Stuff and Moonshine

Finally saw Ghostbusters (2016) on Sunday, but will try to avoid saying anything terribly spoilery; in any case I agree with Andrew that this was more character-driven than plot-driven, compared with the 1984 movie. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, when the characters are likeable, and I found them to be so (except the ones meant to be unlikeable).

I also thought the cameos and other callbacks to the original were well done, in that they were fun if you recognized them but not confusing if you didn’t. Andrew thought there was a little too much gross-out humour for his taste, but I’d say that was true of the original, it’s just that we’re used to it.

The story struck me as a having a very post-Gamergate villain, in that said villain wants to bring about the apocalypse in revenge for having been bullied, and smugly affects a “misunderstood genius” pose throughout; when the Ghostbusters try to convince him to stand down, he sneers: “clearly Humanity has treated YOU with a modicum of decency,” and they shrug: “Nope. Pretty much everybody dumps on us.”

And the audience, by this point, has seen the authorities use the Ghostbusters' help while officially denouncing them as frauds and faking their arrest, because “the public would panic” if they knew the truth; in one scene I actually found slightly painful to watch a man, later implied to be an undercover tabloid journalist, follows them with a camera on the street, taunting Kristen Wigg’s character (who spent her childhood being sent to various therapists because nobody believed she was really seeing a ghost) until she snaps and punches him in the face, in order to get a clip of her acting unstable.

And after all that and more, they still just want to save the world, study ghosts and prove that they’re not crazy. Basically if you were one of your school’s “weird kids,” this movie is triggering or cathartic or maybe both.

Also, a scene in which a heavy-metal concert audience cheers whatever weird thing is currently destroying the stage, because they think it’s just a terrific effect, is always funny to me-- see also Tapeheads (1988).

Handful_ofdust having mentioned M.R. James and A Podcast to the Curious, I listened to a couple. The podcast for 'A Disappearance and an Appearance' reminded me that there is a ghost story, 'Christmas Reunion,' which is directly inspired by an idea tossed out by James in an essay. So I had to go look up the author of 'Christmas Reunion,' which turned out to be one Sir Andrew Caldecott, a former colonial civil servant. His collection, Not Exactly Ghosts is up in part on Google Books, and thus I was able to read 'A Room In a Rectory,' in which young Rev. Nigel Tylethorpe, newly-appointed to the Rectorate of Tilchington, will open up that room that's been disused since one of his predecessors died suddenly while practicing Satanic rites, and has it renovated as his new study....

It's the type of story where there is a possible non-supernatural explanation for everything -- which doesn't make the demons not-real, it makes them the classic type of demons that have no power over the physical world, but work entirely by tempting humans. I like that the effect of the room on Rev. Tylethorpe is not to turn him to the practice of black magic, but to make him into a fire-and-brimstone type (in a humorous aside, his new style of sermon briefly lures the local Evangelicals away from their own preacher, who rants that he always preached an honest Protestant devil and that these fallen angels are crypto-Papist imposters), utterly paranoid that he's done... something to damn himself, even if he's not quite sure what.

The other stories readable on Google Books are 'Branch Line to Beneston,' and 'Sonata In D Minor,' either of which might be considered dark SF as much as supernatural fiction. Not Exactly Ghosts is an accurate title.

Apparently, some Russian planes got near our airspace last week, giving the Sun the opportunity to run the headline above. I like to think it was actually composed in the 1950s and filed away for five decades, and that the soul of some sub-sub-editor can now finally move on.