New 'Ghostbusters' Reboot is Disappointingly Mild

It would have been sweet justice if the new Ghostbusters were really terrific, because its very existence received such vehement criticism from devoted fans of the original film, taking to the Internet—even before the movie was released—to voice their outrage that director Paul Feig was casting four women to fill the shoes of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson. But I’d like to think that was a very small cadre of web trolls, because why does it matter that the main characters are all women? What matters more is that it’s funny. Unfortunately, the new Ghostbusters isn’t funny enough. This isn’t the fault of its stars, either. Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon have proven themselves to be very, very funny. The fault must be laid at the feet of our current studio structure, in which even comedies have to be big, eye-popping, exhausting entertainment machines. This system often squeezes the life out of viable projects.

The original Ghostbusters was actually a victim of this same kind of studio bloat: The problem has only gotten worse since 1984. (See Pauline Kael’s seminal essay “Why the Movies Are So Bad” in her book Taking It All In.) Even some of the most beloved movies of the 80s, including Ghostbusters `84, Batman `89, and the Indiana Jones trilogy, all acquire tunnel-vision in the last act, when they ratchet up the stakes the only way they know how: by going as big as possible. It’s the reason we feel a sense of closure when there’s an explosion in a movie. We’ve been trained well.

It’s depressing that a movie like Ghostbusters must adhere to such exhausting, banal conventions, but it’s the reality. And this reality becomes clear right at the beginning of Ghostbusters, when a glowy green ghost terrorizes a tour guide inside a haunted mansion. The terrified man tries to escape from the house, but winds up in the basement, where the floor begins to move as some kind of green oozy stuff bubbles up underneath it and threatens to engulf him. Soon, the powerful and apparently very pissed off ghost rushes through and then the scene ends.

This opening reveals a lot about the movie’s flaws. It’s not just the bigness of the production. The writers, Paul Feig and Katie Dippold, somehow forget that they’re making a comedy. They’re hyper-focused on the story, to the point that it often plays like a straight horror flick, or better yet, a straight Marvel Comics installment. Especially at the end, Ghostbusters looks no different from a superhero movie in which an all-powerful villain destroys New York City, smashing through whole buildings without actually harming any citizens. At times, there is nothing funny happening on screen, which is usually when the film employs the one-liners of Ghostbuster #4, Patty, played by Leslie Jones, who dishes out quips like she’s dealing cards at a casino.

The girls have their moments. I’m a devoted fan of Kristen Wiig, who can do comedy and drama with equal finesse, and who has a knack for whimsical flakiness, a quality — or perhaps an affectation — she exhibits in Bridesmaids when she’s in an uncomfortable or threatening situation or when she’s trying to be funny. But Wiig is basically the straight-man in this film, save a few moments where she dishes out a sliver of her brand of fizzy insanity. In one scene, Wiig bursts into a fancy restaurant where the Mayor of New York is having lunch, trying to warn him about an impending ectoplasmic apocalypse. The secret service agents attempt to eject her from the room as she grips the table, pulling it with her out the door. Wiig is game when it comes to these acts of silly, delightful humor, and I kept wanting more moments like that for her.

And then there’s Melissa McCarthy, so often miscast as the punching bag of any comedy, who sort of fades into the background in this movie. One of McCarthy’s least acknowledged talents is her painfully sharp delivery, which she employs here to some effect. And, just as in Spy, McCarthy is funnier here when she’s competent and in on the joke. But both Wiig and McCarthy are overshadowed by their co-stars, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, which isn’t always a good thing. I’ve relished McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton impersonations on Saturday Night Live, but she gives a surprisingly limited performance in Ghostbusters, ceaselessly mugging for the camera in every scene. McKinnon’s face is like a neon skyline: every attribute is screaming for your attention. The schtick is funny until it’s not, and until it feels like schtick and nothing more. McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzmann stands in for Egon, the nerdiest member of the original Ghostbusters, played by the late Harold Ramis. But Ramis had some genuinely human moments, like when he tells a woman, “I collect spores, molds, and fungus,” knowing she’ll be turned off by his hobby but nonetheless defiantly proud of his interests. Or later, when the ghostbusters are about to use their ghost-catching devices for the first time and realize they could be endangering their own lives, Egon says, “I feel personally responsible.” Beneath his nerdiness and his savant-like knowledge, there’s a beating heart. McKinnon’s character never grows beyond the conception of a one-note SNL sketch. Leslie Jones fares better, even though she’s ostensibly cast as the stereotypical sassy black character. She’s the most endearing one of the bunch, hired as the fourth Ghostbuster because she’s a New Yorker who knows the city inside out.

