KrangPrime
Master Member
Re: Ghostbusters 3
and that's the nail on the head. if you do it as a period piece, you don't have to bring 'realism' into it. That's a pet peeve I have with modern super hero films too. everyone over thinking the fun out of the concept to try and bring it into the modern world.
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now we have focus groups, test screenings, lawyers, executives apon executives, and people who's star power lasts maybe 6 years before they fade out and go into obscurity. I think the days of people with decades long careers are long since gone.
and elegance is a good way to describe some movies of the 80s. Looking at trading spaces, you'd never get a movie with that kind of slow, simple setup pacing that takes time to build up to the plot today. the first 5 minutes alone are basically music and images and very little dialogue, and it's gloriously done. those days are long gone..
Watch any real police chases video show. People don't run from the cops and get away. They get followed by a chopper until they crash and then they get 2 years added to their jail sentence just for running.
But if the setting is several decades ago then all these aspects of it are believable. Not just "we can come up with an excuse good enough to make the audience suspend their disbelief if they want to root for it."
and that's the nail on the head. if you do it as a period piece, you don't have to bring 'realism' into it. That's a pet peeve I have with modern super hero films too. everyone over thinking the fun out of the concept to try and bring it into the modern world.
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It's not just elegance. It's subversiveness that infuses a particular generation of comedy writers' works. Animal House, old school SNL, Caddyshack, The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, Stripes, even up to Groundhog Day, what do all of these films have in common?
They usually feature a bunch of too-smart-for-their-own-good wiseasses who have zero respect for incompetent authority figures and moral conventions. What you've got here, basically, is comedy borne of the protest movements of the 60s and 70s. These were writers and actors who were incredibly talented, and also incredibly disillusioned with finding out that the people who ran their world were phonies, incompetents, or downright evil, that the values they'd been taught always won the day (in their 1950s/early 60s childhoods) were, in fact, completely disregarded by the people in charge in favor of expediency, profit, and power.
The comedies that came out of this were all about basically doing what they wanted, all with a sardonic smile. They were only referential to past films and comedies and such insofar as they were turning convention on their heads (e.g. hiring Elmer Bernstein to write the Animal House score). Nowadays, the comedies simply act like that old Chris Farley sketch where he interviews people and asks questions like "'Member that time you said that funny thing?! 'Member?! That was cool..." You ask me, that's a big reason why these comedies fail.
now we have focus groups, test screenings, lawyers, executives apon executives, and people who's star power lasts maybe 6 years before they fade out and go into obscurity. I think the days of people with decades long careers are long since gone.
and elegance is a good way to describe some movies of the 80s. Looking at trading spaces, you'd never get a movie with that kind of slow, simple setup pacing that takes time to build up to the plot today. the first 5 minutes alone are basically music and images and very little dialogue, and it's gloriously done. those days are long gone..