Courtesy SonyI know I should be embarrassed.
I love movies. I love comedies. I work for E! News. And I've never seen Ghostbusters. Somehow, someway, it slipped through the cracks of both my entire youth and my cultural education. I've seen Titanic at least a dozen times and yet one minute of Ghostbusters. I'd blame my parents, but that list of wrongs is already far too long—a childhood without cable television, for a start.
But, this shortcoming does give me an advantage today. I have a particular set of skills, if you will. I don't have money, but what I do have is a brain empty of preconceptions about this week's remake.
The new Ghostbusters, which stars such comedic heavyweights as Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon, has been getting a bit of negativity thrown its way. There are the trolls, who of course don't deserve one more word's worth of our time, but also some legitimate critics.
Like the Chicago Sun-Times, which described the reboot as a "horrifying mess." Or Variety, which lamented that the movie was "spending far too much time channeling the original." Or Forbes, which chose the mildly positive spin of saying "Winning Cast Barely Saves Underwhelming Reboot."
Throughout all of these opinions (and the players behind this week's release should take care to remember that they are just that: opinions) there is a common thread: Comparison. It's inevitable in any reboot, but much less one that turns the original on its head by replacing the heroes with an all-female cast. A lot of this sentiment stems from the idea that an original should never be messed with.
Which is where I come in. I'm a blank slate. I went into it with one goal and one goal only: To decide if Ghostbusters is funny.
And in a word? YES! I laughed. I laughed a lot. The last time I checked, that was the point of going to a comedy. Even though I didn't get all of the (clearly inside jokes), even though sometimes the slime was really disgusting, and even though I entered the screening behind several grown men dressed in full-blown Ghostbusters costumes, complete with what I know now are proton packs. I'm a cynical person, and that threatened to be more emotionally traumatizing than the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but luckily it wasn't. (That's because nothing is more emotionally traumatizing than midnight showings of Harry Potter.
First and foremost, the best part of this movie is the cast. This serves to be both ironic, considering that the dearth of online hate directed at the reboot was directly related to the fact that the original stars were to be replaced by (gasp!) women, and totally predictable, considering that the cast is truly phenomenal. Individually these four comedians are hilarious in their own way, but as a group they each rise to the challenge of their personality puzzle piece.
Kristin Wiig plays the mildly-to-totally socially awkward professional, giving many an opportunity for her to revive the pat silences, weird dances and unrequited high-fives that we learned to love in Bridesmaids. Melissa McCarthy and Kate McKinnon are the whack-job scientists, constantly hunched over their laboratory tables and yelling, punching, kicking and every other crazy thing you could imagine. And Leslie Jones, the comic relief among this pack of already hilarious geeks, here to throw out a one-line zinger at every opportunity. Apart from the fact that these women seem like people you actually would want to hunt ghosts with, their banter and good-humored insults have great chemistry.
And then there's Chris Hemsworth.
Oh, Chris Hemsworth, you lovable oaf you. In a fabulous role reversal, he plays the dumb-as-rocks secretary who was hired solely for his looks, and offers up basically no legitimate contribution to the plot. It's fantastic. While he's marveling at how phones work and flashing his insanely pearly whites, absolutely no women are being objectified or even having their looks come into play at all. This is a movie starring four famous actresses in which the way they look has literally no bearing whatsoever—no one is forced to endure a ghost-fight scene in a ball gown, there's not a single scantily-clad person to be found, and (praise heavens) there isn't a single romantic story line.
Now, of course, if I had to guess, there wasn't a lot of sex and dating in the original Ghostbusters, but it still feels refreshing to get to watch Kristen Wiig not talk about men. Consider this round of the Bechdel test passed.
Probably the other aspect I enjoyed the most in the reboot was the fact that it took a few jabs at the aforementioned haters. Movies don't exist in a vacuum anymore, so why should their scripts? As such, the writers threw in some winks about all the criticism, such as YouTube commenters who say things like "Ain't no bitches gonna hunt no ghosts." If that's something you've actually written on a movie's IMDB page, you deserve to be made fun of on the big screen.
Now of course, nothing is perfect. Did I think some parts of Ghostbusters were cheesy? Yes. Did I think that the CGI versions of the ghosts look totally outrageous and not scary at all? Sure. But I'm pretty sure that all those issues were present the first time around; it has a theme song for gosh sakes. That said, the next time I'm in the mood for some ghost-related laughs, I know I'm going to call my fellow women.