Fans of the original will enjoy the cameo appearances of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts (who’s so underrated), and Sigourney Weaver. But as much as I enjoyed seeing these wonderful performers make little appearances in the film, part of me longs for movies that aren’t so dependant on nostalgia. The new Ghostbusters tells its own story to be sure. It’s not a direct remake. But its existence is absolutely based on people’s nostalgia for the original, which may explain why so many fans were annoyed about Paul Feig’s casting choice. His casting is fine. The movie, though, needs work.

With Chris Hemsworth as Kevin, the Ghostbusters’ dumb-hot receptionist, Andy Garcia, Charles Dance, Michael Kenneth Williams, Matt Walsh, Ed Begley, Jr., Cecily Strong, and Michael McDonald.

Aloha

The controversy surrounding writer-director Cameron Crowe’s latest film, Aloha, is becoming more significant than the movie itself. In case you aren’t aware of the backlash against Crowe, it involves his casting Emma Stone as a character who’s one-fourth native Hawaiian. The argument--which is being raised more and more frequently against Hollywood--hinges on the problem of under-representation in mainstream movies of vital, well-drawn characters who are not white and/or not male. Crowe’s response has been considerably respectful and apologetic, but it may also fall under the old adage, “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” Crowe wrote:

Thank you so much for all the impassioned comments regarding the casting of the wonderful Emma Stone in the part of Allison Ng. I have heard your words and your disappointment, and I offer you a heart-felt apology to all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice. As far back as 2007, Captain Allison Ng was written to be a super-proud ¼ Hawaiian who was frustrated that, by all outward appearances, she looked nothing like one. A half-Chinese father was meant to show the surprising mix of cultures often prevalent in Hawaii. Extremely proud of her unlikely heritage, she feels personally compelled to over-explain every chance she gets. The character was based on a real-life, red-headed local who did just that.

I must confess, the issue of Stone’s character’s ethnicity did not strike me as I was watching the film. I figured she was an American Hawaiian: someone of European descent whose parents or grandparents moved to Hawaii; only now do I recall Stone’s explanation of her ancestors, as well as her overzealous appreciation for the mythology of Hawaii. (It feels forced.) As I read over Crowe’s statement, I remembered a scene early in the film in which Stone’s character spells her name out loud, pronouncing it for Bradley Cooper’s character. That’s when she goes into a diatribe about her heritage, but it was lost on me. Crowe’s dialogue, particularly in the first third of Aloha, is muddled and even difficult to understand at times. You feel lost in it: it’s like bad old Hollywood writing; and really, the dialogue in old Hollywood movies was never this convoluted or confusing; it was dreamy nonsense. Crowe’s dialogue for Aloha is striving to be dreamy nonsense, and achieving only the latter part of its goal.

Stone plays an Air Force pilot assigned to shadow Cooper’s character while he’s visiting Honolulu. (The why is still a mystery to me, much like many of the film’s wobbly plot elements.) A romance develops between the two of them, only it’s not really credible, and there’s a half-hearted attempt at a love triangle, because Cooper runs into his ex-girlfriend, played by Rachel McAdams, who is now married to pilot John Krasinski. I adore Rachel McAdams, and she’s very good in Aloha, but she’s often forgotten by the movie, and Crowe does a generally terrible job at resolving the conflict between her and her husband, who’s comically incapable of carrying on a conversation. (His taciturn manner serves as the source of one admittedly genius moment later in the movie, which might justify rushing to theaters to see this movie before it’s gone.)

