Hacker Cinema
Ghostbusters
2016 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Paul Feig
Following a ghost invasion of Manhattan, paranormal enthusiasts Erin Gilbert and Abby Yates, nuclear engineer Jillian Holtzmann, and subway worker Patty Tolan band together to stop the otherworldly threat.
2 positive44 negative1 mixed19 neutralfrom 66 commenters
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72 comments on Hacker News
They certainly can do it. Hardcore fans understand what they're doing. Maybe some would hate it, but everyone knows that would be possible. It's sci-fi. Ghostbusters 2016 got decannonized.
For mainstream fans, the whole Star Wars franchise has been diluted with mediocre stories, I don't think they'd care. It's just another SW movie to watch.
That being said, this isn't the first time decannoizing the sequels has been brought up in a rumor. I wouldn't be surprised if this was just more wishful thinking.
I feel pretty confident that Captain Marvel, Emilia Perez, Spy Kids, Sausage Party, The Last Jedi, and Ghostbusters 2016 aren't at much risk of going over the heads of audiences, but you're entitled to your opinion if you think they count as avant garde cinema
Ive noticed that some of these types tend to be well meaning young people (often girls) who are super excited to have scored a job doing developer outreach for $BIGTECH.
It's a clever political tactic coz a 50 year old white male middle manager at Microsoft trying to become a board member on an open source foundation would face a lot more hostility than a 20-something girl who pushes all of the diversity buttons.
It mirrors the rather successful marketing strategies for a string of movies including Ghostbusters movie and Barbie, among others. i.e. "There's a certain kind of person who doesnt like our latest corporate offering...". Who wants to be that person?
Kilmer, Jarret, Meyrink, and Gries all rendered performances of scientists and engineers that are honestly more realistic and more human than anything I've seen since except possibly McKinnon's in the 2016 "Ghostbusters". Also Atherton's performance was top-notch as the villain.
This remains my favorite movie and the inspiration for me to go into STEM when I saw it as a 10-year-old.
Kilmer was a rare, if difficult, talent, and I'm so sorry we lost him so early.
> More recently, Sony was caught deleting negative criticisms of the females Ghostbusters movie, except the ones that were blatantly sexist
Do you have a source for this? Who caught them and how were they caught?
I did see this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWROBiX1eSc) which only made the claim that it was being "widely reported" and then briefly showed a screenshot of this "article" at manlymovie.net (https://manlymovie.net/2016/03/sony-rigging-ghostbusters-comments.html) which has a scandalous headline but doesn't even make a claim that Sony was selectively keeping sexist comments up while removing all other criticism. The entire meat of the article looks to be a post from some internet rando called "MilesBennetDieSon" who just said they were removing negative reviews and "botting the comments section and replacing negative comments with good ones"
I don't doubt that Sony pushed the sexism angle to drum up controversy but what do we really have to show they were leaving up sexist comments while suppressing legitimate criticisms. Looking at the comments from around the time of release today, there are accusations that sony was removing negative comments, but there also appears to be many which are negative and also not sexist in nature.
It's so common it's practically a meme by now. Hollywood loves saying its customers are toxic sexists and racists. Sometimes they even explicitly say that people have a moral obligation to watch their movies. This article has a bunch of examples.
https://www.outkick.com/hollywoods-war-on-toxic-fans-makes-no-sense/
The 2016 dud “Ghostbusters” may have unofficially been the first time a Hollywood product singled out “toxic” fans. The franchise reboot, which reportedly lost Sony $70 million, included a scene where the budding Ghostbusters attack their online trolls.
The director, Paul Feig, added the sequence to directly attack the film’s critics.
3D movies/TV are the perfect example: It's been PUSHED SUPER HARD for decades by execs who swear up and down the improvement in immersion will be life changing and utterly reinvent the entire industry but oh oh oh the tech just isn't here yet but you just wait it will totally take over everything.
In reality, 3D would not have made the new ghostbusters a better movie. Nobody watches a movie for "immersion", they watch it for a story.
Windows 11 is like Ghostbusters (2016 film). It wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be, not by a long shot, but that doesn't make it good or something I want to subject myself to again.
But my perspective is unusual. The friction increase for Windows 11 over its predecessor is, for me, slight; but I've used so many WMs and DEs that adjusting to a new one is hardly noticeable. To a normie, Windows 11's pebble-in-shoe UI changes -- the start menu location change, the right-click menu change, the emphasis on connecting you to Microsoft and third-party apps and services rather than getting things done -- would be sources of profound aggravation.
It would seem it's actively in their interests to have the most of their customers forget. First, these companies do serve very derivative content, that wouldn't be remotely interesting when compared to their inspirations. The comparison in many case is so unfair that it shed lights on the incompetence of the team. For some example, there was the 'definitive edition' of the PS2 era GTA games, if you go on Steam you can't find the originals. You can buy the definitive edition that stands at a mighty 0.6 user score on Metacritic though. For movies I'm not sure what would illustrate best but when the Ghostbusters reboot movie came out, it seems they made an effort not to acknowledge the originals. And when the big toys line-up came up after the reboot's disaster of a reception, they did as if it didn't exist and went all for the nostalgia.
Woke content is a lot like Christian rock.
The music is generally considered terrible because the quality of the music is not important, the point is to sing about religious themes. Every song is about Jesus, the lord’s love, etc etc. people listen to it because it adheres to their ideology. Not because it’s objectively high quality music.
Woke media is about checking off the diversity boxes, using minorities and very real social issues as a marketing campaign. These producers start with their ideology and work backwards. The writing is an afterthought because in their worldview, people will simply watch X because they look like X.
This is why you end up with extremely low tier writing with properties such as Ghostbusters 2016, Ocean’s 8, Men in Black 4, Terminator: Dark Fate, Charlie’s angels 2019, and the endless list of gender-swapped / race swapped reboots. They do poorly at the box office and among fanbases, but do great on Twitter among folks looking for ideology-driven content.
Woke content, like Christian rock, will always have an audience. But an audience driven purely by ideology and not by writing quality is unlikely to succeed. Especially as audiences and the actors have taken notice. For example, Folks like Emily blunt are avoiding films explicitly prioritizing gender-based marketing:
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/emily-blunt-rails-slams-strong-female-lead-label-worst-thing-ever-1235432354/
You may have mis-parsed what the poster was saying. Imagine going to review the Ghostbusters reboot, but even before stepping into the theater, you decide you are going to write a negative review. That doesn't require fabricating lies, but most would say its an unfair/dishonest way to do movie reviews.
The person you're responding to is probably referring to the plans to release direct sequels to Ghostbusters 2016, which were shelved after that film flopped.
