JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEWS GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE:
So as you’re struggling to stay in the theater, or just stay awake, through the entire—not very long—running time of the new Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, you might find yourself noticing that Bill Murray only appears in about five minutes of the picture and he seems, well, divorced from the other people in the movie.
In his first appearance, his character, Peter Venkman, throws pens at the head of the comedian Kumail Nanjiani… but we never actually see them interact. Later we see him enter the Ghostbusters fire station from the old movies and kid around with Annie Potts, the remarkably well-preserved secretary from back in the 1980s—this may be the movie’s only genuinely enjoyable moment—but are Murray and Potts actually looking at each other or at tennis balls on a green screen?
And while Venkman and Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz, the buddy team from the first two movies back in the 1980s, are supposed to have been best friends then and best friends now, they do not have a moment together. Only at the very end, where the original busting team of Murray, Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and Potts are seen pulling down on a handle, do they all seem to be on the same set in the same scene in the same movie at the same time.
Welcome to the future of movies. Green screens and AI and actors’ schedules are going to mean it will be possible for entire pictures and television series to be produced in which the interplay of characters and the performers who inhabit them are created through digital editing rather than the filming of them working off each other.
We’ve had tastes of this before, notably in the absolutely dreadful Fast X, in which Gal Gadot and Charlize Theron and Brie Larson and a few other players who only appear for a few minutes are clearly standing alone on a stage in London or Atlanta or somewhere reading lines with an assistant director, getting a million-dollar check for their time, and vamoosing back on a private plane to their PrivatePlaneLandia. Gwyneth Paltrow reportedly didn’t even know she was in Spider-Man: Homecoming because they’d cut her in from a scene she’d filmed years earlier for some other Marvel picture and didn’t even bother to tell her.
Yes, there’s going to be a lot more of this, and the problem is that no matter how good they get at it, some part of us is going to know we’re not seeing people acting together, and the degeneration of our interest in what movie honchos and streamer bigwigs are throwing at us will continue and perhaps accelerate.
Read the whole thing. Hollywood has been sequel-obsessed for decades — but why is it making audiences actively despise its increasingly elderly franchises?
On the other hand, Jim Treacher holds out hope for the sequel to another once-beloved ’80s comedy-scare flick: I’m Actually Excited About “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
Maybe I’m just addicted to Memberberries. We all are these days. Us ‘80s kids have gotten sequels to Blade Runner, Top Gun, Tron, Mad Max, Ghostbusters… and of course, the endless firehose of Star Wars crap.
Maybe this will be good anyway. It could happen!
Or not — there’s a reason why Roger Ebert’s definition of a movie sequel was “a filmed deal.”