particularly problematic ghost trapping, Pheobe is sidelined because she is a minor. As she's left to her own devices, she encounters a cool, fiery phantasm and the two become friends...and potentially more than.
The second problem hits when the containment unit at the firehouse starts, seemingly, bursting at its seams. Winston has a solution, but the introduction of a mysterious artifact, and ancient lore about a powerful force via the curio shoppe owned by Ray Stanz (Dan Akroyd) winds up setting off a chain of events that could spell utter doom for NYC (and the world).
What works so incredibly well during the first two acts of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the sense of lived-in reality. Where each prior Ghostbusters film felt like it had to reset or start from scratch (by the time Ghostbusters II came out 5 years later, the team were already written off as relics and cooks and has-beens) this one comes out the gates with the Ghostbusters being a routine presence on the streets of New York. Maybe not the most welcome presence, but the calls were coming in pretty steadily from people who just didn't know what to do with strange things in their neighbourhood.
The film feels quite comfortable with its newer cast, as well as its older cast. Akroyd, Hudson and Atherton all feel organically placed in the narrative. Even when Annie Potts' Janine Melnitz seems to keep popping up out of nowhere, she still feels like she belongs. Bill Murray's appearances as Peter Venkman, though, feel like contractual obligation. There's no sense of purpose to Venkman in this story, and the quips are...kinda lazy this time around.
The cast is rounded out with three great comedic presences in Kumail Nanjiani, James Acaster and Patton Oswalt --all having their own essential role to play in the story of the film-- but two returning characters from Afterlife -- Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O'Connor) -- are unnecessarily shoehorned in, but GilKenan and Jason Reitman's script does find clever ways to make their move to New York make sense (as long as you don't think too hard about it).
For all the easy-going nature of the first two acts, and reintroducing the New York City of the original Ghostbusters in such a seemingly effortless and welcoming fashion, and even building a pretty compelling mystery leading to the big bad of the third act and the titular "frozen empire", once the third act launches, it all starts coming unglued. The film starts rushing through all the different character arcs it had set up, tieing them together often in forced ways and resolving many of them with a tossed off line of dialogue. The action of the piece results in a nonsense flash freezing of New York that should have killed tens of thousands but seemingly has had no lasting effect beyond some ashphalt damage and iced coffees.
The problem with the final act is it goes too big. Every Ghostbusters goes big with a threat that only the power of proton packs can resolve, but this seems a little insurmountable beyond deus ex machina. This film even has the dreaded laserblast into the sky that was all the rage in the 2010s. It needn't have been this visually catastrophic. It doesn't take much to fuck up a New Yorker's day. Even a summer hailstorm, as opposed to ice spikes violently shooting up from the ground (yet somehow impaling no one), would be as effective a device (just look at what happened in Calgary on August 5).
It also does that thing where a character who is otherwise inept at everything levels up so monumentally in literal minutes that it snaps the long thread of disbelief we give these productions.
With many reservations, though, the film is generally a winner. It's charming, and comfortable, and entertaining. It embraces its past in a participatory way rather than winks at the audience. Still doesn't know what to do with Slimer though. And it's still trying to make those Stay Puft minions a thing.
[ToastyPost - we agree-ish]
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I shouldn't have to explain this, but the threat in World War II was Nazis, not communists. The communists, in fact, were allies. This shouldn't have to be explained, but in the "right wing" (so poorly named, given how they're almost always wrong) they taken to embracing Nazis (particularly the "nationalist" part, not so much the "socialist" part) as part of their voter base and ideology, and are trying to rewrite history to edit out Nazis being the worst-of-the-worst bad guys of the past 100 years (out of a whole pile of contenders).
So in times like these, with people being so unclear about who exactly we were fighting in a major war of not so distant past, it's good to have a film like this that reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that the only good Nazi is a dead one.
