Ghostbusters was well received by critics and is considered by many as one of the best films of 1984. It currently holds a 93% "Certified Fresh" rating on review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 45 reviews. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "This movie is an exception to the general rule that big special effects can wreck a comedy ... Rarely has a movie this expensive provided so many quotable lines"...Pauline Kael had problems with the chemistry between the three lead actors: "Murray is the film's comic mechanism ... But nobody else has much in the way of material, and since there's almost no give-and-take among the three men, Murray's lines fall on dead air".In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Its jokes, characters and story line are as wispy as the ghosts themselves, and a good deal less substantial".posted by Miko at 8:05 PM on November 23, 2010 [1 favorite]
Recognition
In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted Ghostbusters the 44th greatest comedy film of all time. The American Film Institute ranked it 28th in its list of the top 100 comedies of all time (in their 100 Years... 100 Laughs list). In 2005, IGN voted Ghostbusters the greatest comedy ever.[29] In 2006, Bravo ranked Ghostbusters 76 on their 100 Funniest Movies list.Entertainment Weekly ranked it as the Funniest Movie of the Past 25 Years. In 2008, Empire magazine ranked the film #189 on its list of The 500 Greatest Movie of All Time.[ In 2009, National Review magazine ranked Ghostbusters number 10 on its 25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years list.
...and, so, yeah, back to the 1930s/40s for me.
The shelves yielded miracle after miracle. Here was The Death of Superman, directed by Tim Burton, starring Nicolas Cage; in Pete’s universe, Burton and Cage had both dropped the project early on. Here was Total Recall, but directed and written by David Cronenberg, not Paul Verhoeven. Here was The Terminator, but starring O.J. Simpson rather than Arnold Schwarzenegger—though Schwarzenegger was still in the film, as Kyle Reese. Here was Raiders of the Lost Ark, but starring Tom Selleck instead of Harrison Ford—and there was no sign of any later Indiana Jones films, which was sad. Pete’s hands were already full of DVDs, and he juggled them awkwardly while pulling more movies from the shelves. Here was Casablanca starring George Raft instead of Bogart, and maybe it had one of the alternate endings, too!from Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt
Variant: what movies would Robert Downey, Jr. be the worst possible replacement lead for?He'd make a horrible Kermit in The Muppet Movie. I'm not even sure he can sing.
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Which is strange, because if you've seen things like Shattered Glass, you know that Chistensen can be fantastic, and is probably a stronger actor than Phillippe overall, but I think Phillippe, though more limited in general, is more deeply suited to the particular arc that Anakin had to play - the kind of cocky, likable guy who you also don't quite trust for some reason which shows through later. (Which, strangely, is exactly the role Christensen played in Glass, but with a necessary element of an outsider's desperation for approval.)
We can't do anything about the writing, which would still suck, but Phillippe could have played Anakin on a path from naive and idealistic to relativistic and scary, whereas with Christensen the path ended at impotent and whiny.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:22 PM on November 23, 2010