If Ghost, Ghostbusters and Men in Black had a baby

Yes, I know three distinct entities cannot have a baby. But just go with me on this for the purposes of this post.

With another night gone without a call in the presidential election, and having already had a tentative celebration movie the night before, I was kind of at loose ends last night in terms of what to watch.

I started with the Amazon movie The Vast of Night, about which I've heard good things. But about six minutes of this movie told me that the distinct rhythms of its dialogue, and its tendency to compliment its audience for its ability to keep up, were just not something my mind could handle in its current state of exhaustion and distraction.

So I watched R.I.P.D. instead.

I cannot figure out any way that watching R.I.P.D. is somehow symbolic of being in the middle of an undecided election. So I'll just tell you what I did glean from it.

R.I.P.D. is a pretty hilarious example of the "elevator pitch movie," which I'm defining as a movie whose premise can be easily summarized in the time it takes to ride up in an elevator with an important studio executive. Often these use the "meets" structure. My favorite example of the "meets" structure is actually a TV show, not a movie, and googling it now, I can't even find the name of the show. But it was about a hospital in space, and I always thought it would have been pitched as "ER meets Star Trek." (Both references, I suppose, are a bit dated nowadays.) 

 "R.I.P.D. is Ghostbusters meets Men in Black," but there's a third comp you can add: Ghost.

Spoilers to follow about all four movies.

The Ghostbusters part is pretty obvious. For starters, it's about specially trained people who try to rid their city (in this case Boston, not New York) of the mischief of ghosts. They themselves are also ghosts, but that's not an important difference. They use special weapons to dispel the ghosts, and much hilarity ensues. In both instances the plot is also moving toward a big rooftop ceremony in which a much larger population of ghosts could be unleashed into the world. The clouds even part and turn into a cyclone of sorts in both movies. 

The Men in Black part is also obvious, maybe in part because Men in Black also sort of resembles Ghostbusters. We're introduced to a world behind the world we can see in which agents are defending normal people from a danger that's just out of view, and trying to make sure the normal people don't become aware of anything they are doing. The agents in both cases are a seasoned, crotchety veteran and our surrogate, who is the new recruit. They travel around the city, shake down informats, and end up having skirmishes that get out of control and threaten to blow the lid off the whole thing.

The unexpected comparison, though, is Ghost. In both movies, the protagonist is killed either directly or indirectly by a shady partner who has a shady financial scheme in mind. The ghost protagonist walks around helplessly witnessing the movements of the deceitful partner, especially as he appears to put the moves on the protagonist's grieving girlfriend/widow. The protagonist also tries to communicate with/connect with his grieving girlfriend/widow through a surrogate body, in this case that of an older Chinese man, rather than Whoopi Goldberg.

What does it all add up to?

Two stars. 

It's not great. It's not terrible. But it's probably more terrible than great.

And soon, hopefully we'll finally be saying R.I.P.D. -- rest in peace Don, at least to your presidency. 

Hey, I found the connection! 

Honoring Kidder and surfacing from the bottom

I probably wouldn’t have watched Superman II Wednesday night only to celebrate the life of Margot Kidder. Although I cherished her on some level, this was really the only movie I much remember her from, as I only saw the original Superman like three times (one of which was in the past few years) and I only just saw The Amityville Horror last year for the first time. I’d memorialized her on the blog on Wednesday and that was probably enough.

But there was also an interest in surfacing Superman II from the bottom of my Letterboxd list for rewatched movies.

I’ll explain.

I’ve kept track of my movie viewings for a long time, but one of the most recent was starting to make note of when I re-watched a movie. That started about 12 years ago, in July of 2006. The first re-watch I recorded was Ghostbusters. I don’t know why Ghostbusters prompted me to start recording rewatches, or whether I made the decision and Ghostbusters happened to be the first one I saw after that. But either way, I’ve consistently kept track of every movie I’ve rewatched since then.

They say the flesh is weak, but so is the Microsoft Word file, even though I’m an avid backer upper. So when I started on Letterboxd maybe seven years ago, I decided to transcribe my list of rewatches over there, and kept adding any rewatch in both locations. Call it a cloud backup of sorts. I’d put the date watched in the notes field, so that information was preserved too.

