Hacker Cinema
Ghostbusters
1984 · Film · 105 min
Part of Ghostbusters Collection
Directed by Ivan Reitman
After losing their university jobs, three parapsychologists start a ghost-catching business in New York City and uncover a supernatural threat that could destroy the world.
24 positive3 negative54 neutralfrom 81 commenters
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95 comments on Hacker News
Yep. I'd just about kill for a decade where we go back to 80s flicks. Some of the best quantity and quality we've ever had for mass-appeal movies, and they didn't cost anywhere near what the average cost is today.
And I'd have at least 2-3 movies a year I'd really WANT to go see, probably more.
Back to the Future, Lethal Weapon, Arnie's action flicks, Ghostbusters-- I could go on for quite awhile, maybe the last decade where we had that kind of movie output.
Eddie Murphy talked about the three movies that he regretted turning down:
- Ghostbusters (he was filming Beverly Hills Cop at the same time)
- Rush Hour
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit
What I can't understand is that somehow I watched ET 10 times in the theater. It was rare for me to watch a movie more than once, I can understand why I watched Ghostbusters more than once, but ET was a huge cultural moment when it came out and then it just plain disappeared from people's consciousness.
Sure.
I spent a lot of time in the hospital receiving treatment. Sometimes it was a few days, sometimes it was a month. My parents were working and so while I'd see them in the morning and evenings, most days I was on my own w/ the occasional nurse or doctor pop in. That led me to have a very independent (sometimes standoffishly so—mainly because I got tired of being poked at by doctors and nurses as a kid) personality and had to learn to amuse myself and be resourceful.
In addition to that, while I would attend school fairly regularly, I was "the sick kid" who was gone for weeks or a month at a time, so I didn't really form a lot of early bonds with the kids in my class. As an adult lone wolf type, I tend to smirk at that because that's essentially what I had to learn to be in those early years.
Another thing that I find amusing is that I would watch a lot of movies while I was in the hospital. I remember they would always play the same few movies:
- Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder version)
- Ghostbusters
- Gremlins
What's funny is that a good chunk of my personality is a mix of the characters in these movies. I like to have fun with people and keep them on their toes like Wonka, I like to invent/build/take risk on my own ideas like the Ghostbusters (my wife also said Pete Venkman reminds her of me), and I've always been a bit of a trouble maker/chaos monkey like a gremlin.
As an adult, I've noticed that I have an in-built preference toward self-sufficiency and tend to work/be alone most of the time and I'm hyper-sensitive to people "poking" at me (or someone else—I love going after a bully). I'd also say that I developed a high EQ and awareness of and for others (like an ability to quickly read people and know what they're feeling—my grandpa refers to it as "acute awareness").
Several years back the "why" of all this started to click when I read Maria Montessori's book—The Absorbent Mind [1]—on the first few years of childhood development (~0-6 years). She explains that kids are like sponges and their personality forms relative to what they experience in those first few years. When I think about the mix of experiences during those days, I can't help but laugh—that theory is dead on.
I also read Thomas Sowell's [2] late-talking children because I remembered being taken to a speech therapist as a kid because I refused to talk. I had no problem talking, I just didn't want to. Even today, I have quiet phases where I just kind of drift off into my own little world and don't really talk much.
Would I say that having Leukemia specifically gave me all of these traits? No, but I would say that the combination of circumstances in relation to my treatment definitely did.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Absorbent-Mind-Maria-Montessori/dp/0805041567
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Late-Talking-Children-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465038352
I see about the same thing as you do, only I am basically also picturing Ghostbusters who also had some very specific tooling for trapping, containing, and transporting ghosts, which was all central to the plot of the original film.
I can just foresee a future asshole European mayor who swaggers into the CERN remote antimatter facility and shuts it all down, triggering Armageddon and a new rampage by the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Really curious to know what the test shots from Boss Films looked like!
Richard Edlund’s team’s work on various films of the 80s was impeccable (including Ghostbusters, Die Hard, Big Trouble in Little China, and more). They were the inheritor of the crown of high quality 65mm VFX after Douglas Trumbull quit the business (the pinnacle of his work being films like Blade Runner and Brainstorm).
I have to wonder what was wrong that caused the last minute switch to ILM!
Before recently movies were shared experiences. A good crowd made a great movie on a great screen even greater. Now movies are kind of singular experience. The only movies that still maybe fit this bill are the horror movies that draw in the teenager crowds -- but then it's more about how gory is it rather than plot, character, acting, direction, etc. Or maybe how cheap they can make the movie while still being able to market seats.
To be fair, Hollywood has always had this kind of problem -- just watch a few Mystery Science Theater 3000s to see how bad things can get -- or 1994's "Ed Wood" from Tim Burton. Both of which still romanticize the industry in their own way.
There will never, ever, be anything like seeing the original Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, or Ghostbusters (peak Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ivan Reitman) in the crowded theater filled with anticipating viewers ever again. Laughing as part of a crowd feels better than laughing alone.
Maybe we're too fragmented as society to enjoy all the same movie that we used to. I don't think this is true, because we all still like Ghostbusters, more or less. I think Hollywood has targeted markets, rather than trying to sell a movie to the masses.
And in 2024 they best thing Hollywood could do is reboot a 1980's TV Show "The Fall Guy". Geesh.
Well said. There's tons of blockbusters and other popular movies from the 80s/90s that were absolutely made for the "masses", but were genuinely great films, and far better than almost any blockbuster from the last 5-10 years, especially all the comic-book stuff. Alien(s), Back to the Future trilogy, Terminator 1/2, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, I could go on and on. And of course the LotR trilogy if you look at the early 2000s. Movies just aren't as innovative or risky these days; something as quirky as Ghostbusters wouldn't be made now (but Hollywood is happy to make remakes and sequels of that franchise now, 40 years later).
What's wrong with Ghostbusters? It was a perfect song to go with the movie.
On its own, it's probably not something I'd want to listen to much, but while watching the movie, it was fantastic, just like the rest of the movie.
It's much like any soundtrack music. The music by Howard Shore on Lord of the Rings probably isn't something you want to listen to by itself while you're jogging or whatever, but in the movie it's a perfect complement.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
When I was a kid I apparently watched Ghostbusters every day. It was on a stolen rental that had the 2nd movie on after it, but my mother always stopped the video after the first and then would ask if I wanted to watch number 2 the next day, sometimes I did, but I always watched the first. When I realised how the tape player/tape worked and learned to read the box, I would watch them back to back. I think this was between the ages of 3 and 5 and it slowed down to weekly, fortnightly etc. I've probably seen the first movie over 1000 times, know every line and musical jingle.
I tend not to rewatch things anymore, maybe after 5 or 6 years if I really like something, usually with someone who hasn't seen it so I can share it with them.