I think this is the first time I’ve ever felt critical of an Emma Stone performance. She’s uneven in a lot of the movie, but this is really the fault of Crowe’s writing. In the first half of the film, Stone talks too fast, like one of those madcap comic actresses from the 1940s, the way that Mary Astor did in the zizzy Preston Sturges comedy The Palm Beach Story. And Stone kind of looks like she’s doing a Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday) impersonation. She’s a go-getter and a busybody and she’s as crazily devoted to the integrity of her job and her state as Leslie Knope, the indefatigable parks department director of Pawnee, Indiana. But something about the Stone character’s reference to old Hollywood actresses and old Hollywood comedy doesn’t work, and it certainly doesn’t pay off, because by the time we’ve gotten used to it, she changes back into a modern-day girl, just in time to criticize Bradley Cooper’s character for letting a crazy billionaire send an armed satellite into space.

Aloha is an incredibly problematic film structurally and morally. Crowe introduces a lot of big moral dilemmas for his characters, and somehow manages to bungle them all. Bill Murray plays the mad billionaire who has essentially taken the place of NASA; he and Cooper are the only ones who know of his plans to put weapons in space; but in the end, Cooper walks away with impunity because he sabotages the satellite, and Murray is arrested. Somehow that feels too easy, and moreover, too complicated, for what should have been a simple, enjoyable romantic comedy.

There are other moral issues at stake here. Aloha is trying to do some kind of Hawaiian heritage public relations, but it fails pretty miserably. Go back and watch John Sayles’s wonderful Sunshine State (2002) if you want to see it done right. Sayles tapped into the psyche of Floridians, as well as the pulse of the developers trying to make money off of them; Crowe is trying to do the same thing in Aloha. I knew it was a bad sign when the movie’s opening credits showed us vintage Hawaii imagery in a vacant cultural collage as the names materialized on screen. Crowe is only scratching the surface, and George Clooney’s The Descendants did more to tap into the culture of Hawaii than this movie does. And worse yet, Crowe's attempts to address American imperialism in Hawaii have no depth to them: the Americans are the center of this film, and Hawaii and its people are basically in the way. Cooper is, after all, sent to Hawaii to try and sweet-talk them into letting Bill Murray launch his space program there without any objections from them.

Alas, here’s my problem: I walked away liking this movie a little more than my review indicates. It pushed enough of my buttons (especially that sentimental ending, which I won’t reveal, involving a character and his daughter) to give me a decent time. I loved Rachel McAdams and John Krasinski’s characters. I wanted the movie to spend more time with them, fleshing out their personalities and conflicts. I quite enjoyed the brief onscreen moments of Alec Baldwin as an Air Force commander. I appreciated Crowe’s attempts to understand the implications of a world without NASA. All of these ingredients worked to some degree or another, even if the movie as a whole wasn’t successful. It's one of the strangest movie experiences I've had in a long time. But it has charm and vitality, and amidst its many problems, there is a good movie, hiding, needing to be plucked out.

Identity Mongering: 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' and 'Divergent'

I've been lost in a whirlwind of books. It's as though the crippling pall of academia has finally been lifted and I am struggling to keep up with my newfound desire to just read, read, read. Yes, I was an English major and an English graduate student who hated being forced to read books. It took me about a year and a half to get into the discipline of reading for pleasure. Since January, I've finished eight books, including John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, and Tab Hunter's autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential. I also gave up on one: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which was truly the definition of dismal reading.

The movie watching has suffered as a result I'm afraid. I've been thinking about this blog and what it means. Whether or not I want to continue it, whether or not I want to be a film critic. I've been thinking about this whole internet life we lead, and how it's not working for me. This need to put myself out into the online world for all to dissect and consume. It doesn't satisfy. So, dear readers, I don't know what that means for Panned Review. I'm not going to make any big statements because I'm likely to change my mind in two weeks. But there is a stirring in me to leave this big technological monstrosity behind, or at least, to take a few steps back and get to know the person who doesn't need to stare at a screen for some semblance of an identity.

