Clip It: Each day, Jon Davis looks at the world of trailers, featurettes and clips and puts it all in perspective.
I'm not going to see Ghostbusters anytime soon. It's not because I don't want to see it, it's that I have to wait for my wife. But we have a two-year-old. And we are both working parents which means we have to see it at night and hire a babysitter, so the cost of that, plus parking, plus concessions will be about 1000 dollars. So we are probably going to wait for it to show up on iTunes. Don't feel bad for me or anything. I can catch a lot of movies if my wife doesn't want to see them, which accounts for MOST movies. This is all to say that I may not get a chance to see Ghostbusters in a timely manner but the same does not hold true for Ghost Team (don't take it personally, Ghost Team, she's not going to see Star Trek Beyond, either). I know they are not exactly the same premise, but they both feature hilarious actors taking on incorporeal beings, and Ghost Team, with no spousal limits, is all cued up for me, awaiting my ghost hungry eyes.
Life presents us with options. Pepsi or Coke? Mac or PC? 1492: Conquest of Paradise or Christopher Columbus: The Discovery? How do we choose? What does that say about us as people?
Is it possible that Ghost Team is better than Ghostbusters? Don't count Ghost Team out. The Ghostbusters trailer didn't look promising, either. As our own Drew McWeeny has suggested, Paul Feig's character driven humor isn't always a fit for the zinger happy trailer format. Perhaps Ghost Team is also a wry, smart movie, the likes of which we haven't seen since Waiting for Guffman.
The chances of that seem small, not just because this is a move called Ghost Team, and it's not just because Tyler Labine was born to be in this movie but they decided that David Krumholtz would transform himself into Tyler Labine instead. Take the line towards the end of the trailer: “Give the aliens thing a rest,” says Jon Heder's character, tired of his friend David Krumholtz's conspiracy theories, “two for our friends got taken by a demon.” I feel like I know what happened in the editing room. They debated whether the audience will get the joke. Is it too subtle? Because if so, David Krumholtz explains the joke in the next line: “Oh, so it's okay to believe in ghosts but aliens are ridiculous.” Back and forth they went. Keep the David Krumholtz line or cut it? Do they trust that the audience is smart enough to get it? Are they going to play it too safe or take off the training wheels? I guess the ghosts must have spooked them. The jokes are too obvious and/or stale, like the reference to Signs, outdated two days after its theatrical release. Even if they had the discipline to exclude a Blair Witch bit, it doesn't feel like it.
If the filmmakers behind Ghost Team were with me right now, they'd want me to make a “Who ya gonna call” joke. So in their honor: “Who ya gonna call?” Ghostbusters! Not Ghost Team!