Oddly enough I have absolutely no love for any further Ghostbusters sequels or the video games. As I said, I'm overly familiar with the first movie, I don't want to hear the same music I associate specifically with the Sedgewick Hotel playing during some other scene, or hear the same quotes or even see the same actors 50 years older. I want something new of the same quality and flavour of the era, which is pretty much impossible at this point in history. The themes, attitudes and imagery of the movie greatly influenced my interests and development as I grew up, even down to the clothes I wear today.
This hasn’t been my experience. My kids have loved Star Wars, Harry Potter, Space Jam, Looney Toons, Muppets, Uncle Buck, Top Gun, Ghostbusters, My Neighbor Tuturo, all the classic Disney movies, Mary Poppins, Get Smart, and others I’m sure I’m missing. They even like some of the light westerns thier grandparents put on. It’s not everything, but it’s most of what I’ve tried.
They currently love playing classic arcade games on a cabinet I built.
It depends on the kid, but I don’t think it’s just a generational thing. The limits tend to be very old movies with sound issues, which was my limit as well.
The Atlantic has always been a rag. So much so it was lampooned in the montage sequence in 1984's Ghostbusters. Even back then, 40 years ago, people knew what a nosy-Nancy sponge it was. So much so that Aykroyd, Ramis, and Moranis thought it would be funny to poke fun in a brief shot mushed into the movie, complete with a caricature cover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwKR_y93izs&t=115s
> How long would data last on tape?
> The Canadian Conservation Institute says that VHS tapes have a 10-30 year lifespan, on average.
https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/technical-bulletins/digitization-vhs-video-tapes.html#a2b
That sucks, I just got in VHS for various reasons and bought a 1987 copy of Ghostbusters. It still works despite being 36yrs old. I'm curious what it means for tape to degrade and how to detect it in films.
> They made a mistake and got too greedy and make a subscription I barely paid attention to something that got too expensive...
That's the thing, in the past I I'd go months without watching anything on Netflix yet still pay them for it, so they were essentially getting a free $8 a month (or whatever) off me during that time.
Now the prices have gone up so much it doesn't make sense to keep subscribed for something I'm barely using, just so I can easily watch a single show that interests me once every three months or so.
The only streaming service that has makes some sense for me to pay for right now is Youtube's, since that's my goto for videos anyway, and it's nice not to have ads for those.
Additionally they also have a bunch of great older movies free to watch movies on Youtube, probably a better selection (of movies I care about) than Netflix right now (saw/rewatched Train to Busan, Little Shop of Horrors, Ghostbusters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tropic Thunder, Fifth Element, Big Trouble in Little China, Dr. Strangelove, 12 Angry Men, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Truman Show, Air Force One, Dirty Work, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It recently).
Wasn't Ghostbusters a movie for kids though?
To be sure, the PG-13 rating[1] wasn't introduced until shortly after the 1984 film[2] was released.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_film_rating_system#Addition_of_the_PG-13_rating
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters is probably the one my argument is the weakest for - but still, its not about the rating but who the most targeted audience is. Ghostbusters is a comedy aimed at adults (or teens at least) which can also be suitable for kids. Super hero movies tend to be aimed at kids first while also being enjoyable by adults (or at most equally aimed. After all so much of the money comes from toy sales).
i think a more fair historical comparison would be original star wars trilogy to current marvel movies.
> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content content: John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
> The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
> We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor utterly lack the sexual chemistry to convince us that either of them would be thirsty enough to commandeer a coma victim’s body (as they do in Wonder Woman 1984) so they can enjoy a posthumous hookup. In defiance of Norse mythology, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor smiles at Natalie Portman like a dumb golden retriever puppy without ever venturing to rend her asunder with his mighty hammer, so to speak
Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
There are certainly lots of overlap in audience. Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
I kind of agree with you - as when I went to the movies the most, it was actually to see weirdo old films at midnight movie events. I don't live in a city that's large enough to have a theater that can survive on that anymore (for a pop 125k city, we have one mainstream theater and no indies) Partly because real estate is through the roof and putting a movie theater in just again: doesn't work on paper.
One of the challenges of showing these films is actually just to find a good-enough print to do so! So perhaps one of the hurtles for doing this now is getting that digital transfer to the new all-digital systems. Midnight movies are also going to/have died since working at a movie theater is already a shit job, and you're now asking people to work a shit job at a really really crappy schedule.
But I still don't know if it's worth putting out like Ghostbusters on a regular schedule, but it sure was fun to watch it 20+ years after I first saw it at a midnight movie. When (past tense now) Netflix had mail service, they had a good Criterium Collection, which fills the gap for me. I guess $11/month for YA streaming service is an option.
If IP were less restricted, I could envision hundreds of derivative works for each film; nobody would know whether Han shot first; Ted Turner would colorize the first 20 minutes of "The Wizard of Oz", and my mom would star in "Ghostbusters (1984)".
It's a movie series set in an old timey fantasy world so it's not going to seem dated the way an 80s movie like The Breakfast Club or even Ghostbusters might seem dated.
That said I don't entirely buy your premise about freshness if by that you mean quality. I'd say Ghostbusters still holds up much better than the majority of modern hollywood movies even if it used a different style of film stock and different special effects.
It depends on the level of the failure. Some failures are minor problems that can be easily fixed with minimal impact on the business. Some failures are colossal and can drive the company out of business.
I wish the consequences for failure were uniform across various organizations. Some companies will fire you for minor infractions. Others let failures grow because they are never addressed. Government is notorious for having negative incentives (failures are often rewarded).
One of my favorite movie quotes is from Ray's character (played by Dan Aykroyd) in Ghostbusters when they were fired from the university: "Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
Patrick (H) Willems unlocked this in me.
May I suggest starting with Ghostbusters: A Movie About Nothing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OB3279Vt8Y
Maybe I'm the only one, and man would I love some way to confirm or deny this (given that Harold Ramis is dead, and was a primary writer, this isn't likely) but did anyone that happens to be an 80's movie nerd pick up on the name Spangler in the linked article?
The article says in 1908 James Murray Spangler invents and patents the first vacuum cleaner. In 1984 we get the movie "Ghostbusters" in which one of the main protagonists is Egon Spangler who invents a way to to trap ghosts (by "sucking" them into traps.)
Actors appear in docudramas all the time who do not resemble the real people they're playing. Jordan Belfort doesn't resemble Leonardo DiCaprio. So maybe, in the universe of the films, (most of) the characters don't actually resemble the actors who play them in our universe, but the parallel universe versions of those actors do resemble themselves.
This was played with a little bit in the 80s cartoon show, The Real Ghostbusters. The show was actually named that to distinguish it from the Filmation cartoon Ghostbusters (which was unrelated to, but made to capitalize on, the popularity of the 1984 film and take advantage of the rights to the name that Filmation still held) and reassure the audience that yes, unlike the Filmation cartoon, these are the Ghostbusters you're familiar with -- Peter, Ray, Winston and Egon, the Beatles of spook hunting.
But there is an in-universe explanation of the show's title, as well: in the universe of the show, the 1984 film Ghostbusters exists, and is based on the lives of the main characters of the show -- who, due to player-likeness issues in real life, look nothing like the film Ghostbusters. In an early episode, Venkman comments on his resemblance (or lack thereof) to his movie counterpart.