Remember when the Angry Video Game Nerd said that he wasn't going to see Ghostbusters (2016) because it looked like a bad movie that didn't respect the fans, and he didn't want to subject himself to something that would make him angry and didn't respect him as a longtime fan?
And how they made him out to be a sexist piece of shit because of it?
You can't even say "I'm choosing not to participate because it's literally 'not for me.'"
If people did that, the thing might flop. They need your lack of critical thinking and compliance.
Oh comeon, Ghostbusters 2016 was genuinely bad. It had an incoherent plot that went nowhere. The first episode of ROP was OK, amazing production value, a laying out of foundation, some nice fight scene. Nothing especially bad nor especially good. The vitroil against this show is so obviously manufactured.
>”For example there was quite a vocal group when the first trailers came out and they found out that (shock) not everyone in the show is white.”
These people exist, but I am extremely skeptical that this is the primary motivator for the droves of negative reviews. What major media production isn’t diverse?
This reminds me of the controversy around Ghostbusters 2016 where people claimed review bombers hated the movie because of the female cast.
I would say it is much more likely that these well-loved properties had botched adaptations and that is why so many people are raking it over the coals.
>Most people don't give a shit about it.
Yes, but the parent's point might still hold.
You might not watch something because you hate the thing they put in (and that could be a minority), but you might not watch something also because "you don't give a shit" about the thing they put in - and want more of what you do like.
I think the Ghostbusters remake is an example where people not hating woke ideologically, still dislike the movie, because they don't give a shit about the things the writers found so important...
I have a morbid fear that studios want the “conflict” as it’s 1) news and any news is good news, 2) set up a right vs wrong narrative that puts their tv show on the right side against whatever jerks are being racist/sexist/whatever.
So it seems like a non-creative way to get free promotion, but I think it distracts from storytelling.
The example I remember is how bad the 2016 ghostbusters reboot was. And the studio had this whole narrative about how sexist trolls were maligning the movie and this got repeated with any criticism. It seemed like astroturf that highlighted a small amount of internet sexist complaining and used it to smear any criticism for any reason. That seems like something that would be attractive to a beancounter-type.
Eh, I'm gay and I still agree: those types of shows get a bit boring sometimes. I'm all for representation but it shouldn't be the only point of a show: it shouldn't be "here's Ghostbusters, the exact same film all over again, but with women!", or "here's Ocean's Eleven, the exa"- eh, you get the point.
I'm sure some people will hotly contest that these shows/movies are genuinely works of art, and representation just happens to be a bonus, but that's not how it feels when watching a load of this tedious paint-by-numbers pablum.
(This isn't to say that there are no instances where I feel the opposition to minority/female casting was driven more by bigotry than by people's finely-honed critical faculties. Of course there are. But I happen to think it cuts both ways in this case: many of those shows/movies are just godawful, and trade on the "you're a bigot if you don't like this!" card to drive sympathy/virtue demand, from people who want to feel like Rosa Parks for going to the cinema.)
>Do you mean female lead characters, or female leadership on the movie project itself?
Female leadership on movie projects isn't an issue. Female lead characters aren't an issue. I think girl-boss is a type of narrative in a film where they write unlikeable women that don't register as real people for the purpose of creating "powerful" female characters that aren't interesting or successful.
Examples - Rey/Admiral Holdo/ from Disney Star Wars, Wonder Woman 1984, Captain Marvel, the female terminator reboot, the female ghostbusters reboot, the ocean's 8 female reboot, etc etc etc
I fully expect the newest Thor movie with new female thor to be another girl-boss film, and from the trailer same thing with the upcoming Miss Marvel movie. The new Indiana Jones movie is at risk since it seems to be about Indy passing the torch to a young woman and Kathleen Kennedy is involved - we've seen her record on star wars. We'll see if any of that happens.
>Apart from that, I'm not sure Disney really cares about social policies themselves one way or another. I think it's much more mercenary than that
I disagree. The leadership and many of the creatives in Disney are the people who want to push particular political opinions on to other people.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1508912865293619202
>Unfortunately for Disney, a different part of their audience doesn't want to see them take a stand on issues. Or if they do, that it should be a different stand. Disney is finding out right now that it simply can't satisfy everybody.
Disney thought there was nothing anyone could do about it - since they're a private company and they can do what they want. They forgot the government they were picking a fight with also had the ability to take back privileges disney had that allowed them to be their own government in their district.
They don't need to satisfy everyone, but they want to be political activists with a direct line to your kids eyes and ears in your home. Disney is a platform for their politics.
> This leads us to today, where critic reviews are functionally useless for the broad audience
This is rather over the top, since the article clearly shows reviews and audience ratings does correlate, especially towards the top.
But it is always interesting with movies where the difference of opinion is starkest.
Note that the "audience ratings" does not always correlate with the average audience. Especially with divisive movies like TLJ or the Ghostbusters reboot, disgruntled fans run campaigns to get the score down. TLJ is still one of the highest grossing movies in history, so the audience rating putting it significantly lower than say John Carter or Snakes on a Plane is clearly not representative of the general movie going audience.
The problem is that people that end up being film critics, celebrities and journalists are not representative of the population at large and they're mostly (with plenty of exceptions) susceptible to the politicised division that curse our time (which is a result of the technology we have available nowadays).
The end result is that politics doesn't simply bleed into art (as it always been) but forces the people in art to create propaganda tools.
When you say that half of the population is batshit crazy and this message is propagated through popular media everywhere, you end up with a scism.
In the same way as people are growing disillusioned with celebrities and newspapers, they're also putting miles between themselves and film critics - and Hollywood for that matter.
I'm looking forward to The Daily Wire (an American conservative publication) building an Hollywood alternative and making movies without the wokeness. Their first movie, Run Hide Fight has critics at 43% vs the audience at 93%.
The data presented in the article is interesting but I feel it's lacking a dimension. It's not about quantity, it's about the extremes.
The feminist reboot of Ghostbusters has critics at 73% vs the audience at 49% which is telling me more about this issue than knowing that critics like documentaries more than the average person.
Not to mention a number of films who stopped the audience scores, decrying "review bombing". Some of these films were fine, while some were objectively bad (-cough- Ghostbusters reboot -cough-). I have a feeling (though it is unsubstantiated rumor) that there are payoffs in the critics circles for certain movies.
I'm sure there were some bad comments, but IMO this is a marketing ploy. Remember Ghostbusters 2016? The film-makers made a huge deal about the trailer being downvoted heavily, claiming it was all about sexism. When in reality the trailer and the movie were pretty mediocre. Seems like the same thing with Santa Inc. Have you watched the trailer? It looks terrible.