When you add new movies to a list on Letterboxd, they automatically go to the end of the list. I might be able to tweak that but I’ve never figured out how. The list was more interesting to me, though, with the newest entries first. So each time I add a new movie, I change its number in the list from 400-whatever to #1, then it jumps to the top. (I’ve rewatched over 650 movies, but about 200 of them were before I started keeping track of rewatches, and I have not watched them since so they aren’t on this list.) This means that the same movie is always last.

For a long time that was Ghostbusters. Every time I moved the newest addition to the top, I’d have to first go down and look at the bottom and see Ghostbusters there.

But then I watched Ghostbusters again in 2016. And because no movie can appear in a Letterboxd list more than once, it was moved to the top, with the latest rewatch date added to the existing rewatch date.

The new last film on the list? Superman II.

It’s been that way for nearly two years, and because I like to consider very inconsequential things (which offers an explanation for this entire post), I had been idly wondering when I would give Superman II another watch and surface it from the bottom of this list.

And that brings you up to Wednesday night.

Now that I’ve watched it again, the new last film on the list could stand awhile, unless I artificially watch it just for the purpose of surfacing it. That movie is The Matador, and though that’s a film I like quite a bit, a third viewing is not really fighting its way into existence. I may soon surface the second-to-last movie on the list, though. That’s Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, which I own and which I have been on the verge of popping into the DVD player for some time now.

I suppose I should actually devote some of this post to Kidder and Superman II, shouldn’t I?

I did appreciate Kidder in this movie, though I think I realized that I had slightly exaggerated just how charmed I am by her here. Although this is a childhood favorite that I thought was impervious to reevaluation upon multiple viewings, I had a number of small criticisms of the movie. I wouldn’t say that Kidder or her performance was one of them, though I didn’t feel the pang of nostalgia and sorrow I expected to feel when I watched it – that I feel when I watch Star Wars and see Carrie Fisher, for example. Ultimately it makes sense that Fisher would have had more of a sway over me than Kidder did, as she appeared in three beloved movies to Kidder’s one. The sense of sorrow is probably a bit greater as well as Fisher died before her work was really done, as she was going to appear in at least one (and probably only one) more Star Wars movie. (I should acknowledge also that Princess Leia in Jabba’s slave outfit was probably also working on my budding sexuality when I first saw it at age nine, and there’s no equivalent for Lois Lane – though if I had seen her turn in Amityville Horror there might have been.)

The interesting thing about Superman II on the whole was how hurried it felt to me on this viewing. You want a tight script to move you along in the action, but some of the jumps seemed downright nutty. For one, when the three Kryptonians first land in that hick town and start wreaking havoc, there is already talk on a concurrent newscast about the use of nuclear weapons being ruled out due to the risk to the population. Hasn’t the world only been aware of these three for like 15 minutes? Who’s talking about nuclear weapons? Sure, there was that incident on the moon, but at this point the powers that be are still likely trying to piece together what that was. When Zod takes the camera, he’s already asking if there’s no one on Earth to even challenge him. The very next scene, they’re changing the faces on Mt. Rushmore to their own. Isn’t that a little fast?

Then I was also reminded how little screen time there is between when Superman forfeits his powers and gets them back. It’s hard to say how much time is actually passing in the movie, but it couldn’t be more than a day or two, a week at most. The only scene outside the fortress of solitude is when he and Lois take a ride to a diner to get dinner and he has the fight with the local bully. He’s already walking back to the fortress (what happened to their car? And where did Lois go?) and already shouting in empty fury at his dead parents, telling them he “failed.” I should have timed it, but it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes of screen time.

Lex Luthor’s time with the Kryptonians also feels very hurried. Gene Hackman as Luthor is one of my favorite parts of the movie – he works so much better as comic relief than “the big bad.” But there’s barely any time between when he introduces himself and having to scurry to explain his relevance and avoid being killed. Both sides are shrewd enough and pragmatic enough for a feeling out period to be logical.

Still a favorite and I’ll still miss Margot Kidder.

A timely dose of girl power

Women cannot be president of the United States -- not yet, anyway -- but they can be Ghostbusters.

This was the subject of infamous debate on the internet, in what now reads as an ominous portent of what was going to happen in the presidential election. We are a nation not only divided by ideology, unfortunately, but also by gender. If you didn't want a woman picking up a proton pack and particle thrower, you certainly didn't want her finger on the button. (And I don't mean you you, of course. You're cool.)

The reasons Hillary wasn't elected are surely more complicated than that. I'm not going to re-litigate that today.