For these particular services I think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
is more like it. That is, a Raspberry Pi is a much more powerful computer than the IBM 360/75 that planned the moon mission and costs orders of magnitude less but there has been no productivity improvement for baseball players.
Movies are an entirely business than they were back in the day. I remember Ghostbusters being in the theater for more than a year, and back then there were not just the first-run theaters that charged full price but many second-run theaters that had cut-rate double features (I remember seeing one of Gremlins and The Dark Crystal)
Today home video "competes" with theaters in some sense, a month of Netflix costs less than one movie ticket but the consequence isn't downward price pressures on theaters but exactly the opposite because home video demolished the second-run theaters leaving the first-run theaters to go on their own trajectory.
(And as for TV sets and things to plug into TV sets... Today's TV offers better quality than was imaginable in the 1960s and is cheap in comparison. It's astonishing what people spent for old game consoles like the Atari 2600, what a VCR and tapes cost in 1980, ...)
Quasi-on-topic anecdote: Amazon used to (and may still) sell these DVD bundles, like 8-12 movies to a pack. There would be a few classics (Ghostbusters or something) mixed in with arrant garbage. The hope was you'd buy the pack for the classics and maybe watch the garbage later because you have it so why not.
I used to call this sales strategy "Amazon Subprime". I still think that's one of my cleverest jokes, but unfortunately you might only laugh if you know how the 2008 housing crisis actually started... and the people who do know that are not great in number.
I think your building was in the original ghostbusters movie.
Roughly, people who liked movies you liked, also liked that movie.
If you like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but you haven't seen Ghostbusters, and 94% of people who have seen all three movies and liked the first two also liked Ghostbusters, then it's 94% likely that you'll also like Ghostbusters.
I'm sure it's much more complicated and nuanced, but that's the general idea.
> Ghostbusters (1984) is another expertly crafted movie that is fun for kids, but well-written enough to be incredibly enjoyable for adults.
When you get right down to it, it’s a movie about exterminators—not exactly fun-for-kids fare. And yet…
I frequently enjoy "weird" movies that audiences tend not to like. But there have been plenty of movies that audiences and critics both enjoy despite a lack of high-brow or polarizing content. I'm thinking of (e.g.) The Godfather, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Sound of Music, Contact, Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Alien, the original Ghostbusters, most Pixar movies...
I feel like there is something pretty blah about most big-budget movies today, but I don't think that it can be explained by saying that filmmakers are progressively removing polarizing elements. Now that I consider it, most big-budget action movies in the past were blah too. The action movies that first come to mind are the ones that I have enjoyed enough to re-watch, but the 1990s had plenty of blah action movies. Maybe the problem is just too many big-budget action movies.
I sometimes hear this, but I disagree.
If you're 40 years old, you need to be able to consume any kind of media and then place yourself into the mindset of a younger person and judge it from that mindset - because you used to be that younger person.
Truly exceptional media is good enough to transcend the age barrier and is enjoyable for everyone, e.g., The Incredibles is enjoyable for young kids because it's a cartoon and it's flashy and exciting, it's enjoyable for young boys who want to be the "best" at a sport, it's enjoyable for girls transitioning to puberty because of Violet's storyline, it's enjoyable for men who have lost some of their steam and can relate to Mr. Incredible, and it's enjoyable for women because of the struggles Elastigirl has as a mother and a homemaker. Even Syndrome is shown as a sympathetic villain who is evil not because he is a bad person, but because he was dismissed and ignored by his idol. There are plenty of people who can relate to that.
Ghostbusters (1984) is another expertly crafted movie that is fun for kids, but well-written enough to be incredibly enjoyable for adults.
When my young cousins or my nephew corral me into playing a game with them, I'm not playing it from my 41-year old perspective, I'm playing it through their eyes.
If you can't do that, then don't review content. Content always has a specific audience. Really great content can weave together enough bits to at least satisfy every audience. Exceptional content manages to speak deeply to every audience. I still feel that's why The Incredibles is one of the best movies ever made. The struggles shown in that movie are relatable for every single person on the planet.
That is a good method, another is actually studying the methods of advertising. The methods they have now are not much better than what they had 50 years ago. The only big differences are volume, intrusiveness, and rate. All of those have increased tremendously in the past few years. But learn about anchoring, A/B choice, timed choice, and so on. Helps quite a bit.
So being conscious that most forms of video media are trying to sell you something. Nothing is on that screen/audio unless someone put it there. Cynical but there are so many different ways to advertise. One cute one I can not unsee is product placement. Ghostbusters was my first time seeing it. The pop can in the fridge. Always at the right angle to see the label. The funniest one was in a movie called Cobra. He stops in the middle of a scene to drink a beer, in front of all the signage. It was literally a commercial right in the middle of the movie and 'fit' the scene.
One thing I have noticed after removing massive amounts of advertising in my life is that what does get through is much more effective. So you have to be very diligent in not being quick to buy anything. Buying something could be an idea or item. I also usually use a timeout method. Basically I set the 'thing' to the side and revisit it a few days later. It removes most of the urgency that most advertising tries to create.
Nah he’s that crazy. Ghostbusters was pretty close to a possible documentary for him.
I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of copyright is to shift money made from selling copies back into the production of new works; and anything else is just blatant rent-seeking at the expense of the larger economy.
High-budget songs, movies, and video games will either make back their budgets immediately, or they will be written off as a loss. There are very few cases where a work's financial success is predicated on money made five or ten years out. Hell, for video games, ten years out and you need to port your game to a new platform, which costs money, since the industry's investment into emulation technology[0] is piss-poor.
Furthermore, the production values of a work don't have much to do with it's longevity; you can't spend twice as much to get a work with twice the relevance decades down the line. In fact, most of the works from the past that still are relevant today were made on budgets that would be considered shoe-string today. If anything, I'd argue that longer terms make cheap cash-ins a safer bet than riskier experimental projects, even though the latter is more likely to be relevant. Do you really think that, say, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is going to last longer than the original Ghostbusters?
[0] Counterexamples: PC gaming, Steam Proton, and Xbox Series/PS5 backwards compatibility. All of these rely upon having built their games on technologies with long-term compatibility support built-in (Windows, x86), or upon community re-implementation efforts (WINE). The game industry cannot ever seem to afford to write their own one-off emulators.
This feels like one of those browser addons/scripts that replaces words,e.g
"being vaccinated" -> "watched the 1984 Ghostbusters" "unvaccinated" -> "2021 Ghostbusters movie"
Why is the ghostbusters graph obviously just a photoshop relabeling of the covid vaccine graph?
> I have checked the underlying dataset myself and the graph plotted above [the photoshopped one] is correct. People under 60 who watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are twice as likely to die as people who watched the 2021 Ghostbusters movie. The overall deaths in Britain are running well above normal.
The poster of this article is observably a liar. Perhaps there is some kind of point to be made here, but I'll wait until someone honest attempts to present it.