The first Ghostbusters is hilarious, and one of many exemplar 80s movies - back to the future (as mentioned), crocodile Dundee, short circuit, die hard, ferris bueller (just off the top of my head) that embodied that decade and often saw stodgy corporate types as the enemy of fun. I've never even thought about it as a libertarian parable, and I believe doing so is a revisionist strawman coming from opponents and reading too much into it coming from supporters. The movie was good clean fun of the kind that existed fleetingly around that time.
The remake was based on only one premise- it will be women instead. It wasn't funny and had none of the cultural centering (especially the whole vibe of 80s New York) that the original had. It was a shitty movie. So it failed.
There is not some broader political message. A good movie that hit the mark for its era was successful, a lazy remake was not
> Yet both Muslims and Christians are in the news a lot, and there's a lot of political discussion about them.
I'm not sure what your point is? That Muslims and Christians should be grateful that the news media talks about them a bit more than the entertainment media? To be clear, I'm not arguing that any particular group should have more representation; I'm criticizing the media for its increasingly propagandist angles.
> It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes, wouldn't you agree?
In general, yes, but that doesn't justify misleading or agenda-driven news media. And in any case, every time people try to "fix" the entertainment media, we end up with awful content (e.g., the GhostBusters reboot) and frankly I don't want to sacrifice that much quality for sake of representation. My wife and I were just talking about how many really good pre-2015 films wouldn't be made today because they don't thrust the characters' race, gender, etc into the foreground.
Rotten Tomatoes is already highly manipulated and editorialized. For example, the interpretation of whether a review was "fresh" or "rotten" is completely subjective and made by editors.
You can see the agenda pushing and manipulation on such films as Ghostbusters (2016).
It's because of Ghostbusters (2016). It just took this long for everyone else to catch up and realize that, "it can happen to you".
We were all supposed to love that movie because it has four women in it! Turns out a shit movie is a shit movie no matter how many SNL alums you throw at it.
Yeah. The difference between making a funny movie and just "being funny" is the difference between Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters (2016).
So, you don't watch shows where the woman is a hero, no matter what, simply because having a women as a hero indicates that the movie is full of uber-liberal political messages?
What are the uber-liberal political messages at every turn in Happy Death Day 2U? Or Men in Black: International?
Why not simply say that you don't watch films with uber-liberal political messages, no matter who the lead is?
> Anyone that had a negative opinion of it was banned from commenting on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
FWIW, a quick search of Twitter shows that isn't the case now.
I believe most of the complaints were about people panning the movie before it was even released. That is, opinions from people who assumed that simply because it was a re-make with women as the leads, it must be horrible.
Which is rather different than making an informed opinion.
Eg, think of the people who protested the Battlestar Galactic remake, including people who protested that Boomer had to be played by a man, not a woman. Many people changed their mind after the new BG came out, which shows the poor basis for the original opinion.
That the most recent Ghostbusters happens to be widely panned after due consideration doesn't make the original ungrounded opinions correct.
> The problem is that nobody wants equality..they want superiority.
I want equality.
> this seems like the 1950s all over again
What's the modern reversal for men on the streets pinching the butts of random women?
What's the modern reversal for the 1950s having the heads of nearly all of the Fortune 500, and nearly all members of Congress, and the President and nearly all of his Cabinet, and nearly all of the military leadership be men?
"Rosenberg shot down anyone who chose not to watch the show just because a woman was the hero: “That’s called misogyny, and I’m so damn tired of it."
I usually avoid shows where women are the heroes now because it can't just be a show where a woman is the hero. It has to include uber-liberal political messages shoe-horned into every turn and anyone that doesn't like the show is immediately considered a sexist.
The last Ghostbusters movie is a good example (although not a show, but the idea is the same). I really gave it a chance and it was a steaming pile of shit. One of the worst comedies I've seen in a long time. Anyone that had a negative opinion of it was banned from commenting on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
If you look at some of the comments women make against men on twitter, they are pretty horrific and almost never get removed. This is the double-standard that has become commonplace and really needs to change.
The problem is that nobody wants equality..they want superiority. They want to continue to have this special treatment on social media and everywhere else where they can do no wrong and anyone that has even a hint of a negative opinion about them are fired from their job and removed from society.
To me, this seems like the 1950s all over again..but the roles are reversed. As a white male, you really have to watch everything you do and say..even if it's well intentioned...because your words may be twisted into something racist or sexist and your livelihood destroyed.
> The fact that every single minority MUST be represented in every single movie—despite the fact that this makes the story less believable or even weaker is what's annoying. Not to mention changing established characters (like Ghostbusters, Terminator, Little Mermaid) to make them black women.
In what way is that particular story less believable because it shows minorities? Is it showing minorities in a context (geographical and time) where you have 100% information that it's very different from the reality of that context? Is this particular movie supposed to show a factually based representation of that context?
If an owner of some IP decides to change the racial, ethnic, etc profile of some character as they were represented previously in said franchise it doesn't take away from the franchise (imagine that they didn't release anything new), you can still watch the older movies that you enjoy. Similarly to how if a new video game is released in a series which is very different (or simply bad, quality wise) from the previous games in the series, it doesn't take away from you the previous titles, you can still enjoy the previous games all you want.
> Back when I grew up, we had Will Smith who was basically every kid's idiol in Europe, and he was black. We had Ripley from Alien who was a believable female role. We had Priscilla with trans protagonists. No one complained, all those characters worked. Now, every movie seems to be just an excuse to virtue signal. It's all politics. I want to watch a movie, not be indoctrinated by a corporation about whatever politics they're into.
I find that as a very naive and simplistic view of said movies. There was politics back then too in said movies, you just didn't notice it or cared about it, you took those things for granted. This is the essential problem with this type of complains, you assume that what was before/you grew up with was the "gold standard" and so making drastic changes to that is somehow bad (and I'm not talking just about minority representation in media, I see this in almost every context with people over a certain age). You should probably see how people complained the first time a black person was on TV, the complains are very similar.
I'm not saying that now there isn't a more active effort around introducing more minority representation into media, it obviously is so, I'm only arguing against that being a bad thing on its own and/or saying that didn't happen before. If this is more important to the studios than making good quality movies then obviously the quality will suffer, but that's not special in any way to the minority representation push.
> You're saying it's annoying to see that when you want to relax and watch a movie. You cannot relax watching a movie where there's a mixed-race gay couple? Why?
Looks like you're the one saying that, uh?
Look.
In the movie I mentioned, there are a handful of people that find themselves in the house.