What I am going to do is set the stage for our renting of Ghostbusters. We wanted something essentially silly to take our mind off the state of the world, but also something that would place women in a position of power, if only for a bit of symbolism about our ongoing liberal agenda. Well, that was my own rationale for suggesting it, anyway. The speed with which my wife agreed on the choice indicated it was sound logic.

The timing was also a bit fraught, though. What if we didn't like it? Or worse, what if we really didn't like it? It might make things worse. The thing we had chosen as a balm could end up squirting Tabasco sauce into our wounds.

Well fortunately, I'm a thumbs up on this movie. I just wish it could be a slightly more definitive thumbs up.

Whether or not women can be Ghostbusters -- or would seem natural as them -- never figured to be an issue for me, and I'm glad to say it wasn't. In fact, I loved the way this team came together. It felt natural and I was cheering on these likable characters. I even liked the choices made by Kate McKinnon, having written a post in which I described her as one of my biggest worries about the movie. When you really commit to a characterization -- and boy does McKinnon commit -- you are going to misfire sometimes. But she hit a lot more than she misfired, and it gave the movie a real additional dose of eccentricity.

Unfortunately, the problem with this movie is that after it has that promising beginning, it doesn't feel like it has a middle or an end. It has scenes that are playing the part of a middle scene, the part of an end scene. But the story is not constructed in such a way to give us the proper momentum toward that middle and end. I don't know how to describe it any better than that. The story of this villain trying to open a gateway to the spiritual world didn't do a lot for me, I'm sorry to say.

Only about 12 hours after watching it, I already don't remember big parts of it. We were both falling asleep a bit, so that's no doubt a contributing factor. Still, I wouldn't say I lost more than a minute of what was happening. Maybe my overall state of exhaustion -- it's been a long and tiring week -- contributed to a kind of fugue state in which I couldn't solidify an impression of the movie.

Or maybe it just wasn't that memorable.

What I do remember, though, is laughing. I laughed out loud at least a dozen times in this film, and many comedies cannot claim such a high success rate. The film looked better than I thought it was going to look and it was funnier than I thought it was going to be. So what if it wasn't perfect? It was a Ghostbusters movie that made me laugh. End of story.

The question I should probably address, in a post with this title, is whether the movie felt specifically empowering toward these women, whether it provided me a specific sense of inspiration. I guess the answer is that it did, but more in the sense that the movie was made at all than in anything textual. They are not better or worse Ghostbusters because they are women. They are not better or worse scientists because they are women. They are not better or worse people because they are women. They are just people, and in most other movies, they would be male people. That itself is something.

Of course, the fact that the movie was roundly rejected and is considered a flop casts a pall over all of this.

I'll close by briefly addressing three other talked-about aspects of the film:

1) The cameos from the original movie. A lot of people thought they killed the pace of the film and prevented it from being its own distinct entity. I didn't have that issue. With the possible exception of Bill Murray's usage, the scenes were all short enough not to feel like anything was being belabored. It didn't detract. But I don't really think it added either.

2) Leslie Jones. The worry was that the only character who isn't a scientist is the black transit worker. Would a truly progressive female Ghostbusters have made the black Ghostbuster one of the scientists? Maybe. But this film does right by Jones' character. The street sass that could have been played up is not. And she's pretty much always making the right decisions. I liked the character, and more importantly, I liked how the film treated her.

3) Chris Hemsworth as the bimbo receptionist. He made me laugh a lot, but only in proportion to the rest of the characters. So, the narrative that the "one funny part of the movie was a man" is also not something I agree with.

So the world may not have been truly ready for a female president or female Ghostbusters. But I'm not going to use the evidence of 2016 to discourage me. And I don't think the studios are either.

And ultimately, I don't think the electorate is either.

Lots of thoughts on lots of hotel movies

This is where I spent my Saturday night:

And these are the movies I watched, along with some thoughts on them, including a number of interesting ways they were related that I could not have anticipated. Please do not think of them as complete considerations containing the entirety of my thoughts on each film.

Oh, and this post will be somewhat long, but it should be easy to jump around in and flip through to find the parts that interest you.

Jane Got a Gun (2016, Gavin O'Connor)

I only really watched the last 20 minutes of this movie in the hotel. The rest of it was watched the night before, that morning, waiting for the bus and on the bus ride out. The reason for the erratic viewing schedule was that I started it too late on Friday night, but then had to finish it before the 24-hour iTunes rental expired. It was much better than five different sittings would suggest it is -- and all the advertising/handling by the studio would suggest it is.