For now, let's talk about the two movies I did see in theaters this month, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Divergent. As for Grand Budapest Hotel: I'm not in any way a Wes Anderson fan. I remember watching The Life Aquatic with my good friend Neal in pure agony. He was laughing at it, I wasn't. I didn't, I don't, I probably never will, get it. Moonrise Kingdom only reinforced this feeling about Wes Anderson movies for me. I fell asleep. The reason Wes Anderson annoys me is the reason he annoys everyone else who finds him annoying: His movies are just so precious, so cutesy, so meticulously storybook, as though Anderson had stumbled across a myriad of dollhouses and toys in his attic and breathed some kind of pompous auteur's life into them. He's the puppeteer who can't decide if he finds puppets amusing in a sentimental or an ironic way. He probably wants it to be both.

That being said, I enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel. At first, there was the same cutesy-ness and the same stultifying flawless-beauty aesthetic that permeates his other work. But then the story grabbed my attention, and the film's quick adventurous tale transcended all the obviousness of Wes Anderson-land. The story is about a hotel clerk in-training who becomes the protegee of Liam Neeson, a wise and seasoned concierge at the titular hotel. Neeson's character is named Gustave H., and he maintains emotional and sexual relationships with many of the hotel's elderly female guests. One of them (played by Tilda Swinton, entombed in aging make-up so that she looks like poor, shriveled Bette Davis did in the late 1980s) croaks and leaves him a priceless work of art which her son (Adrian Brody) tries to keep for himself. He employs a murderous thug to aid him in this endeavor. Eventually, Gustave is arrested when the angry son accuses him of murdering his mother. Thus the young hotel clerk (Tony Revolori) is enlisted to help bust Gustave out of jail.

Grand Budapest moves with verve and comic charm, and even when I rolled my eyes at Wes Anderson laying his usual bag of tricks out on the table and then parading them around the room with the kind of hipster-reverie that only Wes Anderson can exhibit, I couldn't help liking it. It was fun. Maybe he's just worn me down and my defenses are so low that I'll take anything remotely enjoyable. I think this may be the Wes Anderson film that the non-initiated can finally get behind. (It may also be our last.) With Saoirse Ronan. Featuring cameo appearances by Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton, F. Murray Abraham, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, and Bob Balaban.

And then there's Divergent (directed by Neil Burger) the latest trend in pop young adult dystopian story-telling. It's based on the book series by Veronica Roth. I liked it, but are we ever going to be released from the prison of dystopian craptacularness that permeates popular movies and literature? This kind of gook is somehow highlighted as the catalyst to a reading revolution among young people. I recently read in the book The Dumbest Generation that what's actually happening--with successful book series such as Harry Potter and the like--is that most kids who read them read nothing else. They read these books to be in on the cultural event that they perceive is taking place and dare not do so without them on board.  The author, Mark Bauerlein, points out how many people under 30 are proud of their anti-literate sensibilities. They're too worried about pop culture, too obsessed with engaging social media to keep their social lives alive. This may be cynical, but it's certainly compelling. I imagine that there are plenty of people who read widely. They're the ones who aren't on social media 24/7. That's why we think they're non-existent. They aren't making any noise because they're reading. Right now. Let's join them, shall we?

Okay, back to Divergent. The basic structure of Veronica Roth's futuristic, post-apocalyptic world had me laughing inwardly. Everyone is divided into one of five factions, according to their gifts and personalities. Once adolescents come of age (i.e. when they become old enough to theoretically figure out who they are), they are allowed to choose one of these identities. The trouble is when someone doesn't fit in just one box. That's where Beatrice Prior (played by Lindsay Lohan-ish looking Shailene Woodley, a compelling young actress who impressed me in The Descendants) finds herself. She fits into multiple categories. The community has a word for people like her. (Any guesses?): Divergent. Divergents are seen as a threat to the stability of the community, so the villainous Kate Winslet, head of the faction of smarties known as Erudite, has basically issued death warrants for any Divergents who might be wandering around. It's kind of Blade Runner mixed with The Hunger Games mixed with The Giver mixed with Every Other Futuristic Movie/Book Ever Made.

