We smuggled liquor into the movie theater.
This is not something I recommend or condone, and all these years later I have no good answer as to why we did it. We knew better. We were adults after all. I can only blame the city hall reporter. It was probably his idea. It was probably his fifth of whiskey.
Anyway, it was me and him and the education reporter and one of the staff artists. We smuggled the whiskey into a Ghostbusters matinee one weekday in June 1984. We upended that fifth into our legitimately purchased cola products and we drank the mixture while we watched Ghostbusters for the first time.
I don't know if a fourth of a fifth of whiskey was enough to make me genuinely tipsy in those days. But I know one of the very best ways to watch Ivan Reitman's original Ghostbusters is with a little tangle of fire in your gullet in the company of the sort of friends with whom you'd publicly daydrink. I know that it multiplied the guilty pleasure of sitting in a half-empty movie theater in the middle of the afternoon. (My colleagues may have been skipping out on work, which would have made the experience even sweeter.)
We had a fine time watching Ghostbusters in 1984. We probably ate some popcorn. I know we all giggled when the empty bottle sitting at the city hall reporter's feet somehow got kicked over and slowly roll-rattled down the sloped concrete floor to the front of the theater. Afterward we went out for Mexican food.
It was only some years later when I watched it again without the benefit of friends and whiskey that I realized Ghostbusters isn't a very good movie. It's not that funny. Bill Murray is all right in it, but he's basically doing his Bill Murray-charms-with-baby-talk schtick, and the other main roles are terribly underwritten. Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd have little to do, and do it adequately, though there's a flatness in the latter's performance that in retrospect feels very sad to me.
Aykroyd was one of my favorite actors in the late '70s and early '80s, and I always expected him to break out as a major star, possibly in a dramatic role. But his role as Dr. Ray Stantz in Ghostbusters marked the start of a long string of indifferent performances -- it was as if some light went out inside him. He can still be very good -- he was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting performance in Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 -- but he has never been as much fun.
Annie Potts, another performer I always enjoyed, is completely wasted in the film, relegated to a ditzy secretary role. Rick Moranis, who seemed like a genius on SCTV, is pigeon-holed as a creepy schlub. And let's not forget poor Ernie Hudson, whose role as "the black Ghostbuster" is so slight that it feels like tokenism.
The movie is bearable when it concentrates on Murray's banter and other small moments. But unfortunately it too soon becomes a special effects-driven spectacular that is even less compelling today than it was in 1984. Ultimately the presence of Murray and Sigourney Weaver makes the movie a watchable mediocrity, but it's hardly the comedy classic that some seem to regard it as being.
The consensus of the reviews in 1984 was that it was just OK. The Hollywood Reporter called it "only intermittently impressive." Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it a "messy, near-miss film" that paid "more attention to special effects than to humor." Roger Ebert liked it a lot, but he always had a soft spot for Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis, all graduates of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe.
So why does this very average film have a 97 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes? I'm part of the problem. When I was asked to provide a quick score for the film by the website more than a decade ago I gave it three stars out of five because I fondly remembered seeing it when it came out. I felt kindly toward the film -- I wasn't required to think about it, so I didn't. I rated it through a scrim of nostalgia.
And I imagine most of the reviews that you'll find of the 1984 Ghostbusters were written long after the movie opened by people who saw it in circumstances very different from the way most critics see most films. I would guess a lot of the people who are very fond -- and even protective -- of Ghostbusters probably saw it as children on TV or home video. Which means they saw a different movie than I did.
Because none of us ever sees the same movie. (And none of us ever sees the same movie twice.) The atmosphere in which I first saw Ghostbusters was part of the experience. Our petty rule-breaking enhanced our enjoyment of the product. (You could argue our behavior mirrored Venkman's onscreen obnoxiousness.) And in the end, each of us probably remembered the adventure of watching Ghostbusters better than we did the movie itself.
Around here, the feeling is that the only legitimate reason to remake a movie is to correct a missed opportunity. No one should attempt a remake unless they're fairly certain they can improve on the original. By that logic, Ghostbusters is the sort of movie that it's perfectly acceptable to remake, and a lot of the fanboy angst about Paul Feig's distaff version that's opening today seems silly and misogynistic. There's nothing sacred about Ghostbusters, and I'm as excited about seeing any movie that employs Kristin Wiig as I ever was about seeing Dan Aykroyd on-screen.
But part of me wishes they'd done something more ambitious and less safe than a remake of a 32-year-old dialogue-driven horror comedy that a lot of people revere for reasons that have less to do with the merits of the film than the ways they first apprehended it.
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MovieStyle on 07/15/2016