Wow that seemed like a lot of effort to make a point. Often twitter oversimplifies things, but that could legitimately have been a tweet of the offending graph and a few words about how older/sick people are more likely to have been vaccinated, and also more likely to die because they're old/sick.
I do like the original Ghostbusters movie, but I'm not sure that really added to the effect for me.
The first Ghostbusters is hilarious, and one of many exemplar 80s movies - back to the future (as mentioned), crocodile Dundee, short circuit, die hard, ferris bueller (just off the top of my head) that embodied that decade and often saw stodgy corporate types as the enemy of fun. I've never even thought about it as a libertarian parable, and I believe doing so is a revisionist strawman coming from opponents and reading too much into it coming from supporters. The movie was good clean fun of the kind that existed fleetingly around that time.
The remake was based on only one premise- it will be women instead. It wasn't funny and had none of the cultural centering (especially the whole vibe of 80s New York) that the original had. It was a shitty movie. So it failed.
There is not some broader political message. A good movie that hit the mark for its era was successful, a lazy remake was not
I’ve seen most of the movies and could only guess a few, usually by identifying some specific image in the poster and then deducing the movie, like the ghosts and library for Ghostbusters. Some did a better job of getting the look and feel down, for example I said Forest Gump for Field of Dreams, which are pretty similar.
I used to have trouble starting tasks. I still do, but I used to do.
There’s a line from the movie Ghostbusters that I like to quote when I need to get started: “Type something, will you? We’re paying for this stuff!” https://youtu.be/7dnaumEHJa8?t=14s
> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content : John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
None of those were major studio action blockbusters (Terminator, one might mistake for that because of the resulting franchise, but it was an indie film that hit it big; all the rest are out-of-genre.)
So, if those are really your comparisons, the problem may be that you are comparing fundamentally different kinds of movies. The description of “even when they have sex no one is horny” seems to be pretty typical, over a long time window, of action blockbusters. Horniness is big in comedy, romance, and erotic subgenres of other genres, but it's not big in action (though non-blockbusters might include it because they tend to have more freedom to depart from genre rules.)
Yeah. The difference between making a funny movie and just "being funny" is the difference between Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters (2016).
I'm not a movie person, but films like Home Alone, Back To The Future, Ghostbusters etc come to mind. My impression is that they are super hits that span generations because they are so predictable, middle of the road, easy to digest and unable to offend.
Pascal's wager would be verifiable if, say, someone invented a device like the ones in the Ghostbusters movies. That seems about as promising as freezing yourself after you die in my mind...
> Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you. [...] You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
Yeah, because they'd rather be shown to freeze up rather than have the conversation go like this:
Them: I actually really liked the album Mouth Moods. It's an album full of remixed songs and mash-ups, kind of like what Weird Al does.
You: Oh? I've never heard of that. Tell me about your favorite song on that album.
Them: Oh... uh.... it's a song called Bustin.
You: Bustin?
Them: Yeah it's... well, it's the song from Ghostbusters but chopped up and remixed.
You: So it's about busting ghosts?
Them: Uh... well... no. It's about how bustin... makes me feel good.
You: I'm sorry? What are you busting that makes you feel good?
Them: Never mind, forget I said anything.
Loads of young people wouldn't care about Star Wars, Marvel, ... if they didn't release high budget movies regularly. How many kids under 20 care about the biggest franchises from the 80s like Indiana Jones, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters or ET ? How many adults would still rewatch them ?
I think old content is overrated. People subscribe for the new stuff. If they watch old stuff, it's mostly to fill the time before a new show comes out.
Ghostbusters was subtle Reaganomics propaganda. In the film the government is the enemy and the heros are libertarians, self-described operators of unlicensed particle accelerators.
Considering the Ghostbusters were operating an unlicensed nuclear reactor, I actually think the EPA was right in that movie.
> I'm not saying that now there isn't a more active effort around introducing more minority representation into media, it obviously is so, I'm only arguing against that being a bad thing on its own and/or saying that didn't happen before.
I did not happen before, at this scale. It's a new thing. And it's annoying.
> If this is more important to the studios than making good quality movies then obviously the quality will suffer, but that's not special in any way to the minority representation push.
Looks like it is. Look at the backslash with movies such as Star Wars, Ghostbusters, etc., where they take established characters and alienate fans by changing an established character that was a white male into a black woman (007, have you heard he's now a black woman?).
It'd certainly be interesting to see the stats here, as well as how it breaks down when actual violence is taken into account. Gaming has seen a lot less actual violent assaults/fights than sports, and even arguably quite a bit less than film/tv/music.
There aren't any gaming hooligan groups I've heard by any means.
For online toxicity it may be a bit closer, but again, it'd be interesting to see the breakdown by hobby or interest. Stuff like the last series of Doctor Who and Ghostbusters and Star Wars have certainly seen a few controversies recently, and it seems reactions to films/online film criticism can at least as acerbic as anything said about games.
I think this goes far beyond just hobby's and leisure activities. Society as a whole doesn't seem to accept mediocrity anymore.
Take a look at the actors from 80's hit movie 'Ghostbusters' http://cdn-media.hollywood.com/images/l/ghostbustersthetrio.jpg
Would these guys be casted today? I can't imagine, we see mostly perfect faces on television.
Movies and television are not even the worst, advertising is insane. If you count the number of 'perfects' in some commercials you easily hear it 4 to 5 times in just a couple of seconds. You need perfect skin, a perfect dream kitchen, a perfect ride in a perfect car, etc.
Why do people want this? Can't blame it all to hollywood...
I do have Netflix, and other subscription services, but by the nature of licensing, they're very limited. Do you only watch/read/etc the most common, most popular, current movies/music/etc? If you seek out anything a little off the beaten path, you pretty much have to own it or you won't be able to consume it, or get access to it later.
For example, I recently went through several lists of underrated (i.e. not the megahits like Ghostbusters or Indiana Jones) movies from the 80s and 90s and I'm hunting them down and watching them. Of the seven movies I watched this past couple of weeks (About Last Night, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Nothing But Trouble, Other People's Money, The Wrong Guy, Top Secret, Used Cars), ZERO of them can be found on Netflix or Hulu. Five of them can be rented individually from Amazon Prime at $4 a pop, but aren't included in their prime subscription that I already pay ~$100 a year for. That's the full extent of how you can get access to these movies from subscription services. I could have just stuck with what subscription services offer, but if it's not something new the selection gets increasingly worse and worse.
Is that what you want the future to be like? Where these movies might as well have disappeared off the face of the earth because no one can get ahold of them anymore? Because that's the direction we're starting to go in with more and more things going digital only and subscription only.
I used to work in the video game industry, but I have almost nothing to show for it outside of some trailers on Youtube, because almost all of those games were released on digital channels and are no longer available to download. I had two games on the Wii Shop and the Wii Shop is now closed and the company is defunct, so those games are gone. Another on Xbox Live for 360, and a couple of Xbox Indie Games that you can't get anymore because they killed the service. The only game you can still get is Neverland Card Battles on the PSP, and that's because it was released as a physical game.