On the plus side, Divergent is an interesting movie, once you get past the inane set-up and the inevitable message of "being yourself" and "not letting people put you in a box." (These two slogans comprise the messages of 97% of all high school yearbook inscriptions.) The whole training program that Beatrice undergoes when she makes her choice is quite absorbing. (She's pretending to be one of the athletic, super-energetic, comically over-the-top Dauntless people, who are basically like a bunch of hot young things on steroids who protect the city from danger.) There's a little romance between Beatrice and one of the Dauntless trainers, a guy who's imaginatively named "Four" and played by hunky Theo James. (He manages to keep his shirt on most of the time, and even when he removes it, it's not gratuitous ala Taylor Lautner in Twilight.)

Also, it's somehow very gratifying to see Kate Winslet play the heavy. Has she ever played the heavy before? Her performance was cool and collected, smoothly and elegantly evil. She reminded me of Jodie Foster in the wretched Elysium. Foster was the wicked wasp queen keeping the dregs of society away from the privileged. And while Foster's performance didn't really work for me, the general idea is the same: a revered screen actress taking on the part of a couth, clean, polished Cruella Deville. Winslet's quite a natural at it. And Shailene Woodley holds her own.

With Ashley Judd, Zoe Kravitz, Mekhi Phifer, and Miles Teller.

Ed Wood

Oh dear Lord in Heaven. If you're tired of watching Johnny Depp play a wise-cracking pirate or a freaky candy factory owner or a cheeseball 18th-century vampire with lots of money or a wise-cracking freaky cheeseball something else, go back and watch Tim Burton's Ed Wood from 1994. (Also, if you feel Tim Burton has lost his touch, this movie may just perk up your mood.) Yes it's a weird movie, true to the Burton-Depp collaborations, but it's also a delightful one, a faux-morbid chronicle of the infamous career of cult filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., who's infamous as the director of some of the worst movies ever made, including the transvestite trash-gem Glen or Glenda? and the outer-space-invasion spectacular Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Ed Wood is probably one of the best movies about the movie-making business. It's certainly one of the only ones that doesn't genuflect with banal reverence toward Hollywood. Instead of getting some high-minded, self-congratulatory glamor parade, we're treated to the ersatz side of the movie-making business: the world of not just deferred dreams, but squandered dreams, where a guy with too much enthusiasm and too little talent will work his heart out and still struggle to pay the lab fees for his own films. (Thus one of Wood's movies, Night of the Ghouls, sat unreleased and virtually lost to curio-aficionados for years and years.) Somehow, Tim Burton prevents Ed Wood from being a tragic figure: the movie successfully walks the line of sympathy and ridicule, never partaking in either too carelessly. It revels in his sheer, exuberant love of the medium, and I feel like it wants Ed Wood to make a successful movie, even though he never does.

Leave it to Tim Burton to try and do justice to the man who was arguably the worst director in history. (John Waters is the only other director I'd like to see take a crack at the career of Ed Wood.) If you appreciate the deliciousness of failure, you'll find a kindred spirit in Ed Wood. Johnny Depp plays him with wide-eyed, gleeful aplomb, and taps into the intriguing inner-world of a man who loved two things: making shitty movies (although he didn't seem to think they were shitty) and wearing women's clothes, particularly argyle sweaters. (In the movie, Ed swears he isn't gay, just a really uninhibited hetero.) This has to be one of Depp's most engaging and fun performances. In so many of his more recent movies, he plays these cartoonish characters who stand in front of the camera and crack jokes. Luckily, Johnny Depp is still in great shape and can move around convincingly, or he'd really be in trouble. But if you've neglected to go back and re-visit some of his older work, I encourage you to do so. You'll see the Johnny Depp we all fell in love with: the actor who made the grotesque lovable and beautiful and funny.