The plot of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, loosely based on real people and events (at least the end credits have pictures of some of the real people whose names are the same as those of characters in this film) find Britain in dire straits as the Nazi uboats in the Atlantic have been throttling their supplies from western shores (they only mention those American dilly-dallyers, as if Canada were a non-entity, and not already across the pond and in the fight... but I digress). With the threat increasing and the military might growing, the only hope is to target the uboat manufacturing and supply depot of a Spanish controlled island in West Africa. Unable to mount any sort of direct campaign, they instead rely upon a small crew of ...ungentlemen... devoted soldiers whose "by any means necessary" tactics make them too much for regular service, but necessary for this off-the-books job.
It's a handsome people parade as Henry Cavill, Henry Golding, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Babs Olusanmoku and Eiza Gonzalez strategize and mount their assault against an unsuspecting enemy.
These are ruthless men who seem to relish in their task of killing and destruction, and are both efficient and effective. It almost makes them hard to root for...except for the fact that they're killing Nazis, so we root like each kill is a point-winning spike of the volleyball at the Olympics.
The film barely puts our protagonists in any peril. At any point, when it seems perilous, every person seems to have an out already at hand. It flies in the face of conventional action movie narrative, but it's oh-so-essential when the point is to remind us that the Nazis are the bad guys and we just want to see them dead. The bloodlust is downright vampiric.
It is undramatic, but cathartic. And so handsome.
[ToastyPost - we agree]
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I think this 2014 documentary, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films was the inflection point, the catalyst reminding a middle-aged audience of a whole pantheon of weird, wild, raunchy, violent, and largely substandard film that, as teenagers (mainly teenage boys) were giving them everything they could want.
The documentary is the story of Israeli producers and brotherly cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. It paints them as lovably difficult scamps who forcefully injected themselves into cinema, first in Israel and then in America, through sheer determination, salemanship, and an ethos of fast-and-cheap but giving people what they want. Oh, and promises unkept and lies told along the way.
The doc is reverential towards Golan and Globus and their films...or at least the content of their films that made them a success story to start with. The documentary for the first hour is 1/2 talking heads and 1/2 clips of the nudity and sex scenes from the various Golan-Globus films. That extensive stretch of boobs, boobs, boobs is just as gratuitous (probably moreso) than any of the actual films. And to cut to the actresses in some of these films, some who are proud, but many who felt exploited or even abused, and then to intercut their description of their abuses with the scenes that resulted from said abuse seems utterly distasteful and disrespectul on the part of the director and producers (that Brett Ratner is a producer on this is not surprising).
The second hour shows the shift that Golan and Globus made when they came to America. Sex sold, but violence sold even better. So the clips in the second half are much more surrounding the violent side of Cannon's productions. Then many many explosions and bloody body parts being severed.
When I think of 1980s hyperviolent cinema, I'm mainly thinking of Cannon productions. Films like Missing in Action, American Ninja, the Death Wish sequels, Cobra... they were all escalating factors in America's appetite for, and consumption of violence. And so much of it was... unsavory. Very racist and classist and downright ugly.
That the film basks in the glory of nudity and violence is pretty much its only point being made. It does sort of highlight the rise and fall of the ambitions of Golan-Globus, and that their success came from sex and violence, only hinting that the marriage of the two would become repugnantly disturbing (and has no restraint in showing you what it's talking about). Golan-Globus' downfall was in sacrificing their fast, cheap, and give-them-what-they-want attitude in favour of seeking prestige by giving notable directors free reign resulting in duds like Godard's King Lear, Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance, or Zeffirelli's Otello, or their attempting big-budget blockbusters on a constricted budget ending up with Superman 4: The Quest for Peace, Masters of the Universe, or the Indiana Jones riff Alan Quartermain. But if the doc winds up painting a portrait of Golan-Globus (which it barely, barely does) it's not as flattering as it thinks it is.
At one point a talking head makes a comparison between Golan-Globus and the Weinstein brothers. They basically state that Golan-Globus were trying to do what Miramax ultimately did. Unfortunately this was meant as a compliment. But the comparison is apt, and the sort of boy's club revelry tone that it sets leaves very little in the way of constructive criticism, and any constructive criticism that is laid down is completely undermined by tits and guns.
Is it watchable? Of course it is. But that doesn't mean it's any good. And that's the Cannon way.
I think our opinions of the New New Ghostbuster movies are inverted. But then again, second one needs a rewatch :)
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