Thoughts:

1. I'm digging the "slow" westerns these days. I'm thinking primarily of last year's Slow West, but this fits that bill as well (in addition to having several other thematic similarities to that movie). I think I'm more into the intimate western with only a few main characters and a few settings, though Slow West in particular violates that last criterion. These might work better for me than what I think of as the big, sprawling western epic, though I'm hard pressed to give you an example.

2. During the last scene, I finally realized something very funny about this movie: Its three main cast members all appeared in the last two Star Wars prequels. As Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and Joel Edgerton all appear on screen at the same time for the first time during that scene, I was like "Hey, it's a standoff between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padme and Uncle Owen!" I doubt it was totally a coincidence, and since Edgerton co-wrote this movie he may have been the one to call in a couple favors (though Portman was one of its producers).

Grimsby (2016, Louis Letterier)

Looking for something light to start things off in the afternoon in the hotel. A Sacha Baron Cohen film defintiely fit the bill. Its 79-minute running time was also attractive.

Thoughts:

1. This marks the second straight year I've started in the hotel with a visually stylish spy movie featuring Mark Strong. Last year it was Kingsman: The Secret Service, in which Strong appears in a supporting role. Here Strong is one of the leads. In both cases there is gory violence (more there than here) and edgy humor (more here than there), and in both movies, a real American president or would-be president is either killed or given a fatal disease. (SPOILER ALERT) (Barack Obama's head explodes at the end of Kingsman, and Donald Trump gets AIDS in Grimsby after the spray of blood of an HIV-positive gunshot victim ends up in his mouth). Both movies were a lot more satisfying than I expected them to be.

2. And both movies had about the same amount of material, but in Grimsby it was all packed into 79 minutes. That was definitely to the film's detriment as it frequently felt rushed and all over the place. However, this movie has a scene where the two leads are getting violated by an elephant penis while hiding inside another elephant, then proceed to get covered in elephant semen, so that may be the decisive factor in comparing the two films.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn)

My most unpremeditated pick of the day. When Grimsby ended, I had my choice of 16 other movies, only three of which I knew I was saving for the evening (it was about 5 o'clock at this point). As I had only seen Bonnie and Clyde once and it was at least 20 years ago, the time felt right.

Thoughts:

1. The opening scene of this movie floored me. And I'm just talking about that scene where Faye Dunaway rolls around in the bed restlessly. The way the camera ends by zooming in on her eyes, as she detects something outside that she needs to respond to (and that will change her life forever), was absolutely enthralling. Simply put, I love that shot. Dunaway in general really impressed me in this movie. Not that she hasn't in other instances.

2. I was surprised to see Gene Wilder pop up in this film. I guess it wasn't at the point that he popped up that I was surprised; I saw his name in the opening credits. But it seemed like quite the coincidence as we just lost him this past week, and I had no foreknowledge of his presence in the cast when I selected this movie. It was nice to get to appreciate him in a comedic turn as one half of the couple that follows the Barrow Gang after they've stolen his car, only to wish he'd never done so when the gang turns the tables on them and starts following back. As he'd just died, it was especially nice to see him emerge from his interactions with them unscathed.

3. The two leads change cars quite a few times in this film, but I knew it was getting close to the end when they carjack the "Bonnie & Clyde Death Car." A couple friends and I have a joke about this as the car they were killed in is displayed at a casino on the state line between Nevada and California, and we stopped there on the way home from a weekend trip a couple years ago. The casino is called Whiskey Pete's, and you can buy all sorts of Bonnie & Clyde Death Car-related paraphernalia.

Barton Fink (1991, Joel Coen)

I have never loved Barton Fink like others have, but I have decided over the years that I respect it, and again not having watched it in more than 20 years, it was time to see if I had more than respect for it. I bought it for like $2 at a fundraiser for my son's school back in March, so it was time to finally pop it in. This was the film playing during my pizza dinner.

Thoughts:

1. I noticed right away that the film was in full frame rather than the proper widescreen aspect ratio. While this sucks, and kept me from watching a similarly deficient version of The Shining a couple years ago (and also a version of Meek's Cutoff, though I later learned that this was the only version as this film was actually shot in this ratio), I decided that I owned the damn thing so I might as well watch it. I was only distracted for the first few minutes, then forgot about it.