Depp invests such heart into Edward D. Wood, Jr. that the movie's admittedly cynical (at times) tone is much easier to take. The movie does have a bitter side, much of it expressed through the brilliant performance of Martin Landau, as an aging Bela Lugosi. (Wood meets Lugosi by chance, and the two strike up a friendship that leads to collaborative work on several films, ultimately proving to be both the comeback and the swan song of the legendary ham.) With Bela we get a truly depressing window into the dark side of Hollywood, in which older stars have faded completely from view. Landau's performance (for which he earned an Oscar) recalls the mad pathos of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, and in fact Ed Wood lives on the same edges as Sunset: it's Hollywood in decay, black-and-white, vaguely noirish, out of money, and forgotten by audiences who have long ago moved onto the next big thing.

But ultimately Ed Wood is a loving, blissed-out tribute to sheer audacious zeal and the irony of failure. How could you not love a movie like that? The supporting cast is like a gaggle of amusing and uniquely scary figures in a wax museum or a carnival house of horrors. Ed Wood doesn't have the zany madness of Beetle Juice, but in a way, it is Tim Burton's Citizen Kane. (Orson Welles, incidentally, shows up in a chance meeting with Wood. He's played here by Vincent D'Onofrio.) With Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Juliet Landau, Jeffrey Jones, G.d. Spradlin, Lisa Marie, and Bill Murray.

Tootsie

Dustin Hoffman in drag looks like Jane Fonda in Nine to Five crossed with the homicidal tranny in Dressed to Kill. Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, a dedicated actor who gives good advice to his students (he teaches acting class to supplement his income) but fails to implement it in his own life. Michael's a has-been actor, perpetually ignored at auditions because he's too old or to young or too short or just generally "not the right fit." He waits tables while awaiting the next big part, and scolds his students for not trying to make work for themselves. (That's the one bit of advice Michael tries to follow: he's raising money to self-produce his buddy's play.) But nothing works, and even Michael's agent seems oppositional toward his career. So, in a moment of audacious desperation, he makes himself over as a woman (named Dorothy Michaels) and wins a big part on a daytime soap opera, as a gutsy hospital manager named Emily Kimberly.

The first half of the movie is just about the most inspired comedy material to come out of the 80s. That's probably because there's so much interplay between Hoffman and Bill Murray, his roommate, and Teri Garr, Michael's long-time friend and more recently, his lover. The moment you see Bill Murray you start laughing, because he has a goofy charm to him that doesn't require him to say any words. He's just naturally funny with his half-blitzed stare, as though he were possibly stoned, or possibly figuring out solutions to every problem in modern society, or both. But in some kind of alternate universe where he's content to keep it all to himself. And Teri Garr projects a marvelous frenetic energy to her role as a neurotic actress who's too self-conscious to make it past the first audition. She really comes alive, and she and Murray and Hoffman have a loose, fun chemistry together.

But the second half of the movie feels too commercial, too self-satisfied. It's a recurring problem for the director, Sydney Pollack, who also appears as Michael's agent. The year before, Pollack directed Absence of Malice, which was a proficient newspaper drama, but like Tootsie, it wasn't forceful or exciting enough to rise about its banal cleverness. Pollack seems to be the most laid-back director in recent memory (he certainly projects a likable calm as an actor, even when he's exasperated by Michael's flights of temper and petty complaints about show-business). I suppose one could take for granted that Dustin Hoffman in drag is enough force to sustain a comedy all by itself, but when it's given the 80's commercial treatment, it starts to lag. In particular, the part where Michael, as Dorothy, accompanies his co-star, Julie (Jessica Lange), to her father's house in upstate New York for the weekend. Michael lets slip his attraction for Julie, who naturally thinks that he is (as Dorothy) a lesbian. Meanwhile, Dorothy's father (Charles Durning) develops the hots for Dorothy and eventually asks her to marry him. It sounds wacky and screwball-comedyish, but in the hands of Pollack, it all seems just a notch about the melodramatic soap opera that the characters appear in. Perhaps he's trying to reign in the insanity. It's safer, more controlled, but the avoidance of risk-taking takes the edge off the comedy, and it starts to resemble a banal sitcom.