- single mother who drinks while pregnant - gay, mixed-race couple #1 - black guy who ends up with single mother (mixed-race couple #2) - evil Trump supporter - bunch of bad white guys #1 (those two that make a mess) - bunch of bad white guys #2 (everyone else who tries to kill everyone)
The fact that every single minority MUST be represented in every single movie—despite the fact that this makes the story less believable or even weaker is what's annoying. Not to mention changing established characters (like Ghostbusters, Terminator, Little Mermaid) to make them black women.
Back when I grew up, we had Will Smith who was basically every kid's idiol in Europe, and he was black. We had Ripley from Alien who was a believable female role. We had Priscilla with trans protagonists. No one complained, all those characters worked. Now, every movie seems to be just an excuse to virtue signal. It's all politics. I want to watch a movie, not be indoctrinated by a corporation about whatever politics they're into.
It is partly due to new media however lets consider some other things which are really important.
1) The problem is that a lot of the remakes/sequels and reboots are quite frankly crap. I don't care too much about Disney. But other remakes and sequels are generally awful.
So lets take some case studies:
* Robocop (2013). The movie except for on 2 minute scene was dire. It was a PG-13 remake of what was at the time a shockingly violent film (the effects look awful now, but they were quite convincing back in the mid-90s still) that completely missed the point of the original movie.
* Ghostbusters (2016) was another movie that not only looked completely awful in the trailer, it completely again misunderstood the original movie, added nothing much new and they outright attacked the fandom after they said to the studio "What the hell are you doing". The original Ghostbusters movie wasn't really a comedy movie, it was a Action Horror with some Jokes. The new movie was just a comedy movie, which looked like a Spoof along the lines of "Scary Movie". I have no idea who they were marketing it towards.
Lets take sequels:
* They have also totally squandered two solid Sci-fi Action Movie franchises (Alien and Predator) to the point where the previous low points of the franchises look good (Alien vs Predator and Alien 3 & Alien 4: Resurrection).
* Star Wars has been completely ruined from a fan's perspective. The prequels (in the 2000s) has some terrible acting, iffy CGI now but I can at least appreciate what they were attempting to do and it was an honest attempt by Lucas to flesh out Star Wars universe. However the new Sequels go from "This is Okay, but it is the 1977 movie retold essentially" to terrible (The Last Jedi).
The Last Jedi doesn't make any sense on quite a number of levels. It also ruins one of beloved characters on screen and it was probably intentionally written to not only upset the fans but also kill the franchise i.e. there is at least one scene where Kylo Ren says to audience pretty much "Let the past die, kill if you have to", which is the director pretty much sticking his middle finger up to the fans. Yes in the scene he was speaking to whoever the main character is that doesn't seem to have a personality, but it was really a message from the director to the fans.
They also attacked the fan base (not a good move) because they didn't like a terrible movie. While the movies made money, they have tarnished the brand in the long term.
Disney bought Lucas Film because of Star Wars and monetising the fan base. Lucas Film under Kathleen Kennedy have tried driving away their a dedicated fan base. This strategy is madness.
2) The Hollywood Elite (and they are Elite) have forgotten they are actors and actively show distain for the audience. I don't really want to get into a political commentary, but they literally had The Avengers do an online piece of activism where they told the Electoral college to defy the 2016 Presidential Election result. This doesn't go unnoticed by the average movie goer. Just under half of the Country voted for the current president and then they do an advert where they are pretty much putting a middle finger up at the people who voted for Trump. A lot of those people took their kids to see those movies or saw went to see them themselves.
Audiences will forgive actors for quite a lot of things, but if they continually keep on pushing this audiences will associate them with their politics and not what roles they played.
They are actors. I want them to pretend to be Black Widow, not lecture me about Politics. I will go and listen to a political commentator if I wanted that.
3) Bollywood and the rest of Asia are making their own movies which kick ass. Take "The Raid 2". It has plenty of brutal fight scenes, but it also has a top quality plot about gangs, undercover cops etc. It is amazing to watch. A lot of guys are looking at overseas cinema because Hollywood isn't catering to them.
4) User generated content. I think the only movie I've watched recently was John Wick 1, 2 and 3. I recently listened to a recorded lecture series of the History of Islam on Youtube made by some guy who lives in Azerbaijan. I can listen for effectively nothing 1000s of hours of interviews of Joe Rogan and a Guest just talking for 3 hours about sometimes absolute nonsense or talking about say Leaving a Cult (Megan Phelps interview). I recently watched a series of lectures about the database as a filesystem from some Linux conference. There is a guy who made loads of mini-documentaries about old defunct computers systems and the quality now is on par with the Discovery Channel shows of the late 1990s.
5) Longer stories. Game of Thrones, The Wire and other shows that have very long running stories, lots of characters and complicated plots with lots of Lore have proven that audiences want more complicated stories. There is a guy called Alt-Shift-X on Youtube and he has huge number of people watching him and he just explains the Game of Thrones Lore of the Book vs the TV-series. Most Hollywood movies are pretty simple affairs in comparison.
It's like saying
> When you have a movie that’s as entertaining, well-made, and well-received as “Ghostbusters (2016)” not doing the business it should have [the teen comedy underperformed at the box office despite critics’ raves],
How could they fail to realize that a measure of whether people wanted to see a movie would not be reviews of the movie? I think the possibility they failed to consider is they might find themselves in a political disagreement with the users of their site. Still, it's a wonder how they could have failed to anticipate that after the debacle surrounding the recent Ghostbusters movie.
Yes: http://www.hedgology.com/how-the-ghostbusters-film-is-marketing-misogyny/
The Joss Whedon inspired comedy is great for many of us. I loved Taika Waititi's take on Thor, especially compared to the first one, as did most other people. And it's sitting on 7.9 on IMDB, which is pretty much a resounding "Wow". If you loved Thor Ragnarok, watch Hunt for the Wilderpeople, it's a real indie gem and you can play spot the Ragnarok actors.
Also Chris Hemsworth's comic timing is great, he was a real highlight in Ghostbusters too. It reminds me of Ryan Gosling in the Nice Guys, a rare surprise that an actor can do comedy too that you weren't expecting.
As for Marvel baddies, yes, I generally agree with you. Their best baddies have been in the TV shows, namely Wilson Fisk's Kingpin and David Tennant's Kilgrave.
I was watching his feed in real time the night he was banned. He wasn't directing people to do anything. He was trashing the Ghostbusters movie and called one of the female actresses a "black dude". It may have been tasteless but it wasn't brigading.
This is the problem that so many people miss when they extol the virtues of a customized Reddit. If you make a site that is attractive to racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes, those people are going to be using the whole site and not just their tiny vile corners.
