On June 20, the Nantucket Film Festival will honor Harold Ramis with their Screenwriter’s Tribute, and will host a special 25th anniversary screening of Ghostbusters (there’s ticket info on the Festival’s website). With speculation over the long-awaited Ghostbusters 3 at a fever pitch, I called Ramis and we talked about the status of that project, how he’s been “burned by sequels” and why he made a villain out of the EPA.
Why do you think that people are still so hungry for a new Ghostbusters, twenty years after the last film? Why Ghostbusters, and not, like, Caddyshack?
There was another “Caddyshack,” and it was terrible. That could be one reason.
I’m always game to devote one of these roundups to Ghostbusters 3news, but when it relates to a personal favorite list I wrote 7 months ago, I’m especially interested. Maybe you remember I already cast the female version of Ghostbusterswith Elizabeth Banks, Anna Faris, Tina Fey, Niecy Nash, Zooey Deschanel and (replacing the original female cast members) Adrian Brody and Jay Baruchel. But I guess Dan Aykroyd’s latest interview spew of G3 hype is worthy of continued casting ideas, because like Bill Murry before him, he’s focusing our attention on the prospects of girl Ghostbusters. Specifically, he’s proposing the names Alyssa Milano and Eliza Dushku as potential costars for him and the elder team.
Are they good choices? Most people are shocked at the bland suggestions. But remember these are just actresses Aykroyd thinks are “amazing.” Let’s see what the rest of the blogosphere thinks, after the jump.
Between the new Vanity Fair spread starring his comedy troupe (which includes his wife) and official word that he’s producing Ghostbusters 3, Judd Apatow is the talk of the Internet today. Eric D. Snider, in a new post at Cinematical that is apparently unrelated to either bits of news, even discusses Apatow’s potential status as this generation’s John Hughes. Considering some bloggers refer to the stars of the Vanity Fair feature as the “Frat Pack,” despite that term’s origins being with another set of actors (though Apatow’s pals do overlap and have been deemed “Junior Varsity” members), there may be weight to Snider’s claim.
Whatever Apatow’s group is called (Vanity Fair simply yet prematurely labels them “Comedy’s New Legends”), their leader is certainly ruling over a large part of Hollywood these days, enough that he’s sure to appropriate more than just the Frat Pack name before he’s done with his reign as King of Comedy. Now that he’s borrowed the talent of Adam Sandler (for this summer’s Funny People) and is about to take charge of even older SNL alum (for the next Ghostbusters flick), what could stop him from hiring Anthony Michael Hall or Shirley Maclaine in order to align himself with even the “Brat Pack” and “Rat Pack,” respectively?
We’ll just have to wait to see how much Apatow will ultimately conquer. So, for the time being, let’s take a look at what the blogosphere is saying about him and his crew today:
In a new interview with MTV, City of Ember star Bill Murray has called for the makers of Ghostbusters 3to introduce a female Ghostbuster. My first thought was that hottie who models the sexy Ghostbusters Halloween costume, but seriously it is a great idea. As long as the concept is to pass on the proton packs to a new generation, there really should be an actress in the bunch. And I’m not talking just a hot young flavor of the month who Hollywood thinks will get the teen boys in the audience (it’s Ghostbusters 3; they’re already sold). I agree with Murray that the main requirement should be a funny female.
However, instead of merely picking out one comedienne to appear in the sequel, SpoutBlog has decided to imagine a remake of Ghostbustersin which the entire team is made of women. So, here are some casting choices for a gender-reversed version:
Or is it technically Ghostbusters IV? Columbia Pictures has hired writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, both of TV’s The Office, to script a new installment of the Ghostbusters series, which was previously thought to be hitting a final note with an upcoming video game (which Dan Aykroyd led us to believe was pretty much “Ghostbusters III”). The Hollywood Reporter claims that while the new sequel may involve the original cast, the main focus will be with a rookie cast of Ghostbusters.
Paul Bettany, who played a kind of precursor to Charles Darwin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, will actually portray the famous evolution theorist in the biopic Creation (formerly titled Origin), scripted by Master and Commander’s John Collee and to be directed by Jon Amiel (The Core). Bettany’s real wife, Jennifer Connelly, will play Darwin’s wife/first cousin, Emma.
