Day: July 16, 2016

(Warning, there is no plot to give away, really,  and I don’t do that, but I do talk about my feelings about the movie. If you don’t care to know them, skip the piece.)

Maria and I were both primed to see the much-ballyhooed new Ghostbusters movie. We love the very idea of the summer movie, and we always love to laugh. I was looking forward to it all week.

Halfway through the movie, I felt that something was wrong. Maria – who howled so loudly during the Three Stooges movie (especially when the nun played by Larry David had the hairs on his armpits pulled) that the male teenagers in front of us were shushing her  – was deathly still. And I was yawning, and not for the last time.

How could this be? The movie got lots of nice reviews, and it had a legendary franchise to build on.

But here is the thing, and it was something of a surprise. She laughed one time, in the movie, and so did I. And it was, in both cases, more of a chuckle.

It seemed inspired  to make the Ghostbusters heroes all women (male trolls have been shrieking online about it for months), and Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones are all funny. Director Paul Frieg knows how to make good summer movies.

If you saw the first Ghostbusters, you know the plot of the second, as it is almost precisely the same. There is a ghost invasion of Manhattan, two paranormal scholars, a nuclear engineer and a NYC subway worker band together to stop the ghosts, facing clueless,  obstructive, just plain stupid,  and arrogant men every step of the way.

Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd both made cameo appearances in the this re-make, but they only served to remind us how funny they were in the first movie, and how not funny this movie is.

The movie was somewhat scarier than the first at times, but not very scary. And it was not nearly as funny as the first, which baffled me. For me, part of the problem was that I was looking at exactly the same movie, just with some more modern special effects. But they were not all that special.

The movie is not, of course, about ghosts at all, really, more about the chance to blow ghosts up with cool stuff and save the world. Just like the first one.

It may be that if you didn’t see the first movie, this one will hit you as fresh and original. After the thousandth screaming ghost was photo-blasted into slime,  it just got tiresome.  I lost count of the times somebody yelled “fire them up,” and reached for their blasters. Aren’t women supposed to be better than this? I hope so.

None of the ghosts or bad guys had enough personality to even be remembered. Most of them were just rude slobs.  I looked around and even the kids in the theater weren’t laughing much, or even moving. They certainly weren’t scared.

It seemed to move the movie was  over-compensating for the all female cast by making the dialogue insipid, patronizing and awfully predictable. The actors were not simply being women in a tough job, they were playing women in a tough job.  They were trying so hard to be kick-ass women they were almost robotic, even surprisingly lifeless for people in danger of being devoured by thousands of onrushing spectres.

The new Ghostbusters showed about as much excitement and range of emotion as kids held in detention after school. And the end was so dumb and pro-forma it was almost funnier than most of the movie. I mean, the story does matter a bit.

There was the usual mumbo jumbo about all kinds of evil entering the earth through a Manhattan vortex spewing escaped floats from the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade. Much of Manhattan was destroyed, although it was miraculously intact by the credits.  I’m not sure what the scary scenes were supposed to be, but they went right over my head.

Ghosts ought never to be tiresome and predictable.

I loved the idea of an all female cast of Ghostbusters, but I think it just left everyone trying too hard. The movie was so self-conscious about its femininity that it was embarrassing at times, at least to me. When she was younger, I would have hoped to take my daughter to this movie so she could seek strong women doing their thing.

She e-mailed me to ask me if I liked the movie – she lives in Brooklyn – and I told her it was boring, not funny and slavishly derivative. When I wrote that, I knew I ought to write about it.

Movies are subjective. This is just my opinion. It might be great, and you might love it, and that would be fine with me. I’m not writing this to discourage anyone from going or making up their own minds, I just wanted to share what I thought about it in case that is helpful to anyone.

One other thing:

To compensate for all the women, there was Kevin (played by Chris Hemsworth),  the incompetent secretary the drooling and google-eyed women hired at the outset.

Kevin is a very stupid gorgeous hunky boy – the very kind of mindless stereotype that was reserved for so many women – whose purpose seemed to be to walk around in tight jeans and a T-shirt and get oogled by Kristen Wiig. I’m not being politically correct, but this just wasn’t funny.

I can’t really recommend it.

Isn’t at least part of the point of having an all-female cast is to obviate the need for demeaning treatment like this of people, male or female?

We lost a bunny today, and saved a bunny today. I was out in the far pasture photographing Ted Emerson as he brush hogged the rear pasture. I looked down and saw the brush hog rolling over a rabbit’s nest near a tree I saw a baby rabbit run right under the tractor blade and die, he was crushed.

I ran ahead of Ted and got him to stop the tractor, and he turned sharply away from a second bunny, who just froze, trembling. He was saved. In a few minutes, he ran off into the brush, I saw his mother there waiting for him. He waited long enough for me to take a picture of  him.

Ted Emerson, the dean of local brush hoggers, came to the farm today with his tough blue tractor. Ted comes every year to brush hog the pastures  to knock down the weeds and brush and help the good grass breathe and grow. Every year I tell him to stay away from the marshy part of the pasture, and almost every year, he ignores me and gets stuck.

(He got stuck this afternoon, he’ll be here in the morning to pull his tractor out. I think it’s a point of pride with him. His son or a friend always comes to pull him out.)

Ted is one of those good people who never charge enough for what they do,  you have to pay him more than he asks, like a shearer. His tractor is as tough as he is, the giant rotary blades are dull and can handle low stumps and thick roots and twigs.

Photography can be casual, or it can be an art  with many challenges. One of the ideas I have is that a good photographer can take a good photo of anything if he or she thinks about it. I love to watch Ted brush hog and I always think many tractor photos on farms are cliches, so common as to be hardly noticeable.

Could I take a photo of Ted brush hogging today that was different, that might have some beauty to it? I looked up at the sky, it was a good sky for IR, and I know the camera sometimes picks up blue. The sun was in the right place, I knew the blue would come out dark, the pasture and woods light, even white.

So I think I caught the art of brush hogging a bit, a kind of ballet and art form all of its own. I’m learning when to use my IR camera and when not to use it. I took a step forward today

I sometimes think you never really know an animal species until you see the kind of mothers they are. I’ve seen the extraordinary power and dedication of animal mothers for years and always marveled at it. Timid and almost mindless sheep will turn into ferocious warriors for their lambs, the care animals give their newborns is powerful to see. Bears care for their cubs for years before sending them out into the dangerous human world. Barn swallows chase the barn cats and border collies (and me)  away from the barns of their are offspring around.

Phoebes are small and gracious and timid birds. This Phoebe is the mother of the three chicks in the next I’ve been photographing.

Whenever I go near the next, she perches on the fence, close enough to see me and keep an eye on her babies. She is always – always – there. She is a good mother, and I never stay long up near the nest. I hope she will get used to me, but she will never relax her guard or vigilance.

The sight of her touches my heart, and inspires me. She is a faithful and loving and dutiful creature.