You can still also play my Flash games I did before I got into the industry, at least until browsers kill Flash off entirely. There was a whole thread on HN recently about how we're about to lose a whole decade of culture from Flash and how one guy is trying to preserve it as best as he can.
Not being able to own the media (even if only in digital form) sucks, because companies can't be trusted to always remain solvent, always have license agreements in place, and always care about keeping all the content available for people to get. If you don't care about the content, then you probably don't care that you only get some access to some stuff some of the time, but for those that care about the time and energy that creators put in and want to experience and share those things with people that may have missed it the first time around or whole new generations of people, this current trend is terrible.
That's actually one reason why I shifted gears and started designing board games the past few years. I have perfectly good and playable copies of board games that are 60 years old now, decades after the companies have gone out of business. I won't have to go through extra effort to make sure that people can still have access to my board games long after I'm dead.
"Bankability" is a variable in the risk-reward equation, certainly.
I think I was more trying to get a point across that most of those probably were perceived to be relatively "low risk" original or not.
If you compare apples to apples you could probably find an equal number of relatively bankable directors/stars making mostly original stuff.
Guillermo del Toro is a big one in my mind thinking about this decade; Paul Feig and Edgar Wright also come to mind as bankable directors. Between them you can probably point to plenty of original films that might stand toe to toe with ET or Ghostbusters.
Don't forget to take off any rose-colored glasses when comparing of course; there's always that nostalgic factor when comparing one's childhood favorites to today's output.
If there is a big difference between the Top 10 list in the 80s and the Top 10 list this decade so far might be that audiences rewarded the big experiments in ET and Ghostbusters a bit more fondly at the box office than any equivalents this decade, but mainstream favor is always the hardest part of that risk/reward equation for Hollywood.
Not to mention on top of that you have the market shifts of bigger international audiences, smaller domestic theater audiences (shifting to home theater setups), etc.
How do you even compare Okja, for instance? (That one is a bankability "hire", too, in that the director proved himself in adaptation and foreign market work.) One of the most original films in the last decade, and who knows what its equivalent box office numbers might be except maybe some formula of a Netflix accountant somewhere?
ET was a bankable director's hobby project.
The two Star Wars movies were still sequels, even if the franchise was new in the 70s. Star Wars wore many of its pulp Hollywood adventure series and World War 2 movie influences on its sleeve.
The three Indiana Jones were two bankable directors' hobby project. In turn, they were heavily based on early Hollywood adventure serials and pulp adventure novels.
Ghostbusters was bankable comedians' hobby project.
Beverly Hills Cop was a "cheap" film in a bankable genre (cop film), that was easy to franchise if successful (which it was, and did).
I won't directly harp on BTTF that much, but some combination of all the above applies to it, too.
5 of those 9 all directly involved Spielberg, in one capacity or another, which is another way for Hollywood to avoid risk by betting on the non-riskiest "risk taker" they can find. (Given Lucas' relationship with Spielberg, you can argue that Star Wars also benefited indirectly from Spielberg's "golden touch" in the 80s, bringing the count to 7 of 9.)
But looking at the Top 10 isn't particularly fair in any decade. For every ET and Ghostbusters there were six of the seven Police Academy movies and seven James Bond films, for two easy 80s examples.
In the 1980s, at least, nine of the top ten films were original. Four of those were sequels, but all in recently created franchises. Only one of the top ten was adapted from other media.
Those original films were: ET, two Star Wars movies, three Indiana Jones movies, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, and Back to the Future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_in_film
Shhh! Don't give them any ideas!
Seriously, Hollywood's love affair with remaking movies is just sad. Of course, it's not completely new, they were doing it even back in the early days, but not to the extent that they are now. They just aren't coming out with that many new and innovative movies like they did in the 70s and 80s. Where's the "Alien" or "Blade Runner" or "Ghostbusters" of today? Movies like that just aren't being made, but remakes or sequels to these decades-old movies are.
It's a good startup movie! Not in the same tier as "Ghostbusters" or "24 Hour Party People, but a good rival to "Tucker".
If there's more than 20 points between critic score and viewer score (in the viewers favor) on Rotten tomatoes, then the movie is usually good. There are exceptions to the rule, and recent inclusions in the culture wars (Justice League, Ghostbusters) can break this, but generally it's a good rule of thumb to follow. Reviewer scores come from people forced to watch hundreds of films, and as a consequence they reward poor quality idosyncrocy over good quality but predictable tropes. People crave variety, and when you review movies for a living, you lose touch of what variety is for normal people.
Besides this ham, evidently Chinese demand has been blamed for the global shortage of avocados [0] and the lack of butter in France [1]. I've personally most noticed the effect when it comes to wide-release movies, in which the heroes manage to find some reason to end up for a brief scene in China, or to use Chinese brand products -- Civil War, Transformers, and Robocop come to mind. There's also the suspicion that American movies have had to be more generic in their themes and dialog to be easier to translate/localize for the Chinese. Ghostbusters and Deadpool were not eligible for China's market because of their supernatural and otherwise offensive content, so it's not hard to believe that moviemakers will have to work harder to justify such content [2].
As an American, seeing these examples is still kind of amusing to me in a karmic way. I assume whatever annoyance or alienation I feel is just a small bit of how the rest of the world has felt the past 50 years, having to regularly adapt to and adopt strange influences and demands because they were popular in America (Sorry about "Jersey Shore", high fructose corn syrup, the backlash against MSG, and the cocaine trade).
[0] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-china-blame-global-avocado-shortage.html
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/09/news/economy/butter-shortage-europe/index.html
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/did-you-catch-the-ways-hollywood-pandered-to-china-this-year
I was joking that if Sony ImageWorks doesn't already have a relatively complete digital backlot for just about all of Manhattan between the Spider-Man and Ghostbusters franchises alone, then what have they been doing...
The interesting/tough part would presumably be inter-effects house sharing/community work. I'm almost surprised that there doesn't seem to be a company focused entirely on reuseable digital backlots because that does seem like a niche that someone in Hollywood would already be exploring.
You could also see it coming from an outside direction, too. If I was Rockstar and already throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at digital open world simulations, I'd probably be shopping that around as the basis for digital backlot work. "Filmed 'on location' in GTA V's Los Santos" sounds almost silly right now, but I've got a feeling it won't for much longer. (Also, I would suspect it's Vancouver-based genre television that would be in the market for this before films.)
ACLU apparently just won a nationwide stay of the executive order in NYC, so another thing you can do to help is to cue up the bit in the movie Ghostbusters where they pull up to Dana's building to take on Zuul and listen to the "Savin' The Day" montage music while you make a big ol' donation to the ACLU.
At least, that worked pretty well for me. I was going to go protest, but we apparently shut down ORD and now they're not even letting cars approach the airport.