The actors really do to pull this thing off. They are, in the end, enough to make Tootsie a fun and often laugh-out-loud funny movie. It's got a lot of clever lines and a to-die-for supporting cast, which also includes Dabney Coleman as the soap's director, George Gaynes, Geena Davis, Doris Belack, and Lynne Thigpen. And above all, Tootsie is a movie about actors and acting, and more than most movies, it gives the profession its due, not only speaking to the soul-crushing rejection that so many actors face, but the endless dedication many of them put in. It also makes fun of actors, and turns the profession on its head, which keeps Tootsie from seeming like a proprietor of a bunch of self-congratulatory martyrs. And let's not forget how much fun gender confusion really is. It's an eternal source of great farce, from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to Mrs. Doubtfire. (Even when films like Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire don't sustain themselves to the end, there are still pleasures to be had, like the wonderful comic performances we get from them.) 1982.

Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom, the latest from writer-director Wes Anderson, is equal parts lyrical children's fable and quirky misadventure. I found it more enjoyable than The Life Aquatic (the only other Anderson movie I've seen to date), which did not hold my interest; but it's also the kind of movie that you might just as easily sleep through. Moonrise Kingdom feels like a Charlie Brown movie stretched out to feature-length. That's probably because it's set in the mid-60s, like Charlie Brown, and the story involves a group of boy scouts (that seems Charlie Brown-ish too.) Even the music, and the voices of many of the children, captured this sort of cartoon childhood nostalgia. It's cute for a while, but the overall effect is banal. It's forced nostalgia. It looks more retro than most movies that are set in a past time, but it also feels incredibly shallow and disingenuous.

The movie is best not over-thought, because you might start to read a bunch of meaningless symbolism into it that isn't there. At its core, it's about an orphan named Sam (Jared Gilman), the misfit of the boy scout troupe, who abandons his camp entrenched on the New England coast, and takes off with a local girl named Suzy (Kara Hayward) with whom he has fallen in love. The incompetent adults in the movie try and track down their missing kiddos, twice losing them. These include Suzy's parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, two lawyers who might be a less-interesting version of the characters played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the 1949 comedy Adam's Rib), the boy scout leader (Edward Norton, who delivers every line with straight-faced aplomb and dedication, just like a boy scout), and the local coast guard Captain (Bruce Willis, who becomes a sort of father figure for the unwanted Sam).

Visually speaking, Moonrise Kingdom has some lovely images, and it seems as though it were pieced together like a storybook. The visual beauty is offset by Anderson's nonchalant, almost recklessly (but not quite) non-serious approach. It's not that he doesn't care about the story or the characters; they're not being pushed onto the screen to be mocked or made fun of, but he doesn't elevate their problems. For these characters, everything is already so elevated in their minds (from the Scout Master's obsession with orderly cabins and strictly adhered-to schedules to Sam and Suzy's determined puppy love), that Anderson is right to reign himself in. The movie would have felt heavy-handed otherwise. This is a portrait of a group of people who are taking everything far more seriously than the movie takes them. Still, Anderson hasn't pulled off anything that great. His inventions are a kind of obvious kitsch charm that he's been working on presumably all the way back to his early films. He's got a following that has embraced his cutesy hipster style. It's not offensive, but not as great as everyone's making it out to be.

With Tilda Swinton (looking stuffy and quite hilarious as the social services lady) and Harvey Keitel as a self-important Scout Master.

Ghostbusters

The performers in Ghostbusters (1984) are better than the material. Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver have a fabulous chemistry, especially in the scenes where she's possessed by a centuries-old spirit, making advances toward Murray, who reacts with a wonderfully sarcastic indifference. Murray's natural comic abilities are the anchor of Ghostbusters. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis are constantly trying to catch up with him, but it's not because they aren't talented. Aykroyd plays the easily excitable Raymond, and Ramis is the uber-scientific, stiff, humorless Egon. The three of them are paranormal investigators who, after being ousted from a cushy research post at New York University, set up operations in an abandoned fire station. They're a sort of 911 service for supernatural emergencies. They have bizarre-looking paraphernalia: lasers that somehow trap the ghosts with their beams and confine them in an airtight box. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but then again, how could it?