Albert and Allen Hughes will finally follow-up their 2001 period-set From Hell with the post-apocalypse-set Book of Eli, which will star Denzel Washington as a man “who must fight across America to bring society the knowledge that could be the key to its redemption.”
According to Variety, as long as male audiences aren’t too busy with the new football season or summer leftovers, Nic Cage and his latest crapfest, Bangkok Dangerous,should top the box office this weekend.
Video games today are great for recreating scenes from old films (such as The Godfather) and plopping you into the action. But how faithful do a game’s sequences need to be? From the way Sierra Entertainment is advertising its new Ghostbustersvideo game, I guess you want the gaming to be as close to the direction of the original film as possible. Not only does the new trailer for the game include many scenes from the first Ghostbusters movie, it displays side-by-side comparisons of footage from the film and the game. Because what would the game be without a near-identical shot of library catalog cards shot into the air?
Interestingly enough, the game is not actually a total video game remake of Ghostbusters. Instead, it’s “an all new story you won’t see in theaters,” featuring a script by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who also wrote both the original and the sequel, and the voices of Aykroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton and Brian Doyle-Murray, all reprising their roles from the films (I understand Sigourney Weaver opting out, but why no Rick Moranis?). Of course, it does require you to battle old favorites, such as Slimer, Gozer, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and Vigo (”master of evil”), but there will also be new villains, including the biggest paranormal problem the Ghostbusters have ever seen.
Some of these links still date back to before the weekend. What can I say? It took a couple of days to make it all the way through my feeds. Only freshies tomorrow, I promise.
John Brownlee offers a sneak peak at Ghostbusters 3, the videogame-only continuation of the saga, featuring a script by Dan Ackroyd and the voices of Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. “Will Ghostbusters 3 be a worthy successor to the franchise? It’s still too early to say, but early game footage of Ghostbusters 3 has leaked out, and it looks incredible.” That footage is embedded above. The footage has been removed from YouTube. Boooo.
We’re sure Ronnie Bronstein is very excited about his Spirit Award nomination, but Frownland is also up for an award at the Gothams, the New York-centric film awards put on by Find Independent’s former parent company, IFP, which takes place tonight. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough already, Michael Tully has declared, “if Frownland doesn’t win the Gotham tonight I will eat my iPod.” Of course, we’d rather see Ronnie win, but should the iPod eating actually go down, I’ll try to get photo evidence.
What’s this? High praise for Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, which was almost universally dismissed at the Rome Film Festival? Hmmm. Jurgen Fauth says: “I know, I know — there’s nothing duller than listening to other people’s dreams. And yet… the shared fantasy Coppola created from Mircea Eliade’s novella weaves a strange magic, mysterious, playful, philosophical, and loopy with romance. I’d like to hold on to that gossamer enchantment for just a little while longer, privately, before it’s time to take out the stainless steel critical apparatus and cut this one open.”
Speaking of Coppola, The Playlist weighs in on FFC’s One From the Heart: “This neon, highly stylized break-up film might be a failed experiment, but man, is it one of the most pretty failures to look at ever.”
Ray Pride passes along exciting news: David Cronenberg is writing a novel. Says Nicole Winstanley, the Penguin Editor who nabbed the rights, “I wrote David Cronenberg several months ago to inquire about whether or not he’d consider writing a novel. His films demonstrate a deep understanding of the human condition that could translate into fiction brilliantly.”
“Noah Baumbach is one relentlessly bleak filmmaker, and that’s not a compliment,” writes Daniel Carlson at Pajiba. “It’s not that his films are necessarily evil, or even completely off-target; rather, one of the things that makes Baumbach so slippery is his habit of stumbling onto moments of slight emotional truth in the middle of a film completely devoid of it.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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I’m always game to devote one of these roundups to Ghostbusters 3 news, but when it relates to a personal favorite list I wrote 7 months ago, I’m especially interested. Maybe you remember I already cast the female version of Ghostbusters with Elizabeth Banks, Anna Faris, Tina Fey, Niecy Nash, Zooey Deschanel and (replacing the original female cast members) Adrian Brody and Jay Baruchel. But I guess Dan Aykroyd’s latest interview spew of G3 hype is worthy of continued casting ideas, because like Bill Murry before him, he’s focusing our attention on the prospects of girl Ghostbusters. Specifically, he’s proposing the names Alyssa Milano and Eliza Dushku as potential costars for him and the elder team.