This phenomenon might be easier to understand with a specific example like the recent Ghostbusters remake. It was by most accounts a bad movie. If you browse any movie related subreddit you will see plenty of valid criticism of that movie. Mixed in with that are comments about how that movie never should have been made with an all female cast and that is what caused the movie to be unsuccessful because women aren't funny. It is easy for some naive kid to see that and think "yeah, I saw that movie and it wasn't funny, maybe that comment has a point". Meanwhile it might never occur to them the user who originally left that comment came to Reddit to be a member of an incel community that is notoriously sexist and anti-women. This allows these communities to grow their size by spreading hate and feeding off the rest of the site.
> Because it's unthinkable that movies with male main characters could actually just be better than movies with female main characters
Or, more realistically, it's not unthinkable that movies with a male lead could be better reviewed than movies with female main characters, especially when you open the field up to non-professional reviewers. We've see how ape-shit people went at movies like the recent Ghostbusters remake or even the new Star Wars series just because they put women in the kinds of roles that had traditionally been played by men.
It's an interesting question of when machine learning models that reflect actual human biases are correct and when we should try to adjust them for that human bias. In the case of movie reviews, you could make the case that you'd want the models to reflect the biases of the reviewers. Just because a reviewer is being sexist doesn't mean it's wrong for the machine learning model to correctly classify the reviewer's sentiments.
Black Panther earned its success, as did Wonder Woman. Alt-righters who complain about them are truly lone voices. But there were two major movies in recent memory -- Ghostbusters (2016) and Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi -- that had unusually high RT scores that they may not have gotten if they hadn't been so on message. Doubtless the critics involved were trying to reassure everyone that they weren't one of those people. Had they spoken the truth and said, for example, that Ghostbusters (2016) was ill-paced, obnoxious, and mostly unfunny, the likes of Jezebel would have raked them over the coals and you know it. That's what they did to James Rolfe, for simply saying he would not see the movie.
Modern color treatment in film totally drives me crazy, independent of what it does to CGI.
It seems like every film coming out of Hollywood these days is processed exactly the same way:
* Crank down the low end so half the frame is solid inky black.
* Pick one or two key colors, and jack up their saturation.
* Desaturate everything else.
In other words, make the entire movie look like an over-dramatic poster for it. Throw any sense of naturalism or unique look out the door. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Here's the top live action movies of 2016:
Rogue One
Cyan and olive: http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rogue-One-A-Star-Wars-Story15.jpg
Captain America: Civil War
Yellow and red: http://cdn3-www.superherohype.com/assets/uploads/gallery/civil-war-trailer-2-screenshots/cwttss03.jpg
Why they felt the need to make Cap's lip rosy red is beyond me. Even better is this shot:
http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Captain-America-Civil-War-cast-photo-Renner-Johansson-Evans-Sebastian-Stan.jpg
This is a daylight shot. Look at how the characters are all squinting. Look at the big white fluffly clouds that should be diffusing the light and softening shadows. And yet, magically, all of the shadows are jet black and almost all of the color is gone.
The Jungle Book
Green and red (to draw attention to Mowgli):
https://www.moviedeskback.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The_Jungle_Book_HD_Screencaps-23.png
Deadpool
Another daylight shot with nonsensical shading:
http://turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Deadpool-Movie-Screenshot-Brianna-Hildebrand-Negasonic-Teenage-Warhead-Texting.jpg
The light is clearly diffuse, if you look at the shadows on the ground, and yet there is this deep black everywhere. Deadpool took the look further by only picking one color (red, Deadpool's outfit color) for the entire film.
Lest you think this is just an issue with superhero movies, let's ignore those and look at the other top non-superhero movies of 2016:
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
More of the same:
http://harrypotterfanzone.com/wp-content/2016/09/fantastic-beasts-trailer-screenshot75.png
It also suffers strongly from the "It's a period movie so we're going to sepia tone everything so hard it looks like you're watching the movie through an aquarium full of pee" effect.
Hidden Figures
https://www.themarysue.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/hiddenfigures.jpg
More of the period movie sepia along with an improbably jacked up complementary cyan.
Star Trek Beyond
If the past is warm, the future must be cool:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Star-Trek-Beyond2.jpg
Blacks, grays and neon cyan, just like Rogue One. Look how unnatural his skin tone is! They wanted to jack up yellow to complement their primary blue so much that the poor dude has jaundice:
http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/star-trek-beyond-trailer-cover.jpg
La La Land
I'll give this one some credit for varying it up a bit. Also, dramatic spotlit stage lighting is a logical part of the movie's look. But it's still prey to the same cliched look in places:
http://henrymollman.com/content/images/2017/01/Screenshot-from-2017-01-18-22-36-49-1.png
Ghostbusters
Ectoplasm green and spooky violet were the key colors for the whole film. Secondary colors tend to come across as magical or eerie to viewers since they're different from the safe and familiary primary colors. Of course, jacking up magenta doesn't do flattering things to skin:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ghostbusters2.jpg
Also, what color is Melissa McCarthy's coat? Is it actually black? Who fucking knows.
Central Intelligence
The traditional comedy look is brightly-lit and saturated, so Central Intelligence didn't fare quite as poorly as the above. Whenever they had a chance to dim the lights, though, they revert to the same cliched look as well:
https://i2.wp.com/doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/centralintelligence2944.jpg
The Legend of Tarzan
http://images3.static-bluray.com/reviews/14209_5.jpg
Jesus, we get it, colorist. They're in the wet jungle. We don't need to be physically assaulted with the colors blue and green to figure that out.
...You get the idea.
Go back and watch a movie from before 2000 and you'll quickly realize how much more pleasant to look at most of them where, and how much more variety there was in look. Compare Alien to The Graduate. But it seems like ever since the rise of digital coloring and superhero movies, Hollywood has decided every single fucking movie needs to look like a comic book page, whether it needs it or not.
One recent movie I really liked that bucked this trend was Her. It was heavily colorized, but in a way that stood out. In shots like these, even though there's a strong color cast and a lot of dark, there's still always some color and detail in the shadows:
https://i1.wp.com/turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Her-Movie-2013-Screenshot-Theodore-Apartment.jpg
https://3kpnuxym9k04c8ilz2quku1czd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/her-screenshot-14.jpg
One of the many problems is Hollywood trying to target Millenials who only watch YouTube instead of watch movies or TV shows. Then the movies and tv shows flop and they can't understand why.
Ghostbusters reboot failed because they tried to target social justice warriors and feminists who don't watch sci-fi or horror movies. Trying to make Ghostbusters 3 was really hard and got delayed as they could not get the formula correct in the first two movies. Now Star Wars and Star Trek are suffering.