2. If seeing the recently deceased Gene Wilder in Bonnie and Clyde was total coincidence, then seeing the recently deceased Jon Polito in Barton Fink was not total coincidence. I'd been planning to watch Barton Fink anyway, so in that sense it was a coincidence that he died that morning, but once I heard he'd died, then the resolve to watch it become absolute. Strangely, I think of Polito first and foremost as his character in The Crow -- "Shit on me!" Also, had no idea he was gay until he died. It was good to get the chance to appreciate a memorable character actor, in addition to a lead like Wilder.

3. I was struck on this viewing how indebted Barton Fink seems to David Lynch's Eraserhead. It's not only the physical similarity of the lead actors, especially as John Turturro's hair is styled in this movie. It's not only the idea of going mad in the confined setting of a living area (there an apartment, here a hotel room). It's even the shots traveling down into the various fixtures and openings -- there the radiator, here the bathroom sink. Throw in a weird worm baby and Fink would be a full-on homage to Eraserhead.

4. Speaking of which, it was funny to watch this movie in a hotel room. I didn't start to go mad, but there was one point where someone tried to open my door. I think they had just come to the wrong room, but it was enough to spook me a bit.

5. I definitely more than appreciate this movie.

Natural Born Killers (1994, Oliver Stone)

Another movie I hadn't seen in 20 years. Sensing a theme? Also, this movie is grotesque enough that I thought it would be better to watch it away from my wife, so I wouldn't have to explain myself. This was a movie I always loved, but had not revisited in ages. I started at about 10.

Thoughts:

1. Despite the long layoff between viewings, I remember a ton about this movie, and it's easy to see why: I own the soundtrack. This soundtrack was put together by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and included not only a couple of his old songs, but one new one ("Burn"). In fact, "Burn" may be the only song on the soundtrack that I didn't notice in the movie during this viewing, as the movie has songs going nearly beginning to end and the soundtrack has a ton of the movie's dialogue on it. So lines of dialogue were coming back to me from multiple listens to this CD in the late 1990s. Funny how that stuff lodges in there.

2. The movie did not disturb me as much this time. I remember the violence being bloodier than it actually is. I think the thing that always disturbed me the most still does: Rodney Dangerfield. Genious casting. Who knew this man could be so damn creepy.

3. The structure of the movie took me a bit by surprise. I didn't remember until this viewing that the whole second half of the film takes place in the prison. I would have though that would have been more like the last third, but 'tis not.

4. It was funny to see blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos from both Evan Handler (as a guy working behind the scenes on Robert Downey Jr's. show, American Maniacs) and Jared Harris (as a British youth talking about why Mickey and Mallory are so great).

I had the idea of watching one more movie -- it would have been Spring Breakers -- but I just couldn't justify starting a movie at midnight. Not when checkout is at 10 a.m. and I still needed to awaken early enough to watch one more movie in the morning. Which was ...

Ghostbusters (1984, Ivan Reitman)

I always finish in the morning with a movie I know by heart that is usually pretty light in tone. Past movies in this slot have included The Cable Guy, Raising Arizona, This is Spinal Tap, Almost Famous and Say Anything. I had lined up Back to the Future for this year, having just bought it (very belatedly) about a year ago, but then I realized that my copy is BluRay, meaning it won't play on my laptop. So Ghostbusters it was, for the first time in ten years, just about exactly. (And before seeing the 2016 Ghostbusters, which I will catch when it arrives on video.)

Thoughts:

1. The connections to other movies I'd just watched were really funny here. The ectoplasm on the library card catalogues immediately put me in mind of the oozing wallpaper glue in Barton Fink. It was the same color and texture.

2. Weirder: The New York news anchor reporting on the activities of the ghostbusters identifies himself as Roger Grimsby. Grimsby was the first complete movie I'd watched the day before.

3. I didn't notice until this viewing that Dana has also bought a package of Stay Puft marshmallows on the same trip to the store where she bought the eggs that will fry themselves on her counter. The marshmallow bag appears right next to the eggs as they begin popping their shells.

4. I thought it was really interesting to note that Winston Zeddemore, already late to the party, tries to distance himself from the other ghostbusters. When they're jailed, he shouts about only having worked with these guys for a few weeks and he wasn't even there when it happened. He then talks about getting his own lawyer separate from them. Of course, he redeems himself by vouching for them to the mayor in the next scene and then being a team player from there on out, but it struck me as an unusual decision that they would not likely repeat today.

5. Reginald VelJohnson has a small role as a police officer. He would more famously play the role of an officer of the law in Die Hard four years later.