On the flip side it can be maddeningly stupid. I have two Tom's in my contacts. one is regularly texted and called and other very, very rarely so. When I try to use voice to text Tom, it asks me which one. Every time. This adds a lot of interaction and time and honestly makes using the phone touchscreen faster and more pleasant.
I have the Google Home and my kid loves the Ghostbusters song. For whatever reason if you ask Home to play Ghostbusters you need, first, to specify the song not the movie, even though I have no Netflix integration setup. Then when it gets it correct it will only play the instrumental version for some bizarre reason. Weird, its clear the Home engineers are Ghostbusters fans as you can ask Home "Who you gonna call" and it gives some humorous canned responses, but somehow they can't get playing the Ghostbusters song correct.
Worse, because I have Google Play Music, there's some kind of licensing limit with Home. If I have Home playing music then my desktop PC refuses to play any youtube content, not play music, but unrelated videos. I can't watch any youtube videos unless I log out. Its incredible how bad the usability here. Buying a device for your kitchen shouldn't make all your computers be unable to play videos.
"modest success"
Yes, because Caddyshack, Stripes, and Tootsie were small, modestly successful, movies that only a few people have heard of.
I mean it's not like Ghostbusters was one of the most successful comedy movies of all time.
It's not like Groundhog Day from 1993 was was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" or anything.
No, clearly he just had "modest" success in just those 13 years post-SNL. I mean we'd better not even mention his award winning turns in movies starting the late 90s had we?
Yikes, I take it back - it's not your youth, it's your smug ignorance that's showing.
My youth? I am old enough that I saw both Ghostbusters and Caddyshack as a kid in the theater when they were new movies. As such your comment or attempt at snark is quite laughable. I've been an avid Bill Murray fan for I guess most of my life now. He was not a legend back then, he had modest success post SNL with those movies and a long string of flops and was actually considered "washed up" for quite some time. So no, the whole "living legend" thing started around the time that Sophia Coppola cast him in "Lost in Translation" and introduced him to a new generation of kids. This phenomenon is particularly amusing to Murray fans in my age group.
Your lack of facts is showing.
Technically the original movie wasn't the first to use the "Ghostbusters" name, and there were some legal issues around that. This is why there was a "Ghostbusters" cartoon that was not tied to the movie franchise, and a "The Real Ghostbusters" cartoon that was tied to the franchise.
>Essentially, male users were more likely to rate television shows with a female-heavy audience lower than female users would rate male-centric television lower.
If you look at the gender breakdown on imdb for movies that have been out for a while (meaning that people have actually have had the time to watch them), it seems like the differences between the genders are nowhere near as big as for the new ghostbusters movie. The original Ghostbusters for example is 7.8 (m) vs 7.6 (f) [0]. It doesn't look like imdb provides the gender breakdown of votes in their publicly available dataset[1], but it would be interesting to see someone preform a more rigorous analysis (than me looking at movies I can remember at the top of my head).
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/ratings-male
[1] http://www.imdb.com/interfaces/
> but when it does happen, the person is lashing out at any stranger.
I responded to a comment and to a "personal account". Zilch replies, downvotes instead. I moan about that, I get your non-replies. So yeah, excuse me for lashing out at a throwaway who doesn't care about something I care about, and feels the need to tell me that.
> Pretty much means the person I'm dealing with is isolating themselves,
Awww, I'm so hurt. From whom though? From people I'm criticizing who can't deal with that honestly? From a throwaway? From "peers" who don't bat an eye to join a mob, all with their own plausible deniability? I never joined, you could not pay me enough to not want to distance myself from that kind of stuff. So you're exactly right, int he meaning of the word, I am isolating myself, putting on an ABC suit, say "whoa wtf is this, are you people crazy? well, I spoke my piece, the rest is on you."
> In the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters, one of the main characters, Ray Parker (played by Dan Aykroyd), accidentally selects a childhood memory of a marshmallow mascot for the "stay-puft" marshmallow company. He imagines, in his own mind that this was a representation of harmlessness, only to find it transformed into something horrible, and used against him.
That explains that then, thanks, but I don't find it so terribly monstrous to "lash out" at something needlessly during adressing everything else in a comment, too. That's just a bonus you can ignore, instead of fixate on.
> it shows me that you are looking for things where they don't exist, and deciding that you found them anyway.
Right, and you're telling yourself that being slightly annoyed by getting essentially mocked with a non-reply, and to then make ONE demonstrably false guess, that this somehow can be applied to everything else, and of course retroactively, too?
You're simply demonstrating the "type of character" kind of stuff I'm denouncing. Read Arendt, that's exactly how totalitarianism "thinks". Jake's a "rapist, sociopath, plagiarist", the victims are "victims", I'm someone who "is looking for things where they don't exist", and you're someone who is being "anything but malicious". Nothing of substance at all. The punishment "proves" the "guilt" for the thoughtcrimes, the type-of-person-crimes, as well as bestowing the appropriate immunity from criticism to others, and the sentences are nilly-willy and the hands of the executioners free of all guilt.
Instead of me asking some valid and uncomfortable questions, which don't get good responses because nobody HAS a good answer, it's now my fault, obviously because mentioning that I got no responses, and noticing that you then respond with nothing but "I personally don't care, that's how it is, if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen [which you'd never say about some of these stories about a creeper even in cases where he stopped when asked to, then tried again, am I correct?]", and getting something about your throwaway handle wrong, which is the only thing you respond to -- all that somehow means I'm "looking for things that aren't there" and "isolating myself" and ladiblah. It's not you avoiding things and blaming that on me, nah. It's not you who prefers to talk about people rather than facts, and then looks kind of bad even when talking about people, in your mind.
Anyone who has ever been mobbed or dealt with a narcissist will find that kind of strategy very, very familiar. You saying you're not malicious is just you saying things. But this string of comments, in content, for those paying attention, is what it is.
That's the only thing I responded to, because it shows me that you are looking for things where they don't exist, and deciding that you found them anyway.
I've rarely seen other people attribute malice to my actions at times when I know I'm being anything but, but when it does happen, the person is lashing out at any stranger.
Pretty much means the person I'm dealing with is isolating themselves, and it won't be possible to do anything right for them, regardless of any objective, rational information one might try to present.
In the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters, one of the main characters, Ray Parker (played by Dan Aykroyd), accidentally selects a childhood memory of a marshmallow mascot for the "stay-puft" marshmallow company. He imagines, in his own mind that this was a representation of harmlessness, only to find it transformed into something horrible, and used against him.
Saying you don't like a movie isn't hate speech.
The first trailer was terrible. I think almost objectively terrible. It's clearly a ghostbusters movie, but it didn't seem to give me any reason to want to see the movie. It made it look like a cash-in-remake.
The later trailers have looked much better and give me some hope. We'll see what reviews say.
The original movie is a pretty great film, and I enjoyed it. I loved the cartoon as a kid, so I'm interested in seeing what happens with the franchise.
If you're not interested in the movie because you don't want a remake, or you thought the trailer didn't look good, that' fine.
