GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE*

The original 1984 GHOSTBUSTERS was a thing of perfection - inventive, hilarious, perilous, epic, buddy-bromance intimate. For decades, people have been trying and failing to resurrect its unique magic, not least SATURDAY NIGHT's Jason Reitman - son of the guy who directed the original.

Unfortunately, FROZEN EMPIRE is no exception to the sucky sequel rule.  It's a bloated film, both in terms of characters and running time, with disappointingly few moments of levity and no actual jump scares. 

In this contemporary retelling Egon Spengler's daughter (Carrie Coon - The Gilded Age) has taken over the family business with her two kids and partner (Paul Rudd).  There's a plot line about how hard it is to be a bonus dad and how the teenage daughter's only pal is a ghost in what may or may not be a queer relationship.  Meanwhile, a MacGuffin owned by some guy played by Kumail Nanjiani is about to unleash hell on earth and only the old school ghostbusters can stop it.  Ray (Dan Ackroyd) and Winston (Ernie Hudson) - now conveniently rich - do most of the heavy lifting here. We get a cameo from Bill Murray as Venkman and that's literally the only scene that's actually funny. Kumail Nanjiani tries, but he can't carry a film this bloated on his own.

Enough already.

GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated PG-13. It was released in March 2024.

SATURDAY NIGHT - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 8

This is not a review of SATURDAY NIGHT as, for logistical reasons, I had to skip the final thirty minutes. That said, I was not that invested in it and I doubt I missed anything.

The problem may be that for British people, SNL is not part of our cultural fabric. And even from a contemporary perspective, whenever I come across skits on social media I don’t find them especially funny. So for sure I know about Ackroyd or Chevy Chase or Billy Crystal but these guys feel pretty vanilla to me. I appreciate George Carlin but he’s not really part of the SNL crew. And as for Belushi, it’s complicated and complicated in a way that the first hour or so of this film did not seem willing to engage in.

I am also not sure that the ninety minutes leading up the first ever episode of SNL fifty years ago really warrants the full Robert Altman treatment, or whether writer-director Jason Reitman (GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE) has the technical ability to make that shooting style feel organic rather than forced.  So yes we get the rapidly moving camera weaving in an out of dressing rooms and the stage and the control room and it’s all meant to feel claustrophobic and chaotic and kinetic. But it’s also felt stagey and shouting attention to its own cleverness in a way that was distracting. The overlapping Altmanian voices were probably better at conveying atmosphere but again to what end when the character arcs become harder to follow.

Worst of all, Reitman and fellow writer Gil Kenan (MONSTER HOUSE) seem desperate to inject some stakes into proceedings but I wasn’t convinced.  Producer Lorne Michaels has too much material. Okay fine just move half your skits into next week’s show. It’s not as if it’s topical satire. And as for Belushi going missing no shit he’s a raging drug addict: you have too much material just fill the gaps! 

All of which is to say that what I saw of the movie was not for me with the exception of every time writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) was preaching revolution to the franchises or ripping into the censor.  That was absolutely delicious.

SATURDAY NIGHT is rated R and has a running time of 109 minutes. It was released in the USA on October 4th and opens in the UK on January 31st 2025.

CITY OF EMBER - inventive, beautiful and after a slow start, engaging

I can overlook a lot of faults in a film it it merely looks wondrous and CITY OF EMBERS is certainly one of the most wonderfully inventive films I've seen. Based on a children's fantasy novel by Jeane Duprau, the production designer beautifully recreates a self-contained subterranean world in which generations of people have lived after an apocalyptic "disaster" above ground. The look of the City mixes Dickensian London, art-deco design and a general feel of labyrinthine grunginess. The city is powered by a failing generator and a system of crusty old pipes, and the people live in fear that the supplies of tinned goods are running low. Bill Murray's oleaginous mayor tries to keep their spirits up while hoarding canned goods and the fear of the unlit outer regions keeps them from trying to escape.

If the movie starts off slow, it's because Gil Kenan (who directed the brilliant animated kids flick MONSTER HOUSE) takes time to establish how the city works and the mythos of the Builders. I suspect that audience's less keen on simply mopping up the atmosphere of an elaborate set will start to wriggle. But once the plot gets going CITY OF EMBER works well as a standard children's adventure movie. Saoirse Ronan (ATONEMENT) plays a standard-issue cinema Plucky Teenager, who inherits a scrambled version of the exit plans, and pieces them together with another similarly enterprising teen played by Harry Treadaway (BROTHERS OF THE HEAD).

Admittedly, the final scenes play a little like INDIANA JONES and the discovery of above-ground - which is never really in doubt - is a bit of anti-climax after the visual richness of the City. Still, for all that, this movie is a perfectly enjoyable fantasy adventure with better design and acting than most. How many kids films throw in actors of such quality as Martin Landau, Tim Robbins and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, like so much confetti?

CITY OF EMBER is on release in the UK and US. It goes on release in Iceland and Portugal on October 23rd, in Russia on October 30th, in Argentina on November 20th, in Singapore on November 27th, in France and the Netherlands on December 17th, in Belgium on December 24th, in Australia on January 1st and in New Zealand on January 22nd.