6. Try not to follow the logic of time in the last 24 hours plus of this movie. When Louis Tully gets turned into the keymaster and delivered to the ghostbusters, it's nighttime. No one is ever shown sleeping or anything, and it would appear they've just been examining Louis the whole time. Next thing you know, it's the next day when the EPA shuts down the power to the containment system, leading into the following night where all the shit goes down with Gozer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Oh, and then it's morning again during the closing credits. Not a big deal, but I did notice it.

7. By getting viewed again, Ghostbusters has jumped from the bottom of a particular list to the top. That list is my Letterboxd list of all my repeat viewings in order, back to when I started recording my repeat viewings in mid-2006. When a movie I've watched during that period gets watched again, I update the notes field with the most recently watched date and move it to the top of the list. So essentially, all this time, Ghostbusters has been the oldest movie that I haven't rewatched again since starting to keep track of my rewatches. Got that? In case you're wondering, it has now been replaced on the bottom of the list by Superman II, which I last rewatched in July of 2006. (When I first started, I only kept track of the month they got rewatched. The exact date was added at the beginning of 2008.) Also, I have rewatched 409 different movies in the past ten years and two months, some of them multiple times. There are nearly 200 more I've seen more than once, but longer than ten years ago.

Whew. If you are still reading, congratulations. You can stop now.

My problem with one particular ghostbuster

I have not jumped into the Ghostbusters fray on this blog.

"The internet" (of which I frequently dislike to count myself a part) has gone all hater on the fact that the Ghostbusters reboot features female ghostbusters, not male. When this sentiment is not being put forth overtly, it's being encoded deeper into the bedrock of something somebody says. But more often than not it's been put forth overtly. "The internet" rarely feels any shame over being sexist.

When the first trailers for Ghostbusters were considered to be awful, "the internet" rejoiced at how correct it was that women cannot make a good Ghostbusters movie.

I don't know whether this is a good Ghostbusters movie or not, and I certainly don't think whether it's women or men has anything to do with it. I can't envision it being that much more enlightened with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum donning ghostbuster suits.

But I do know it has one strike against it:

Kate McKinnon.

I can't stand this woman.

When McKinnon first appeared on Saturday Night Live a couple years ago, it was about four episodes before Kristen Wiig (who also appears in Ghostbusters) left the show. As they bore something of a physical similarity and a definite similarity in their types of comedy, I figured they had tabbed her as Wiig's heir apparent, and I felt okay about that. If SNL definitely needed a Wiig type, McKinnon seemed more than capable of filling that niche.

But the more I watched her, the more she grated on me.

There's something about her comedy that is just so "loud." She can't play a character without PLAYING A CHARACTER. There's a lot of sneering and winking and blinking and bugging out her eyes and twisting her face into all shorts of shapes and sizes. Goofy voices are a given.

This kind of thing can be funny. Examples abound. But McKinnon's method of delivering it is less like a real version of that hammy acting style than someone ironically imitating a hammy acting style. So the winking was not just actual, but metaphorical. Her bigness was like a parody of bigness. Just give me actual bigness.

I say "was" because my wife and I stopped watching SNL just one year into McKinnon's residency. The show did not survive the move to Australia. Every once in a while I'd wonder what I was missing, which actors I was not now familiar with by not watching the show (and Ghostbusters' Leslie Jones is one), and I'd regret that we'd walked away from a show we watched consistently for our first eight years together. But then I'd see a viral clip with McKinnon contorting her body and face into some perverse version of broad comedy and I'd be just as glad I was no longer being exposed to that stuff.

But McKinnon did enter my viewing schedule in other ways. Although I have somehow managed to miss each of the six features she has appeared in since debuting on SNL -- finally breaking that streak with Finding Dory, though I didn't identify her contribution -- I did see her in the otherwise very funny The Spoils Before Dying. While the point of that show is to be a satire of melodramatic miniseries, and therefore a certain amount of going over the top is par for the course, her role as some kind of jazz floozy just screamed. Screamed what? Exactly. It screamed.

What I don't understand, both in regard to The Spoils Before Dying and to Ghostbusters, is why you bother to cast McKinnon if you've already got the real thing. If McKinnon is a poor man's Kristen Wiig, she need hardly be cast when you've already got Kristen Wiig. And Wiig does/did indeed already appear in both of these. That seems especially problematic when you have just four main characters and you want a diversity of personality types represented. Thankfully, Wiig seems to be playing a straight woman in Ghostbusters by comparison to this deranged loon.

