Ghostbusters II (1989)

 "Being miserable, and treating other people like dirt, is every New Yorker's God given right!"

I hadn't seen this film since its original theatrical release in 1989, when I saw it at the old Cannon cinema in the towncentre. So, yes, it's been a while. Surprisingly, I did remember a few things.

This film, of course, was famously a flop, after which there wouldn't be any more Ghostbusters for a very long time. But... I can't really see why? This seems to me to be every bit as good as the original. This cast was always going to be superb. The script is great, with some very witty lines- I love the moment when a ghostly Titanic finally arrives in New York City and the man at the port says, deadpan, "Better late than never..."

The film is even about something- the threat is, essentially, a metaphor for the negative emotions stirred up in a big city and uses that concept to riff on the stereotypes and reputation of New Yorkers, as embodied by the quote above. It's a film absolutely about New York City, so of course we get a walking Statue of Liberty. It's a pity that Americans of today seem to have abandoned those nobler and old-fashioned values of, you know, welcoming the tired huddled masses and giving fascists the finger instead of voting for them.

So, yeah, the critics are just wrong here. This film is great. Yes, even the sex scene with Janine and Lewis.

My Girl 2 (1994)

"It's not easy being a woman!"

It's sometimes good to see and blog a film not in the usual genre, without all the explosions and CGI I'm used to, and see a nice little 90 minute drama about our old friend Vada and her dad, stepmum and soon-to-be baby sibling. No Thomas J for obvious reasons, so no Macauley Culkin to provide a big name '.this time; we'll have to make do with Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Aykroyd. Still, I'm not sure Macauley Culkin was still a thing in '94 anyway.

It's interesting that this isn't, given the absence of Thomas J, really a direct sequel at all but rather a tale of Vada, a couple of years older, travelling to Los Angeles to research her late mother and to undertake a sort-of romance with the awkward and very teenage Nick. In its quiet way it's a nicely done drama, with Vada's search for answers providing a nice structure to it all.

The script and acting are both superb, and there's just enough wallowing in the fact it's 1974 to be fun without overdoing it. There are some nice cameos with Aubrey Morris as a jaded, elderly poet ("Don't be a poet. Be a TV repairman.") and Keone Young as a nerdy cop. A quietly satisfying sequel that's just as good as its predecessor.

Ghostbusters (1984)

"Do you have any hobbies?"

"I collect spores, moulds and fungus."

It's quite an instructive experience seeing a film you saw at the old Cannon Cinema in Hinckley back in '84, watched tens of times while still in primary school, but haven't actually seen since Thatcher was prime minister. You remember very little until you see it happens, and then the memories flood back. You even find yourself unexpectedly remembering dialogue from the next scene. It's quite surreal.

This is the first time I've seen the film as an adult, and so finally realise what Hittites, Sumerians and Babylonians are, and what a cad and a charlatan Peter Venkman is, and what a creep he is with Dana. But I can also appreciate what may not be laugh-out-loud funny but is a justifiably popular fun classic with a top notch cast. In hindsight it's clear how much this film owes to the then-recent Poltergeist, with lots of that kind of ghost activity, but it never attempts to be a scary film and keeps the tone light and fun.

Rick Moranis s great as the possessed Louis, but William Atherton deserves special praise for his Walter Peck, the perfect pantomime villain. But the whole damn thing justly deserves its status as a true classic.

Pixels (2015)

"Don't tell anyone I killed a smurf..."

I am, to put it mildly, far from an Adam Sandler fan. Worse, this film seems to have left the critics unimpressed. But, perhaps because I'm very old school when it comes to computer games (I was born in 1977 and pretty much stopped buying new games in the early '90s as albums by rock bands replaced games in my limited teenage budget), I found this film pleasantly and nostalgically entertaining. I'll admit, though, that I'm still not particularly enamoured with Sandler as such.

The film looks great, and it's huge fun seeing Space Invaders, Centipede, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong recreated in real life. And Ludlow is an enjoyable piss-take of conspiracy nuts ("JFK shot first!"),  so insane that he actually uses 4chan. The film also makes a good point; those 8-bit games from the '80s relied on recognising the pattern, not something that applies these days.

I love the scenes in London- Hollywood certainly seems to love our visually arresting national capital, and Fiona Shaw gets a great cameo as the prime minister. There's a lot to love. But I'm a little disturbed by the treatment of Fox News as a legitimate news source and the troubling idea that it's ok for  a US president not to know big words. But there's no denying how much I enjoyed this film.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

"I had bugs for lunch..."

I wasn't sure whether or not I'd seen this film before but I must have done; the memories all came flooding back as a watched it. It's a good film, if less so than its predecessor, and exciting as ever. 

I suppose we can't avoid the inevitable questions about an arguably negative portrayal of India- I mean, Thuggee in the twentieth century- and an implicit endorsement of colonialism, showing a semi-independent Princely State to be rather beastly and having Britain's Indian Army act as the cavalry at the end. And yes, those are valid points. But I think we should account for the fact that this is an American film, not a British one. The USA is not India's former colonial ruler, nor does it have anything like the number of people of South Asian extraction who live in the UK. Perhaps we can forgive them for some cultural sensitivities that we would not accept from the British, much as we forgive them for the stereotypical character of Apu in The Simpsons.

Anyway, the film starts in 1935, making it a subtle prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and there are no Nazis to be seen anywhere.we begin with a nice little sequence in treaty port Shanghai before the action shifts to India by means of a delightfully entertaining plane crash which is one of the best sequence in the film. Alongside Indy are his stubborn love interest Willie- I bet that have some angry sex- and Short Round. I'm guessing a lot of people must find Short Round annoying, but I like him. He's cool, and by acting as Indy's surrogate son he softens and humanises the character.

Our hero is soon directed to save all the children of his host village from the temple of the title, and that's where the fun really starts. The meal, with the various living bugs, snakes, and the eyeball soup, is great fun. Soon, though, there is exploring,and the booby trap see know and love. We learn that the baddies are Thuggees, that their chief priest can tear out a man's heart with his bare hands(!), and that the rotters are using children as slaves. There's a final awesome chase scene before our heroes face a climax where they all end up trapped on a bridge over a chasm, facing death just like Danny in The Man Who Would Be King.

Still, there's no stopping Indy. The film ends with the village saved and Indy doing kinky shit to Willie with his whip. Oo er.

It's a fun film, packed with incident and crammed with cliffhangers. It's not as good as its predecessor, perhaps, but enormous fun nonetheless. And the location filming in Sri Lanka and then-Portuguese Macau looks gorgeous.

My Girl (1991)

"Feel my aura!"

"I don't think I'm allowed to..."

Just to make it very clear; the wife cried. I didn't. Heart of stone. I deny everything.

This is a nice little coming-of-age story starring a very young and brilliant Anna Chlumsky (who I only know, much older, from In the Loop), a typically charismatic Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Aykroyd playing against type as man whose approaching middle age seems set to be defined by his underlying sadness and mild neglect of his delightfully full-of-life daughter, and Macauley Culkin, that walking advertisement that being a child star doesn't always end well.

The whole thing hangs on Vada's unique personality- a hypochondriac, terrified of the dead bodies she sees all the time, what with being an undertaker's daughter, and bring rather brighter than her peers- and that in turn hangs on the young Anna Chlumsky, who really makes this film. As does, yes, the sad twist, which hits like a sledgehammer.

This is also a nice little glimpse into the middle America of 1972, with hippies at the creative writing class using phrases like "right on" without irony and phrases like "women's lib" being hurled around. This isn't a big film, but it's a pleasant way to spend ninety minutes.