Kudos for remembering his birthday.
Which reminds me: he has such a perfect voice for Bond. The next guy should have that, too.
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If I ever picture an actor when reading the books, it is invariably him.
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The Flash
Um… that was lots of fun, fast paced, well made and focussed storytelling. Probably one of the best comic book films of the last decade.
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Did you notice that this, the film with the end of this continuity in sight, has a theme of some things are too broken to fix?
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I am no Zack Snyder fan. But MAN OF STEEL did have some good scenes and ideas. Even BATMAN V SUPERMAN had interesting things going on, amidst all the stuff that did not work or was WAY TOO EARLY (Superman’s death). JUSTICE LEAGUE just was a mess, nobody could rescue that project.
WB/DC wanted too much too soon. I hope Gunn makes a really, really superb Superman film and then gives that character a firm build up in more films without overextending everything…
Oh, wait. I forgot I was talking about studio blockbuster planning.
As for THE FLASH - I can understand the excitement the studio felt when watching this. But the personal problems of the main actor probably kept away too many audience members who would have been needed to make this the deserved success.
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Or they should have considered reading just one of the comics and they would have found out that The Flash isn´t a scrawny, strange, weird talking teeny nerd…but that´s just me reading dozens of Flash comics as a teenager
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Well, Ian Fleming didn’t write James Bond looking or sounding like Sean Connery either.
That’s what movie adaptations do, they change things to fit their needs.
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You´re right. But they made Bond even better with Connery (I don´t think Hoagy Carmichael would have had the same cultural impact). Jury´s out with Miller so…
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Yesterday I picked up GHOSTBUSTERS AFTERLIFE by chance on the telly. That was a surprisingly amiable film, didn’t expect it to be so entertaining. I liked the originals but wasn’t a dedicated fan like others.
That said, it wasn’t such a huge revelation as to make me wish for a restart of the franchise. Which of course studio bosses have other thoughts about. Anyway, nice little comedy.
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I finally saw The Flash, too, and though it wasn’t terrific IMO it was frequently funny and well-paced (ahem). Keaton was great and I liked Supergirl, but I could’ve done without the callback to Zod and it continued the DCU’s perfect run of very, very badly done CGI. As a fan of George Reeves, Adam West and Christopher Reeve, I really regret their inclusion as Sims 3 renderings. Miller did great with the comedy and the pathos and was fun to watch if you could forget his real-life antics, but in the end he felt like a guest star in his own film. They could just as easily have given it a title that didn’t even mention a superhero by name.
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Ha! Me too. 
All that streaming stuff just isn’t for me, I’m just too much used to good old classic TV. Flipping channels, watchin half an hour of this movie or that, switch over to the news for a few minutes, then catch the decider frame of that snooker game, and on to an episode of SpongeBob. I’ve developed the attention span of a 12-year-old 
That said, I actually saw most of the movie (which had surprisingly few comercial breaks) and it was better than I expected. The target audience age for this one is ten years lower than it was for the original ones, but okay, I understand the need to draw back younger audiences. I liked those little Marshmellow Man Minions.
But one of the basic premises of the movie is a giant plot hole: how is Egon supposed to have children and grandchildren when he’s depicted as having chosen a hermit’s life on that farm after the ghostbusting business had broken down – and Janine obviously is not the mother? 
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Even hermits do have fun.
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Must have been some ghost lady…
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Ahh! Missed it! I saw it mentioned in the TV guide I have, but completely forgot about it. In the Netherlands we also can watch ARD, ZDF, WDR, RTL and ARTE.
On the other hand, I assume it was probably not in English?
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Of course not 
The kind of movies in original language you get on Germany usually are those which aren’t dubbed because the costs for that would surpass the money that could be made with it.
Indonesian arthouse movies, for example 
In recent times, there’s been an extra original language channel for some newer series, and sometimes on children’s TV.
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As I asked, I actually already knew the answer. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I often watched German TV and many movies in German language, Louis de Funes, Bud Spencer and from the mid-80s a Bond film every six months. 
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I’ll preface this by saying that this is coming from someone who is probably too big of a fan of these films for his own good and has a bit too much time on his hands 
, but according to the Ghostbusters Wiki page, Egon’s daughter was born in 1982, so before the original film, which I guess could be a potential plothole since she’s not mentioned in either film (and probably was not something that was on the mind of the writers then). Egon probably left New York in the early to mid 90s since the second film takes place in 1989, presumably leaving his daughter in the custody of their mother so he could go live the good life as The Dirt Farmer out in Oklahoma.
Agreed on the target audience of the new film(s) being a bit younger than that of the original, which I think has quite a bit to do with how much the 80s cartoon truly changed the dynamics of the franchise. This new film coming out this week looks like (and this is confirmed by the director) it has been significantly influenced by the cartoon, and then even the second film took quite a few cues from it, although mainly from an aesthetic point of view (changing the look of the slime to take on a more purple/pink color as opposed to the original’s more clear look, changing the design of Slimer, Janine’s change in appearance, etc.). I would imagine that the franchise as it moves forward (if it moves forward) will continue to take its cues from the cartoon, which is just fine because that show, at least in its early days, was definitely a worthy follow up to the original film while definitely expanding the audience to a significant degree.
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That is answered in Ghostbusters II when Peter deduces that Egon has been sleeping with the mood slime. If Egon is willing to get freaky with slime for science he’s capable of having a daughter from a failed marriage.
Also Harold Ramis in real life had a secret daughter with director Amy Heckerling that wasn’t revealed until after his death. I think GB: Afterlife draws inspiration from Ramis’ life and incorporated it into the character of Egon.
I just saw Frozen Empire today and I loved it. I was smiling from ear to ear for the entire film.
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Glad to hear. The negativity from the critics has been disappointing, although, of course, entirely predictable. At least it sounds like the reaction from the fans has been rather positive, which is really all that matters. Looking forward to making this my first trip to the theater since early 2020, hopefully sometime tomorrow.
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Looking forward to it, too.
And while I read all those trade headlines about the opening weekend b.o. either “freezing” or “heating up” the weekend, there is some weird glee about it not overperforming - as if it could suddenly top results of the original.
Also, box office pundits completely forget about the changed marketplace and the pandemic still influencing movie going habits. Most articles just compare b.o. and, in the case of deadline.com, even assume that Ghostbusters is too “goody two shoes” to make a mark these days.
I haven’t seen the film yet, and I have not been a total fan of the franchise. I loved the first one back in 1984 because it was fresh and weird and funny, I enjoyed the second one but did not think too much of it. I liked parts of the Feig reboot but never understood (only the financial reasons) why they thought Ghostbusters-meets-Bridesmaids would work better than a real sequel. I liked Afterlife much better and think this is the way to go. And it has Paul Rudd, so, yeah, of course, it is the way to move forward.
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