If you're expressing that you hate the movie only because they changed the cast for this iteration... then you start to fit into the 'angry-man-boy' category. Same if you fit in the previous category but use lots of sexist terms and slurs to describe the new movie.
And then there is group three, the worst of the groups. These are the people sending hate messages, death threats, rape threats, etc. You can call for a boycott for whatever reason you want, people will probably think you're childish. But if you're sending death threats because someone changed a fictional character in a movie you haven't even seen yet? Yeah, you've earned that label.
As for AVGN, I haven't watched the video. Given everything that's happend around the movie it certainly immediately raises my "angry-man-boy" suspicions, but again I haven't watched it. At this point the nutcases are getting so loud over this (and every other topic) that it gets really easy for people with more reasonable viewpoints (especially if not presented well) to end up lumped in.
Solution? Ban the nutcases. No one needs to be able to send death threats via Twitter. No one needs to be able to receive them. Death threats aren't free speech, they're already exempted (assuming they are in any way reasonable).
There is plenty of room for subtlety in discussions of this kind of stuff. Can white people use the n-word? What if group X suddenly decides that phrase Y is evil?
I don't care. We can decide that later. For now, let's just ban the death threats, physical abuse threats, etc. and see where that gets us. I bet it improves things a ton.
I'd say I want to see someone make a good case for allowing death threats but this is the internet and I really don't, because someone will try and I'll think that much less of humanity.
Got to say, I haven't seen it, mostly because I know I would hate it. But one of my friends told me that they are destroying a death star. Again. For the 3rd time. Seriously? How many times are they gonna try?
"One can envision Hollywood eventually turning out only two products: "Star Wars" movies and James Bond movies, each periodically "rebooted" for a new generation of customers."
Absolutely love the conclusion. This is exactly what is happening right now. It's like every single new movie is a reboot. Mad Max, Ghostbusters, Robocop, Point Break, The neverending story...
Note that "funniest movie" isn't the same as "best comedy". It's merely the one that made me laugh the most. That's a very important attribute for judging comedy, but not the only one. Taking all aspects into account (how much I laughed, acting, memorable lines, cultural impact, cinematography, etc.) I would rate Ghostbusters as best.
I didn't understand prime video. I tried to watch a movie when i had prime, following their link for the "free videos!"
Only to find that it was 5 bucks for every stream or something. Ok. Searched out ghostbusters or something older, guess what? $5. Also no way to sort by free for prime, at least not then.
Don't have prime anymore, and these days amazon is around 10-15% more than what you can easily google elsewhere. Miss the shipping priority though, but as soon as you drop prime, expect them to wait 7 days before bothering to package your stuff and ship it out.
>There are some movies you can't get in any format but DVD. Ghostbusters, for example. The owners of that particular title refuse to let it be licensed for streaming of any kind.
While your general point remains valid, Ghostbusters was a poor example. It was available for streaming on Netflix earlier this year. (http://www.ibtimes.com/netflix-movies-disappearing-2014-over-50-films-4-tv-shows-expiring-october-1696521)
Netflix has already killed the old distribution model. For the price of about 8 full-price DVDs per year, you can watch any video in the Netflix catalog with the assurance of consistent quality and convenience. You can even watch multiple video streams at once, if you have a network pipe that's fat enough and a few extra screens.
I have a decently-sized collection of DVDs. But my indexing and search system sucks, in that it heavily relies on physical discs being replaced in exactly the right spot, which is often hard to reach. Now, a decent HTPC with networked storage would solve that problem handily. But I would still have to read the video files off all the discs and put them into a media catalog.
Netflix has already done all that work for the videos they are licensed to distribute. So if I know that a movie I want to watch is buried behind two rows of DVD cases, certainly no longer in the genre+alphabetical order that I try in vain to enforce, and possibly not even in its case, I'll definitely check to see if it's on Netflix before I get off the couch.
And if I know I don't own the DVD, and it's not on Netflix, I'm certainly not going to go check a dozen walled gardens that will probably still want me to pay $2.99 to view each TV episode one time, or $4.99 to see one movie one time, and maybe they also want me to log in using credentials from a cable or satellite provider.
It only takes a few instances of being annoyed and frustrated like that, and a few instances of finding exactly what you desire from friendly pirates, before skipping the former. I have already demonstrated my willingness to pay for content that I like. But that willingness has limits.
I bought the Ghostbusters DVD, because I knew that I'd want to see it again, at multiple times of my choosing in the future. And I also know how to use certain programs to take the video off the physical medium and transcode it to a file viewable on my kids' Android tablets. That's still not as convenient as Netflix, because I have to do that extra work, and there's still no central entertainment nexus, where I can search in just one place for the video I want to watch.
That's the thing that will kill the walled gardens. People don't want to have to flip through 57 channels and still not find anything they want to watch. They want to open up the program guide, maybe search, maybe look at recommendations and reviews, and then press play. If consuming your entertainment becomes too much like work, your audience shrinks. As long as Netflix has the infrastructure to make consuming entertainment convenient it doesn't need to carry exactly the content people want. All they need is a reasonable alternative.
For example, if people search for "Indiana Jones" on Netflix, they might see a "not found" result. Instead, Netflix could have said "not found, but..." and made suggestions.
Features like "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark": "The Librarian and the Spear of Destiny", "Allan Quatermain and the Kingdom of Skulls", "The Da Vinci Code", "The Mummy", (>> more >>) ...
Features starring Harrison Ford: "Star Wars", "The Frisco Kid", "Witness", "Cowboys and Aliens", (>> more >>) ...
Features directed by Steven Spielberg: etc ...
Features set between 1917 and 1945: etc ...
Something like that would kick those distributors who refused to license content at a reasonable price right in the wallet, because Netflix would be forcing them into direct competition with all the other features that include the same old tropes and plots. Likewise, anyone who could seize the initiative from Netflix as the first place that people check for the features they want to watch could kill them, too.
All it would take is a better search engine, with support for alternative recommendations.
Spotify and Netflix are early carnations of what what could come.
Yet both of these companies you mention are reviled by the content producers. What the content producers want is their own walled garden. You want their content, you come to their app or website.
It's pathetic. I would pay a reasonable fee for TV and movies (and often do, btw). There are some movies you can't get in any format but DVD. Ghostbusters, for example. The owners of that particular title refuse to let it be licensed for streaming of any kind. So, I downloaded it (in a completely safe way, of course).
Much has been written about the licensing nightmare for content, though. It's going to be the undoing of Netflix, unless they can get enough of their own content to keep them alive. I'm not sure they can. Whenever I look, it's very hard to find stuff that I want to watch. All the newly added stuff is really 2nd and 3rd tier stuff.
I saw "Ghostbusters" as well, but the joke's on you. All that crazy stuff they believed turned out to be true (in the movie).
This man was a legend! He wrote/directed/produced/started in some of the most icon comedy films every (love me some Stripes). Its strange that he was able to slip under the radar. I think he liked it that way.