Just know your target market and cater to them.
My mother watches old movies on Hallmark and TCM etc. She does not like Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Star Trek anyway. She likes mysteries, drama, soap operas etc.
Yeah Amazon and Netflix are making their own movies for a good reason as Disney buys out Fox and will pull all of their IP from other sources to put them on Hulu it owns 60% of now or make their own movie streaming platform.
> Two glaring examples of "certified fresh" films loathed by audiences and top critics are Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls and the new Ghostbusters. Both have Audience scores in the low 50s and top critics scores in the low 60s, but "All Critics" scores are overwhelmingly positive enough to boost the score to just over 75% making them "Certified Fresh".
Then what makes you think they cherry-picked their reviews? The Indiana Jones film has 260 reviews, and Ghostbusters has 325, both of which seem to be in the normal ballpark for huge wide releases. Indiana Jones is still at 77%, so it would still qualify as Certified Fresh today, while Ghostbusters is at 73%, just barely below the threshold.
I'm not seeing any reason to suspect foul play, and I don't understand why you would be upset. Audience scores and Top Critics are great pieces of information, but they're not how the Tomatometer or the Certified Fresh label work.
They can claim to use that algorithm, however in practice as of the last few years, that claim is extremely suspect as we have no way to determine whether or not RottenTomatoes cherry picked its reviews for the films.
Two glaring examples of "certified fresh" films loathed by audiences and top critics are Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls and the new Ghostbusters. Both have Audience scores in the low 50s and top critics scores in the low 60s, but "All Critics" scores are overwhelmingly positive enough to boost the score to just over 75% making them "Certified Fresh".
As far as "pre-certified" fresh, Rotten Tomatoes has taken upon themselves to sell Sponsored content and of those I've seen, Step and The Tick, as of right now, when the subject becomes Sponsored a wave of positive reviews is sure to follow.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/upcoming?minTomato=0&maxTomato=100&genres=1;2;4;5;6;8;9;10;11;13;18;14&sortBy=release
As far as I can tell, none of the ape comments were made by Milo? Which specific comment of his did he do so, or incite harassment?
I researched Milo for a while, after seeing his initial interview with David Rubin, where he explained some of the politics behind Gamergate. Although his own politics is quite contrary to mine, I agree with him that there is a regressive left that would rather shutdown conversations than debate. They have a blatant disregard of facts and data, exactly what they accuse conservatives of doing, but they feel they are uniquely justified by noble motives which is misguided at best. I would agree with Milo on that being a nonsensical approach, and should be admonished by any true liberal who supports free speech and the exchange of ideas. Twitter effectively held Milo accountable for the actions of other people who were simply on the same side of the argument, that being that the new Ghostbusters was a terrible movie, on a pretty weak premise of his inciting harassment, but as far as I can tell from his quotes, all he was guilty of in that context was being downright nasty in his criticism of Leslie Jones' appearance and her illiteracy (as her spelling and grammar is atrocious), at the same time as stating his sexual proclivity towards African American men. But perhaps I missed some of his quotes, as I didn't follow the original conversation and have only found quotes of him in various articles, so please enlighten me with specific quotes if I'm mistaken.
> We're talking about the same Twitter that shut down Milo Yiannopolis' account because Twitter didn't like what he was saying?
Nope! We're talking about the same Twitter that shut down Milo Yiannopolis' account because he openly encouraged people to harass an actress (Leslie Jones), including sharing fake screenshots making it look like she tweeted a bunch of offensive stuff, because she was in a movie he didn't like (Ghostbusters).
Yes, milo yiannopoulos'a criticism of the ghostbusters movie. Show me the actual "hate speech". It's become common for any criticism of liberals to be framed as hate speech.
1. There was ten times as much carrying on about Ghostbusters than Doctor Strange.
2. Doctor Strange took an actual Asian character and cast it with a non-Asian. Ghostbusters didn't recast male characters as women, it just decided that after two movies with male ghostbusters there would be a movie with female ghostbusters.
Not that I think scrutinizing these things is of any importance or that exposing this flaw means anything in the face of the white & male supremacy mindset that causes someone to be defensive about seeing criticism of a white casting or the existence of a female casting.
Okay, this is why people don't want to listen and debate you: you're living in a weird cartoon universe where "President Trump" isn't a sick joke.
Just to take one minor example: Milo Yiannopolous is a racist bully. That's literally the only thing most people who have heard about him know about him. "Milo Yiannopolous? Isn't he that racist bully who picked on the actress from the 'Ghostbusters' movie?"
You calling that "bro" a hero is a racist thing to do: congratulations you're being racist on the Internet.
PLONK
I appreciate the apparent social value of remaking Ghostbusters using an all woman cast. The only problem that I have is that - the movie is crap. Sorry but I'm not going to go see a movie to make a social point.
orchestrating a long campaign of harassment
It's actually possible for independent people to all hate the new Ghostbusters film. It doesn't require orchestration to have taste.
Twitter has a much bigger problem with bullying and harassment right now than anything political at the moment. Bullying is frequently cited as a hamper on their growth prospects. That makes sense. Most people, naturally, don't like being on toxic environments where harassment / bullying are considered par for the course. Twitter has that reputation at the moment, quite deservedly in my opinion.
As I understand it, Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned for encouraging his supporters to troll / harass stars of the new Ghostbusters movie (being the final straw of many previous warnings). No surprise there then, right? There certainly have been people permanently banned that are not right wing (Azealia Banks is probably the most famous example), so at the present, I'm skeptical that political orientation has much to do with it.
Here is a link discussing this issue. http://variety.com/2016/film/news/ghostbusters-loss-sony-50-million-1201834911/
The debate that's been unfolding for a couple months about the Ghostbusters movie as leftist propaganda.
>It's pretty obvious sexism, and the same people who would pan this type of sexism with reversed roles are in favor of it here. It's hypocritical.
While I understand the criticism that his character's role doesn't map to the original character's role... is it possible that this is an example of what it means to "punch up"? What does it mean that there is so much hand-wringing about Chris's character and yet when a female plays that role in basically every other movie that comes out... much less is vocalized by the folks upset at Ghostbusters?
I dunno, it still seems like a weird thing to spend this much time trying to form a strong opinion on (I say ironically as I keep thinking about it). I wish studios would leave classics alone but that ship has long since sailed. If they had to reboot it, I think the gender reversal is kind of novel.
