jhkim-5 Reviews

Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)

Good solid comedy

[9/10 · 30 July 2016]

I thought it was a solid comedy. It doesn't replace the original Ghostbusters, but as a movie on its own, it's pretty good.

On the good side: a great cast, a good script, and a lot of fun material. The interplay of the whole ensemble was good, and there were a lot of great gadgets and jokes.

There were some missed opportunities. I loved Melissa McCarthy in The Heat and Spy, but here she isn't quite as awesome. It feels like the writers expected her to be awesome just by her presence, instead of writing a cool character for her to play. Still, she was solid, and the rest of the cast shined.

It did get a little CGI heavy at points for my tastes, but that's true for just about every big movie these days. At least the ghosts were pretty inventive and eerie looking. The kids I went with had a great time.

Pretty Cool (2002)

Juvenile but still amusing

[7/10 · 11 December 2005]

OK, so this is a low-budget take-off of eighties teen sex comedies like Zapped and Weird Science. But if you can accept sometimes painfully hokey lines and antics, then there are nice comic bits in this movie along with some nice eye-candy girls. There are also many groan- inducing comic bits as well, which is I guess part of the package. It at least keeps moving, and has a variety of different types of mental powers gags, rather than dull repetition.

Amy Brassette is great though underutilized as Howard's nagging older sister, with occasional bits like an amazing run of impressions in a single take. Cecilia Bergqvist was hokey as the supposedly-plain-but-clearly-hot teacher, but she made up for it by being hilarious as a teenage boy in her body (particularly the hilarious shot in the bathroom). The others are mostly mediocre.

Incidentally, the DVD I got was loaded with stuff for such a low-budget production -- I'm not sure how they managed that.