What's next, a fucking Goonies reboot ....... now i've jinxed it.
I've felt like a Goonies reboot has been pretty much inevitable for a while now. With the success of stuff like Stranger Things and the It movie (the first part, anyway), Hollywood is keen on the idea of nostalgia-flavored kid-led casts (which is why the last Ghostbusters movie looked like it did).
The Goonies is the perfect intersection of 80s nostalgia and kids. There has to be someone in Warner Bros salivating over the possibilities. Doubly so since Steven Spielberg is sort of attached to the property.
In this mad word we live in where Ghostbusters and the Oceans movies get an all female reboot which (to the surprise of absolutelty fucking no one) turned out to be complete and utter shit.
The sad part is, there's no real reason why they
had to be shit. It wouldn't have been that hard to write a story that involves a new cast of female Ghostbusters taking up the legacy of the old ones as a direct sequel. Since Harold Ramis was dead, establish the "genius" character as his daughter or student, taking on his legacy now that he's gone. Then she recruits her own team (which coincidentally happens to be all women because those are the people she knows). The rest of the team doesn't necessarily have to be a 1:1 clone of the originals, but you can still help validate them by having the rest of the original team show up and do cameos that match their own personalities. Ray probably loves the idea of a new team, Peter has probably gone mainstream and views those years as his old shame (much like Bill Murray), but can potentially be won over by the end. And Winston - who always sort of saw the job
as a job - could potentially be the one to help ground the new team a bit (ie, they're excited about the possibilities and the glamour of things, but he kind of helps them see that it also needs to be a business).
Done right, you've created a spin-off that can stand on its own and spool out at least a few sequels with less direct influence from the original cast/movies. It can become its own thing, but it kind of needs to
start out as a springboard off the originals.
Instead, we got what we got. And a lot of what killed that movie was Paul Feig directing it like a piss-poor improv session, and not really understanding
any of the underlying themes or ideas that made the original popular in the first place. What it copies, it copies without knowing why it worked, and where it innovates it almost always does something much worse. It winds up feeling like a lame retread where the only meaningful difference is that everything is worse, and there are female Ghostbusters.
So then everyone focuses on the female lead part rather than the "everything about the rest of the movie is also bad" part, and blames its failure on sexism.
Similar problem (though nowhere near as bad) for Ocean's 8 - some of the characters are quite interesting, but most of them feel like direct replacements for corresponding characters from the male version, and the heist isn't all that great. A better overall plot and a bit more originality in terms of the team and it could easily have been a strong film. But again, people hyper-focus on the all-female lead aspect and put the blame in the wrong place (which means nothing will ever improve).
When Paris Hilton has done a better job at something not involving cock sucking you know you've fucked up.
I've got to be honest, I've always been convinced Paris Hilton is way more savvy than people realize.
A lot of her vapid party girl personality seems like it was deliberately cultivated (something a few people close to her have openly hinted at). She was essentially pulling a Madonna (like Lady Gaga did later), courting controversy and media attention to expand and develop her brand name identity. And then she parleyed that name value into multiple brands, which generate
billions of dollars, to the point where she's the richest member of her family right now just based on her own income.
What we thought was just a dumb rich girl being a bit of an attention whore was a very clever would-be businesswoman pioneering a new business model. It's kind of telling that, once she started, she kind of disappeared out of the public eye. Once she no longer needed to be the vapid club kid to grab public awareness, she stopped doing most of those things. Almost as if she was never really about that sort of lifestyle in the first place.
Sure, it could just be a case of a dumb teenager (and then dumb young adult) finally growing up, but usually shitty rich kids stay shitty rich kids (and become even shittier over time).
It's also kind of telling that her friend Kim Kardashian used the exact same gameplan (right down to the leaked sex tape) to turn herself into a multi-media star. In both cases it feels way too calculated to just be nothing more than "Ehh, people love watching stupid rich people being stupid, so it was a complete accident that they became famous".