The portion I found most interesting, and best illustrates their point:
"Here are a few stats I collected early Thursday for the new “Ghostbusters” movie: IMDb average user rating: 4.1 out of 10, of 12,921 reviewers IMDb average user rating among men: 3.6 out of 10, of 7,547 reviewers IMDb average user rating among women: 7.7 out of 10, of 1,564 reviewers The movie isn’t even out in theaters as I’m writing this, but over 12,000 people have made their judgment. Male reviewers outnumber female reviewers nearly 5 to 1 and rate “Ghostbusters” 4 points lower, on average."
And from its related article:
"“Sex and the City” has seven Emmys and a suite of Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards... Any reasonable person should concede that “Sex and the City” was an above-average television program ... “Sex and the City” has an overall rating of 7.0 ... the average score ... is 7.3. So why did a show roundly considered seminal in the now ubiquitous genre of driven-New York-women-make-a-go-of-it programming score so low? Yeah, it’s men. Nearly 60 percent of the people who rated “Sex and the City” ... are women, and looking only at those scores, the show has an 8.1 ... Male users, though, who made up just over 40 percent of “Sex and the City” raters, assigned it, on average, a 5.8 rating."
We like to think of these aggregated ratings, as some objective measure of crowd-sourced wisdom. But in reality, it's just an aggregation of thousands of people's personal preferences and biases.
If you're someone whose tastes line up with the average critic/online-commenter, the aggregated ratings will sound pretty accurate to you. If you're someone who differs from the average critic/online-commenter, you'll be left wondering why all your favorite shows are rated so poorly.
There's probably a moral in here somewhere regarding top-rated posts/comments on HN.
It is impossible to separate out however, how the movie was marketed and how people that rely on controversy for attention have fueled this fire. For instance, a reasonable human being would agree that you might just not like the new Ghostbusters. I saw a Twitter exchange with Devin Faraci saying, no, in fact if you don't like it you hate women. Full stop. When asked why that would be so, he replied "I don't know why you're a misogynist, probably because girls don't like you."
Even he doesn't really believe that. But he makes his money by stirring shit and getting attention for himself. This is the classic definition of "Internet Troll." It feeds right in to the other side wanting to believe that, basically, exactly what he said. This movie is in part so incredibly polarizing because a bunch of bottom feeders benefit from making it as polarizing as possible (this includes at least some of the people doing marketing for the film itself.) It is horrifying to think that advertising of the future is going to be based around sowing social dissolution in such an obvious way.
> The thing is that we have been in the work of parody for so long time that we don't ever know were it started. Get the Rocky series blockbuster, for example. We had a much better history, with a black man and boxe. But then someone stole the idea and put a white man against his worst enemy: another white man with diferent world view (Russians).
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "someone stole" the idea of Rocky for Rocky IV. Sly both wrote and directed that. It's as regular a sequel as anything.
> I find it funny how most of people that discredit the OP conclusion also thinks they are right when they are in the opposite situation. I don't see you Bros complaining when Hollywood whitewash history.
I explicitly said that I'm not discrediting OPs conclusion, I however did not agree with how they arrived there.
The collective "Bro"-thing I don't feel worthy of responding to.
> And last, when did you guys started to think that the "old" stuff is yours? They have legally owners, and they can change to fit or create a better history/world (and some guys like you keep thinking in ways to put it worse), like star wars and the woman and black as main characters.
I can't answer for "us guys", only for me, but I have no problem with them doing whatever they want with Ghostbusters. All I am saying is that the reviews in this specific case isn't about sexism, but the movie not being at all relatable to the original one(s) in tone. Nothing to do with gender. As much right as they have to make the movie, the fans of the original have a right to opinions on it, without it being sexism, simply because the new characters happen to be women.
Personally I liked the new Star Wars, but it's entirely beside the point, but since you brought it up: SW:TFA was so true to SW:ANH that I'm inclined to call it a true remake, much in how Interstellar worked as an homage/rehash of 2001 with slight twists. I happened to like that one too.
> So, do you have a preconceived notion of how good or bad the “Ghostbusters” movie is going to be? Of course you do, you clicked on an article with “Ghostbusters” in the title.
I blindly clicked because of fivethirtyeight in the url.
I actually agree with much of the articles reasoning, other than the title, and everything about Ghostbusters:
> More specifically, a vocal portion of men on the internet — shall we say — go out of their way to make their voices heard when it comes to judging entertainment aimed at women, and that appears to be happening with the new “Ghostbusters.”
The thing with the new Ghostbusters has nothing to do with them being women. I'd see Bridesmaids 2 or any other comedy with Kristen Wiig (probably have), and I like Paul Feig fine.
The problem with the new Ghostbusters is that it's not Ghostbusters, not that it's necessarily a bad comedy.
The old Ghostbusters is shot and built up as a dark disaster movie, that just happens to be really funny. The new one is a Paul Feig movie (again, not knocking). It doesn't fit.
I noticed the same thing in the last season of Veep when Ianucci left. Instead of it shot more like an Office-type documentary (without the interviews, like its predecessor The Thick of It), if you look at the Christmas episode (of Veep) as the clearest example, it's shot like any other honestly mediocre sitcom, with saturated colors and honestly phoned in jokes.
Sorry about the tirade, but as a guy who does like good female media (Broad City and Lady Dynamite are my latest favorites), seeing this argument be made with terrible examples is unfortunate.
This is mostly covered in the article, but anyway:
I see a few overlapping effects here:
1) Aggregators like Tomatometer rank based on broad appeal. That's why Toy Story is one of the highest scored of all time (if you don't like Toy Story, you're dead inside), and Fight Club can be beloved to many but still not A grade.
2) Audiences are slowly getting tired of cynical reboots. Sure, I understand the harsh reality that means Hollywood has to play as risk averse as possible, and that recycling beloved IP has slightly-better-than break even results on average, but you can't expect movie watchers to gush over story retreads.
3) Yes, the loudest and most obnoxious voices on the internet are also the ones who will go to the most trouble to tank your reviews. This is not specific to movies. The fact that men are doing this for Ghostbusters does not reveal an inherent misogyny overall, just that said mysoginistic neckbeards are more likely to invest their time in trolling the internet (the 4chan effect).
I have no trouble with an all female lead cast. I just wish they didn't waste all that potential on such a crappy regurgitation.
I don't buy that Ghostbusters success will hinge on the gender of the lead actors - the leads in the new film have a lot to live up to in Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray.
I won't argue that an average score on its own doesn't provide you with information about the diversity of opinion that led to that average, I'm sure we could do better in this regard. Perhaps something like Amazon does with the graphical representation showing how many people gave each star rating on a product review.
