Caça-Fantasmas

I don't know, even after many years this one is still controversial. I think it's cooled down a lot with another "Ghostbusters" film being released since this one. The original 1984 movie is kind of a "lightning-in-a-bottle" type deal. The sequel with the original cast altogether wasn't that great. The "Force Awakens" style Hollywood nostalgia money grab wasn't pretty mediocre. This remake is awful. You can make a movie like "Ghostbusters" or "Back to the Future" that just has a very original plot and concept, and no matter how badly you want the dollars that came with it, it's always gonna be a hollow attempt.

Man, this one is very bad though. Like almost insufferably obnoxious and stupid. It's disappointing because I honestly have nothing bad to say about any of the people who worked on the film. I liked a lot of the cast members in other projects like "Saturday Night Live" and "The Office." Chris Hemsworth is really funny, but they didn't even try to give us any chemistry between him and Kristin Wiig like they were teasing throughout the whole film. Not even anything like a funny joke. Just short little jokes about how sexy she thought he was or something.

The story is more or less a retread of the original's plot points, but I can at least give them the complement that it's a different one? Like at least not a beat-for-beat remake? Kristin Wiig's character is the only Ghostbuster that I liked, all three of the other ones really got on my nerves and the actresses all seemed like they were trying way too hard to just force jokes that didn't come naturally. I was laughing at some points, but at most of the others they just fell completely flat on their face.

Really terrible special effects and awful jokes mixed with extremely obnoxious forced attempts at poop and queef humor (yes there was a terrible queef joke in this that obviously went over like a wet fart) made this one incredibly hard to watch. And for that reason I would only recommend this movie to those with a very high level of curiosity or if you're a "Ghostbusters" fanatic, which I guess by this point most of them have already made up their minds on the 2016 version. It gets relegated to a footnote in movie history, like "hey remember back in 2016 when they tried to remake 'Ghostbusters' with an all-female cast?" That's really all there is to it.

I passionately dislike this movie as a Ghostbusters movie. Let alone the fact that it's also a bad movie but it's just- no! Rated higher than Ghostbusters II and they call themselves critics!? Its the worst in the series. Not in a sexist way but they might've created some of the dumbest most boring characters ever. Afterlife, though there isn't much development they still had decent characters (Paul Rudd was good but unfunny) It's just really stupid and to corny. I know Ghostbusters is a comedy series in general but this is just brainless and unfunny mish mash of a generic alien invasion film but with ghosts. . Yeah, it's got some alright ghosts and good VFX but it 50% just recycles the plot of the original! I mean if you "critics" are still gonna give Ghostbusters II a what, like 5? Well at least it has a unique story! It's just like your usual horror/science fiction "Oh look the paranormal is haunting all of the city!" Thing. It just tries to be chaotic and cinematic and you know what!? Its just a disgusting monster mess. Bad humor, unoriginal plot, but some cool ghosts and ghouls!

What's to say? At this point the movie is so mired in controversy that any opinion on it seems like a political statement more than a movie review. But here we go anyway - I didn't like it. It feels less like a movie with an idea (in this case a recycled one) and more like one of the many subpar comedies we have today where a few comedians who are friends in real life get together and give us two hours of smug back-patting. It offers nothing memorable of its own, just a few reworked things from the original movie, which was a classic with many iconic images and scenes. The only thing anyone will remember about this is the controversy surrounding it. I don't care much for Melissa McCarthy or Leslie Jones but I do like Kristen Wiig and I'm trying very hard to like Kate McKinnon (perhaps too hard). None of these women are impressive here. Chris Hemsworth's character is used too much. It's an obvious joke that doesn't get funnier the more you tell it. Ultimately the problem with this movie isn't that "women aren't funny," so much as comedy writers today are very lazy and uninspired.

Ghostbusters (2016)

1/2 (out of 4)

Wow, what on Earth were they thinking? I will freely admit that I love to see films remade. I mean, it gives the original some attention and in the best cases you end up with another good movie. In the worse cases, hey, you've still got the original film there. If anything this 2016 remake of GHOSTBUSTERS just makes the original all the more impressive because it's amazing how bad this thing is. And no, I'm not sexist or racist. I'm just being honest. I was okay with this film being made but it's really shocking how awful it turned out.

I'm not even sure where to begin in regards to the bad stuff. I guess we can start with the story because there really isn't a story. There's pretty much a bunch of stuff ripped off from the original movies and toned down here. The horror elements are all toned down. The sexism is toned down. There's really no "story" here outside of four women trying to capture ghosts. I kept watching this expecting something to happen but it just never did. Even worse is the fact that the film didn't make me laugh a single time, which gets us to another problem.

The four female leads here are just downright awful. I'm not going to put an awful lot of blame on them since I'm sure they'll all talented actresses but the screenplay pretty much gave them no characters. In the case of Melissa McCarthy, she's pretty much playing the same type of annoying character that she plays in all of her movies. Kristen Wiig was downright annoying, Leslie Jones was even more annoying and Kate McKinnon didn't even register on the screen.

Even the ghosts are downright pathetic and lazy. I use the word lazy because there's just nothing creative about them and once again it just goes to show how wonderful the original film was and they even make the stuff in the sequel seem better. I could go on and on about the awful stuff in this movie. I honestly had no idea the movie would turn out as bad as it did and it really makes you wonder why Bill Murray would refuse to do a sequel for so many years yet he'd sign up for this thing? I'm hoping he and the other cameos were paid quite well.

GHOSTBUSTERS is a film that could have worked and should have worked. I'm really dumbfounded as to what went so horribly wrong with this but just changing the sexes of a character certainly isn't enough to make a film work.

I'm afraid this is not a good film.

I like some things of it. Some people complain about the CGI but I really think the monsters/phantasm were good and it's the only one thing that is better than the OG (obviously due to tech limitations at that time). I also think some of the scenes at the end work even they are merely a copy of the OG and not better than it. I also liked some of the origin details, like the logo or the song.

However, this film has 4 major issues:

1st, the cast. Leslie Jones is the best one, she knows when to do her thing, when to stop, when to listen, she is funny, it doesn't feel forced. McKinnon is super praised and I get why. Even if I didn't love her role - sometimes it seems she replaced the lack of any substance by weird expressions all the time - she is charismatic and I can clearly see her working very well with a better plot. But then...Melissa McCarthy is so bland here, so insipid, I can't even remember a single take from her. Wigg, on the other hand...I would prefer to forget what I remember. There is one good moment from her (when she met Hemsworth character) but all the rest is super annoying, super unnatural and not funny. Hemsworth's role is funny (in fact, the funniest when it works) and good to see until...it's too repetitive and more of the same.

2nd, the plot/story. I'm still trying to find out how do you want to reboot a classic film with this story to tell. It doesn't make sense. It would work potentially as a stand-alone episode if they decided to create a TV series with 12 episodes per season, as a film is not enough. After 15 minutes, I don't even remember the villain and why he did what he did. I don't understand how things scalated so quickly.

3rd, the editing. What an atrocious thing. This film would work so much better with less 20/25 minutes, with much less stupid (and weak) jokes...sometimes you can even see when they did several takes with scenes not matching from different angles. Yeah, that bad.