Harold seemed like a great guy. Always smiling. Always willing to give the funny lines to everyone else.
I hope he gets the coverage that he deserves. He truly was one of the greats!
I know this sounds a bit selfish of me, but I kinda wish there was a third Ghostbusters movie (ya ya ya, the game was the "3rd" movie). It would've been great to see him in a suit again and to be praised for the amazing films he brought to us.
R.I.P. Mr. Ramis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igfRYtwpQyU
Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day are both truly great films with an astonishing influence on American culture. He'll be missed, but never forgotten.
Oh, man, that link proves my point. IMO.
Doubtlessly, numerous people on this planet woke up this morning and said: "wow, this day would be great if I could see a 53-year-old movie in 4K. Because watching The Guns of Navarone in Blu-Ray just doesn't do it justice". No, I don't think that happened this morning (or any other morning).
Or maybe they all said: "If only I could see Dr. Peter Venkman get slimed in 4K quality, my life would be complete. Watching Ghostbusters in Blu-Ray doesn't let me appreciate the nuances of that 29-year-old film". No, I don't think too many people said that either.
I understand that Sony has to start somewhere. But there's no "killer app", or in this case "killer movie" on that list. (Though, granted, there was plenty of killing in Breaking Bad). Ghostbusters is one of my favorite movies of all time, but I'm not going to buy a brand new TV set just to re-watch it in 4K. Still, if they add Forbidden Planet to that list, maybe they'd make a sale. :)
This is not a mass market product. In fact IMO there's not enough of a market for this to be a profitable product.
But as Dennis Miller used to end his rants: "of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong".
I have a few "flashes" of very clear memories from < 3 ... I very vividly remember a single moment of being in my crib (I recall the high walls, the feeling of the felt base, etc.) I have an equally vivid memory of the first night I spent in my "big boy bed" (mostly I remember experiencing fear and anxiety, and that wooden side rail meant to keep me from falling out). And I remember toddling around my house, seeing this incredibly juicy and tempting big button that just needed to be pushed, and then a lot a lot of chaos (it was an old-school panic button that set off our house burglar alarm ;)
But the flood of real memories doesn't start until nursery school, which was right around 3-4.
On a related note, there's a different type of memory that started to form later and that I can pinpoint to a VERY specific age...I refer to it as "cultural awareness/memory". I.e. movies, songs on the radio, etc. I was born in '78 and my earliest memories of that sort of stuff is all '85 (i.e. 7 years old). And what a year! Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, "We Built This City", "Born in the USA", etc.
I can barely remember any movies/songs from before then...maybe some in 84, but 83 is a basically non-existent to me. So maybe this is the sort of thing they mean when they're referring to "adult memories" ?
Aaaaand now I feel old.
a. We seem to have pretty bad (or at least predictable) taste in movies.
b. The list is missing the two most important movies to HN: The Shawshank Redemption, which is about how you're never going to close funding until you give up on ever closing funding, and Ghostbusters, the greatest startup movie of all time.
It had textfiles from the old BBS days together with SNES roms. Thats 2 decades if not more. Together with "old" movies (Ghostbusters 1 for example). Trust me, that rabbit hole went deep.
I'd add two more:
1. Kids get bored quicker, This year, I've left the cinema four times before the movie finished because the kids were bored. This makes me less likely to go back, they prefer to stay home on the xbox/lappy or go out for pizza/bowling instead.
2. Mass appeal movies are shit. There's just no quality or focus anymore, every movie is trying to be everything to everyone and ends up crap.
Don't get me started on the overuse of CG.
Instead of learning from filmmakers, the CG guys picked up tips from animators, that's why every CG creature walks and talks the same, with over emphasised, unrealistic, and ridiculous movement patterns that don't fool anyone and ruin the moment. You know why Jurassic Park is still awesome? and ghostbusters, and all those other heavy animation movies? Because they don't look obviously fake.
Hollywood is almost universally terrible at hacker movies, unfortunately, dating back to when they perverted Frankenstein. I haven't seen Swordfish, but what I've heard doesn't make me optimistic.
Real Genius and Ghostbusters are two pretty good hacker movies. I hear Buckaroo Banzai is in the same ballpark, but I haven't seen the whole thing. I also enjoyed Flight of the Navigator, but it's really more about magic than about hacking.
Reminds me of the Ghost Sniffer equipment from the Ghostbusters movie:
http://ghostbusters.wikia.com/wiki/Ghost_Sniffer
Being in Canada, many of the Live benefits (e.g. Netflix) aren't even available here, which is a luxury that we pay a premium for.
For us it is simply a gaming matchmaker for online play, and a way of buying grossly overpriced movie rentals (with 24 hour viewing periods from the moment you click play) and overpriced downloadable games, like a ghetto version of Steam.
I can't believe I actually pay for the ability to overpay like this.
Here's the best part -- some time back I bought Ghostbusters on Games on Demand. Somehow over the following months the install got deleted from the console, but that's okay: one of the big advantages of XBL Games on Demand is that if you buy a new Xbox, your hard drive crashes, you need to make space, etc, you can just redownload it when you want it again. So I navigated looking for it.
But I couldn't find it.
They had removed it from their catalog -- this is apparently a regular event for a wide range of titles -- which means that my virtual purchase is now forever gone and irretrievable.
That's the last Games on Demand I'll be buying on XBL.
And if you try to cancel the auto-renew that they surreptitiously enrolled you in...have fun. Xbox Live engages in the most atrocious hide-the-link behavior. It's incredibly shady for a company the size of Microsoft.
One exception, noted by the Journal's editorial page, was the first Ghostbusters movie.
IIRC, the spate of hauntings in the movie was brought on by the imminent return of Gozer the Gozerian (or by the same rare set of conditions that allowed Gozer to return).
By the sequel, the Ghostbusters had mostly closed up shop due to the collapse of the haunting bubble.
Wow, Ghostbusters is a movie about a startup. It seems so obvious once it's pointed out, but it never occurred to me before.
Good movies about startups: "Tucker", "24 Hour Party People", and "Ghostbusters".
Vaudeville: True enough. In fact, I can only use that around close friends who are already familiar with the original quote. If I said something like that to anyone else, they'd think I'm being an ass.
It would be bad: You have to use it in the proper context as a gross understatement. As in every atom in your body exploding at the speed of light would be bad. True, the same line has been used as an understatement in other movies, but the Ghostbusters instance sticks out for some reason.
It seems a little too generous to attribute "It would be bad." to Ghostbusters. Or the last one, which is basically Vaudeville. You might as well say you're quoting Earth Girls Are Easy every time you say the word "the", because it's in that movie at least once.
I've never been able to relate to Lebowski for some reason. Loved many of the other Coen bros films, though. Using Matt's criteria for movie greatness, I can name several other movies off the top of my head that are much more quotable than Lebowski: Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers, Airplaine, Holy Grail, Fish Called Wanda, Napoleon Dynamite, Pulp Fiction.
...I must be significantly older than Matt, I guess.