It's the first second movie in a series for the project! That's a really confusing sentence! While there have been other sequels covered (Thor: Ragnarok, Mad Max: Fury Road), I do not own the first movies in those series. So this is the first time Making and Movies has covered multiple movies in a single franchise. There. That's better. Kind of.
I honestly watched this one more than the original growing up, simply because it was on cable TV all.the.time. I watched it in fragments. I delighted when I caught it at the start just because I was so used to flipping channels and catching it when the Ghostbusters come to take pictures of the painting. I remember thinking Janine feeding French bread pizza (gross) to a baby was really strange.
I'm such a starry eyed fan of Harold Ramis. He's extra charming in this movie, taking some delicious pauses to deliver his dead panned responses. I've read that he was reluctant to play Egon in the first one but I'm so so glad he did, if only because it gave us his facial expression when it is implied he fucked the slime. Comic genius. What a loss.
I do not remember Peter MacNicol doing The Most in this movie. Honestly, I was always annoyed by his character when I was a kid. But watching tonight, holy cow. The insane physicality of his acting. Full bodied flopping whenever Vigo zaps him. Rubber facial expressions that put mid 90s Jim Carrey to shame. That accent. His muttering (thanks subtitles!). His comic timing. He might be the best part of Ghostbusters II.
Aside from Ramis and MacNicol (and Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis - perennial favorites in our household), this movie doesn't really hold up. Bill Murray's patter consistently dips into xenophobic and fat shaming nonsense and, frankly, I don't have patience for that anymore. I've been blessed with excellent new media lately, TV shows and movies that focus on kindness and whimsy and are still incredibly funny and moving (what's uuuuup Everything Everywhere All at Once and Our Flag Means Death!) and watching an actor I generally genuinely enjoy leaning so lazily into humor that hurts... I just can't. I won't any more. Again, look at Ramis and MacNicol and Ackroyd. Plenty done with good natures and better timing.
Huh. I thought I wrote more about the movie. Guess I didn't have much to say. Anyway, here's art.
"Vigo the Destroyer"
Acrylic paint on canvas
14x18"
Takeaways:
-I'm really pleased with this one. I think I took some good steps forward, particularly with blending and timing. I got a level of detail I don't always have patience for and that's good because I love detail. I need to find that patience.
-The thought behind this one was, of course, Vigo's painting but also the Venkman's line about "he just misses his kitten. Let's paint one in" or whatever. I'm paraphrasing. Then I thought about the cat picture in Everything Everywhere All at Once that makes Ben laugh so much. So why not combine them? (I also briefly entertained painting in a small, pet Peter MacNicol but frankly I didn't have the time to do it justice so it got abandoned.) If this painting is at all successful, it is because of how much it makes Ben smile and laugh. You can't buy it, it's already his.
-It was wild working on this one because I felt like I knew the original painting *really well* but the more I looked at a high def screen grab the more I felt like I'd never seen it before. The village on fire, the skulls, the BIZARRE proportions of his costume. Really odd.
Next: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I have so many misgivings about continuing the HP series because JK Rowling is TERFy Trash but I also want to try and reclaim what I can from a series I really loved.
I hope the next week is enthusiastically kind. I hope you are able to silence your mental Venkmans and elevate your heartfelt Spenglers and Stantzes. I hope you have all of the confidence of Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts put together.
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