What I do have two problems with is the framing of this article when it comes to the new Ghostbusters film. This quote is a useful starting point for looking at those problems:
"More specifically, a vocal portion of men on the internet — shall we say — go out of their way to make their voices heard when it comes to judging entertainment aimed at women"
First of all, is the new Ghostbusters film meant to be aimed at women? If you look at it at a superficial level perhaps. To me, when you take on a beloved film franchise, you should make something that stays true to the spirit of the earlier films. The earlier Ghostbusters films have appeal across the board, why can't the new film have the same?
Secondly, the issue people are having with the Ghostbusters reboot is not really because all the new Ghostbusters are female. I, for one, think it was a good idea to do so, as it provided something new, and could have helped it to break from conventions whilst still providing something recognisable as a Ghostbusters film. The main problem people have with the film (and yes, they are just basing it on trailers at this point), is that it appears to be a generic, formulaic comedy with Ghostbusters dressing. For example, with the 'sassy black lady' Ghostbuster, the vast majority of the backlash isn't because she's a woman, the majority of the backlash is because she's playing a hackneyed stereotype. There were other parts of the trailers that were similarly paint-by-numbers Hollywood comedy.
Perhaps the trailers did the film a great disservice and there are better moments to be found in the film itself, but early impressions are not too great IMO.
When I saw the new Ghostbusters trailer in the cinema (yes, I still go there), I thought it was a parody film. I'm not kidding.
Nowadays, people always try to find ways to be offended. A women-led movie got bad ratings? It must be the patriarchy! Nobody wonders if it might have been just a bad movie, as I, as a man, also enjoy women-led movies (I mean movies in the cinemas, not what you think :P). Hoewever, the new Ghostbusters just looks like a big horrible painful joke, and that's why the ratings tanked.
Given it's so hard to even assess statistically, how many men are among movie raters, this entire article stands on weak feet.
The new ghostbusters movie looks awful - it's not a thing about women leads, it's that it looks really bad in a way the original isn't. I know that's subjective, but watch the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw
Just bad.
There are a lot of bad movies, but this one walks around in the corpse of a much loved and nostalgic intellectual property that a bunch of people wanted. They got that.
Is this really about sexism?
This pattern has shown up a lot recently when an intellectual property is used by something that the original audience doesn't fit into (e.g. the last fable game that got canceled). It's a pretty silly use of an IP - the original audience is where the value comes from.
> See also people getting angry about female Ghostbusters
Oh come on. From the reviews leaking out it sounds like Ghostbusters is a legit shitty movie. A spoiler for the ending is out there; go read it and tell me this isn't something a 5th grader would write. No, I haven't seen it, and I probably won't, and it has nothing to do with the fact that it is a female cast, but because it doesn't sound like something, based on the trailers and previews, that I would willingly spend money on.
No one complained when the main protagonists of Star Wars VII were a woman and a black man. (Or did they? I don't know, I certainly don't remember hearing it if they did.)
Queasy nerds make SJWs uncomfortable because they are perceived as much more likely to display shockingly inappropriate sexual behavior. Since women have the right not to fear for their lives or chastity, the reasoning goes, they have the right not to have any contact with queasy nerds, and so they must be expunged from the places in society where they nest (computing, gaming) in order to create "safe spaces" for women.
This is also a subtext in the upcoming 2016 Ghostbusters film: the villain is a queasy nerd who summons ghosts to Manhattan as revenge for getting the mockery and rejection he deserved; so it is up to the Empowered Womyn Ghostbusters to exorcise him so NYC can become a safe space again.
Money. Hollywood is running out of ideas and they've rebooted/re-imagined/re-released/sequelized/etc everything.
So while we are debating whether to watch ghostbusters or independence day ( and whether our choices make us sexist or not), they'll be busy with this silly movie/non-story.
It's amazing how the media took a non-story and made it into a story and now they are going to make a movie out of a non-story they turned into a story.
This is akin to a firefighter arsonist setting fires all over town so that he can have more work or a greedy doctor intentionally giving his patients poison so that he'll be able to drum up more business.
It's circular and incestuous and wrong on so many levels. Like a snake swallowing its own tail.
Saying you don't like a movie isn't hate speech.
The first trailer was terrible. I think almost objectively terrible. It's clearly a ghostbusters movie, but it didn't seem to give me any reason to want to see the movie. It made it look like a cash-in-remake.
The later trailers have looked much better and give me some hope. We'll see what reviews say.
The original movie is a pretty great film, and I enjoyed it. I loved the cartoon as a kid, so I'm interested in seeing what happens with the franchise.
If you're not interested in the movie because you don't want a remake, or you thought the trailer didn't look good, that' fine.
If you're expressing that you hate the movie only because they changed the cast for this iteration... then you start to fit into the 'angry-man-boy' category. Same if you fit in the previous category but use lots of sexist terms and slurs to describe the new movie.
And then there is group three, the worst of the groups. These are the people sending hate messages, death threats, rape threats, etc. You can call for a boycott for whatever reason you want, people will probably think you're childish. But if you're sending death threats because someone changed a fictional character in a movie you haven't even seen yet? Yeah, you've earned that label.
As for AVGN, I haven't watched the video. Given everything that's happend around the movie it certainly immediately raises my "angry-man-boy" suspicions, but again I haven't watched it. At this point the nutcases are getting so loud over this (and every other topic) that it gets really easy for people with more reasonable viewpoints (especially if not presented well) to end up lumped in.
Solution? Ban the nutcases. No one needs to be able to send death threats via Twitter. No one needs to be able to receive them. Death threats aren't free speech, they're already exempted (assuming they are in any way reasonable).
There is plenty of room for subtlety in discussions of this kind of stuff. Can white people use the n-word? What if group X suddenly decides that phrase Y is evil?
I don't care. We can decide that later. For now, let's just ban the death threats, physical abuse threats, etc. and see where that gets us. I bet it improves things a ton.
I'd say I want to see someone make a good case for allowing death threats but this is the internet and I really don't, because someone will try and I'll think that much less of humanity.
Having watched both of the available trailers for the new Ghostbusters movie, I think I will very much dislike it and have no intentions of watching it. By the measure of many prominent online media publications and verified Twitter users, this alone makes me a misogynist, hate mongering, intolerant man-child [1].
https://heatst.com/entertainment/angry-video-game-nerd-james-rolfe-will-be-right-about-ghostbusters-being-terrible/
But Twitter et al. support that sort of hate speech, while my opinion would be happily suppressed because of all of the hate people would stamp onto it.
As Men in Black 3 wasn't that great and Star Wars: Episode 3 also had its lengths (don't get me started about Lethal Weapon 3!), we tried to avoid that. Let's see how Ghostbusters 3 will work out and maybe (but just maybe) we'll think about releasing Graylog3. ;-)