Kate McKinnon may not actualy be a deranged loon, but she does play one on TV.

Parallel tokenism

If you look up the term "tokenism" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Ernie Hudson next to it.

This is to take nothing away from the greatness of the comedy classic Ghostbusters, in which Hudson's Winston Zeddmore actually comes off rather well. But isn't he kind of the first character you think of when you think of adding a token representative of another race to a cast? And isn't tokenism disproportionately, inevitably, a term applied to the addition of a black person in an otherwise white cast?

If so, Paul Feig is taking more lessons from the original Ghostbusters than we were anticipating.

The internet buzzed on Tuesday with the finally sort-of official announcement of the cast for Feig's Ghostbusters reboot, whose pictures were tweeted out by Feig. There should be a certain familiarity to these faces to anyone who saw the original: three are white, and one is black.

Tokenism is alive and well in 2015, ladies and gentlemen.

Casting is supposed to be race blind in this day and age, isn't it? Even some of the cinema's most iconic characters are being considered for actors whose race is not the same as the iconic character's original race. Most people thought Marvel blew it when they failed to cast Captain America as someone who better represented what America looks like today, though that has ultimately turned out alright. And I think people will shit if the next James Bond is not black.

So did the new Ghostbusters -- allegedly so progressive by starring four women -- really have to be three white chicks and a black chick? Couldn't one of the chicks at least have been Latino?

It's not my only complaint about the casting of Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. (Note that I myself further the perniciousness of tokenism in the semantics of the previous sentence, listing Jones last, though I would argue I am listing them in order from most to least famous. I actually had to look up Jones, but not McKinnon, since I stopped watching Saturday Night Live a half season after McKinnon started, and a whole season before Jones did. Though that picture above is careful not to picture Jones last, and you can bet that was intentional.)

Where was I? I also complain about the fact that Melissa McCarthy is on a major losing streak (and I'm not sure if she's ever been as funny as the popular perception of how funny she is), and that McKinnon is basically a poor man's Wiig (she was clearly meant to fill the spot vacated by Wiig on SNL, as the pretty girl willing to humiliate herself by setting aside her vanity). So I'm already worried about one cast member being overrated and two others being too similar to each other. Jones is the one I don't know at all, as I have not seen even a second of her work. (Not true: IMDB tells me I have seen her in both Lottery Ticket and Wrongfully Accused.)

I just think in this day and age, there are only two possible explanations for a choice that clearly has such a potential to invite derision:

1) They are serious about it being a reboot, mirroring even such details as it being the "black Ghostbuster" who joins the team late, or

2) These really are supposed to be the daughters of the original Ghostbusters.

That was a theory that was tossed around but supposedly proven incorrect in the end, maybe only because someone at Sony clarified that it was a reboot, not a sequel. If these are indeed the daughters of the original Ghostbusters, that's a sequel under the traditional definition of the word, right? Though that traditional definition does tend to get blurred in our current climate, where the line between a reboot and a sequel is a fine one indeed.

But think about it. You've got four characters who are the same races as the original foursome, with ages that are not only similar to each other, but around the right age to have been born just after the events of the original movie (or movies, if you count Ghostbusters 2).

If this is true, of course, you'd have to ask yourself which of the three white guys had which daughters.

McCarthy would be the easy one, I guess. She's got a few extra pounds on her, and so does Dan Aykroyd these days. He's the most likely of the original cast to show up in a cameo, so him being her dad seems to make sense.

But then you've got to decide between Pete Venkman and Egon Spengler for the parentage of the other two. One would need to play a wiseass to show her kinship to Venkman, while the other would have to play a nerdy eccentric to come across as Spengler's girl. My money would be on Wiig playing the young Venkman, just because I can see her pulling off wiseass a bit easier than I can see McKinnon pulling it off. Which leaves McKinnon as the nerd, which I can see her doing better than Wiig -- if she's the poor man's Wiig, I understand she may go even further in setting aside her own vanity than Wiig did, so this would be another case of that.

Alas, I worry that this is actually giving them too much credit, and indeed it is just knee-jerk tokenism. Cast one non-white actor to reach out to additional demographics, but don't shift the racial balance so much that white audiences won't consider it a movie aimed at them.

I mean, they say there's nothing new under the sun, and there's a lot of sun over Hollywood.