The film relies on at least two montages to carry its story, which is never a good sign. (It was a common tack of comedy films of the 80s and 90s, and has become a cliche.) Much like in Caddyshack, which Harold Ramis co-wrote and directed, and Murray co-starred in, you get the feeling that the filmmakers didn't have enough form to their ideas. And while Caddyshack has the mark of improvisational comedy that works for it, Ghostbusters could have used a little more structure to tighten some of the loose ends. It doesn't have the right build-up to it that it should have as a strong comic-horror film. Instead, there are grabs at ideas that sometimes work and sometimes don't. Fortunately, the cast lifts the material up.

Sigourney Weaver is a standout because she's such an imposing force as an actress. The crime of this movie is that so many great actors are short-changed. Annie Potts, as the blase secretary, injects her own brand of droll humor in her scenes, but they aren't as many as you'd like them to be. And Rick Moranis plays a likeable chump, an accountant who's got the hots for Weaver's character, his neighbor. When he becomes possessed by a spirit, he's absolutely terrific, acting like a stoned klutz. Directed by Ivan Reitman. Written by Aykroyd and Ramis. The idea was apparently conceived by Aykroyd to be a vehicle for he and Saturday Night Live co-star John Belushi.

As a movie, Ghostbusters is uneven. There are some wonderful comic moments, such as a scene where Murray conducts a test on two college students to determine if they have psychic abilities, and uses it to hit on one of them, an attractive blonde co-ed. One of the other stand-out moments is the afore-mentioned encounter between Murray and the possessed Weaver, who's loose and wickedly funny because she's finally allowed to do something than play the straight woman. At other times, the jokes are hopelessly juvenile and detract from the stronger parts of the movie.

Also starring Ernie Hudson and William Atherton.

Get Low

Get Low begins with a burning house on a dark, deep Tennessee night, and suddenly a figure moves from the left side of the frame toward the middle and then to the right until it vanishes just as quickly as it appeared. It's the story of a hermit named Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) who has been the focus of much local gossip and story-telling for the forty years that he's lived in seclusion. Suddenly in the winter of 1938 he comes to town and announces to the local mortician (Bill Murray) that he wants to throw a funeral party to which the whole town is invited.

The dark comedy and the Southern gothic have never made a more peculiar match than in this aged-in-wood "tall tale," which presents a perfect opportunity for Murray, whose deadpan brand of humor is so well-suited to this particular vein of comic movie-making. As Felix's life moves from intensely private to suddenly public, the relationships between he and Murray (and Murray's assistant, played by Lucas Black) become strangely compelling and sympathetic, despite Felix's gruff, pushy, stubborn behavior and Murray's opportunistic money-grubbing.

In the midst of Felix's quest for a public, "living" funeral--one where he can finally lay to rest some of the demons he's been living with for forty years--he rekindles his friendship with Mattie (Sissy Spacek), who remembers him as he was--charming, handsome, and much deeper than the taciturn persona that has developed about him through years of gossip and unanswered questions.

The movie is slow, but on the other hand, it allows us to live with the absolute solitude the characters seem trapped within. It's got the look of a Southern-fried nightmare at times: scenes pulsate with eeriness, and yet this isn't a horror movie (although it's a bit of a ghost story, in a way...without the actual ghosts, perhaps). It's also palpably sensual: You can almost smell the rabbit cooking in Felix's kitchen, the trees as he chops through them with an axe; you can almost feel the dirt under his fingernails and the chill of the ghostly winter, as a faint but persistent aroma of smoke wafts through the landscape. The delightfully sarcastic humor saves it from being stagnant, and the humanizing performance of Robert Duvall transforms Felix from ominous to endearing.

With Bill Cobbs and Gerald McRaney. Directed by Aaron Schneider. 103 min. ★★★

Zombieland

Fantastic! Not my favorite "looking" zombies, but this is certainly one of the most fun zombie flicks in recent years, sort of America's answer to Shaun of the Dead. Woody Harrelson is a bad-ass. Jesse Eisenberg balances out Woody's redneck Dirty Harry persona with his neurotic, witty and insightful take on his new "world," which is--you guessed it--overrun by flesh-eating zombies. And who would have thought a zombie movie would quote All About Eve's famous line ("Fasten your seatbelts...")? ★★★