The Other McCain

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Will the New SJW ‘Ghostbusters’ Be a ‘Disaster of Biblical Proportions’?

Posted on | July 10, 2016 | 64 Comments

“While the new ‘Ghostbusters’ successfully empowers female movie stars, that’s not the movie’s selling point. However, it’s the only justification for its existence. . . .
“At the end of the day, no amount of culturally enlightened intentions can rescue another undercooked studio product.”
— Eric Kohn, IndieWire

The early reviews of the new SJW feminist Ghostbusters remake are trying to say as politely as possible that this movie sucks. Because the producers have spent a lot of money hyping this turkey, and because everyone in the liberal media wants to believe that a comedy can pass the “Bechdel Test” and be a commercial success, it is too early to say that this wretched piece of feminist propaganda will be a box-office flop. Like all movie remakes based on decades-old franchises — The Flintstones (1994), Scooby Doo (2002), etc. — the idea is that parents will pay money for their kids to see something that the parents enjoyed 30 years ago.

Every such movie ever made has sucked, so far as I know. And let me confess a prejudice: I never much liked the original Ghostbusters, either.

Like so many other movies spawned from Saturday Night Live‘s original cast, the 1984 Ghostbusters was just about cashing in on the popularity of a TV comedy phenomenon. Nobody under age 50 today remembers the movies Chevy Chase made with Goldie Hawn (Foul Play in 1978 and Seems Like Old Times in 1980), but instead remember Chase for the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise that began in 1983, and also for Caddyshack (1980) in which Chase was upstaged by Rodney Dangerfield and by fellow SNL alumnus Bill Murray. If we had to rank the best all-time movies starring 1970s-era SNL cast members, none could match Animal House (1978) with John Belushi, and perhaps Caddyshack is a distant second, or maybe third behind the Belushi-Dan Akroyd project The Blues Brothers (1980). Depending on how you rank Chevy Chase’s film output, Ghostbusters might rank fourth or fifth among SNL-spawned movies, but it definitely wasn’t nearly as good as Animal House or Caddyshack.

My prejudice against Ghostbusters is in large part a function of my bias against the gimmicky SNL cash-in genre of which it was a part, but I also have a strong bias against movies with supernatural themes. Anything with magic, witches, wizards, vampires — no, I don’t like that stuff, and except for the original Friday the 13th (1980), can’t recall very many horror movies that I ever actually liked. The Exorcist (1973) was not nearly as good a movie as the novel on which it was based, which was one of the scariest books I ever read in my life. Because I believe that supernatural evil is quite real, I dislike the recent trend in which some kinds of “magic” are portrayed as benevolent. Any movie in which wizards and vampires are depicted as heroes I consider to be simply satanic.

Also, I don’t believe in ghosts. The dead are dead, and will remain so until the Resurrection and Judgment Day. As goofy as Ghostbusters was, I remember being uncomfortable in 1984 with how the movie played with the idea of paranormal activity as comedy fodder. The best scene in the whole movie — “a disaster of biblical proportions” — treated as laughable the idea of Old Testament “wrath of God type stuff,” which I do not consider a joke. The fact that Ghostbusters came out just about the time the scope of the AIDs epidemic was becoming apparent added a dark subtext to this apocalyptic humor: “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! . . . Human sacrifice! . . . Mass hysteria!”

Indeed, weird things were going on in 1984 and maybe Ghostbusters was a metaphor for things nobody was supposed to joke about, but finding any kind of politics in that silly movie is a stretch, although every libertarian laughs at Dan Aykroyd’s famous line: “Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results!”

Which brings us back to the idea of the new Ghostbusters remake, a deliberate feminist political statement. The message of the all-female cast is simple: Males are useless, because girl power saves the day!

 

Sometimes I’ve called this “Lesbian Ghostbusters” because it was predictable, from the moment the project was announced, that this new movie would emphasize a familiar “Third Wave” feminist theme of males as either (a) incompetent idiots or (b) evil oppressors. Like so many recent feminist movie projects, the new Ghostbusters aims to pass the “Bechdel Test,” which originated with lesbians who did not want to see either male heroes or heterosexual romance in movies.

Imagine a world in which males are never competent, honorable or courageous. Therefore no man can ever be a hero, nor deserve a woman’s love. This is the worldview that Hollywood must reflect to placate feminists, who demand female characters so “empowered” that males exist as ancillary characters to serve the narrative of female heroism.

Variety critic Peter Debruge very much wants to like the new Ghostbusters, but its problems are too obvious to ignore. The movie “suffers from a disappointingly strong case of déjà vu,” Debruge writes. One element of the film’s deliberate feminist role-reversal features beefcake actor Chris Hemsworth as “an assistant too dumb to realize he’s being objectified.” Hemsworth represents the male as incompetent idiot theme of feminist cinema, and what about the male as evil oppressor? Debruge explains that the new Ghostbusters plot hinges on “a disgruntled white guy (Neil Casey), [who] has been inviting noxious visitors from the spirit world to cross over for his own nefarious purposes”:

Once the ladies manage to track this sad sack down, the movie grinds to a halt as the heavily armed group of scientists (whose arsenal has gotten a major upgrade since the earlier film) try to talk him out of destroying the world. That’s pretty much the point where “Ghostbusters” stops being funny enough to sway the haters who’ve become such a vocal presence online — a phenomenon the film actually goes out of its way to acknowledge, as McCarthy dismisses such sexist comments as, “Ain’t no bitches gonna hunt no ghosts,” that appear beneath the group’s YouTube videos.

Get it? Hahahaha.

Not content with the “disgruntled white guy” as villain and the pretty boy Hemsworth as dimwit male eye candy, the new Ghostbusters also had to take a self-referential jab at the naysayers who predicted that this movie would be one of the most unwatchable flops since Ishtar.

While the movie doesn’t open until Thursday, so we won’t know for a couple of weeks whether prophecies of its commercial failure were accurate, the new Ghostbusters nevertheless seems to conform to what the naysayers predicted it would be. Maybe the pre-sold audience will be large enough to rescue the movie from being a catastrophic box-office failure. Perhaps media hype in the pro-feminist climate of an election year where Hillary Clinton is running for president will form enough of a wave to lift this chick-flick comedy to success. However, the new Ghostbusters is apparently not a movie intended to make money, but rather to preach a feminist sermon, and Debruge predicts that the producers are likely to take a “write-down” and lose money.

Well, a mid-July release date isn’t exactly a gesture of confidence from the studio. If they thought the new Ghostbusters was a winner, Sony would have released it in May or perhaps waited for September. My fear is not so much that this feminist project will succeed, but rather that it won’t fail hard enough to discourage similar projects in the future.

 


Category: Movies, Sex Trouble

Comments

64 Responses to “Will the New SJW ‘Ghostbusters’ Be a ‘Disaster of Biblical Proportions’?”

  1. Steve Skubinna
    July 11th, 2016 @ 2:53 pm

    Oh, maaaaaan.

    I’ve been practicing carrying packages and saying “Yes, Ma’am.”

  2. NeoWayland
    July 11th, 2016 @ 2:54 pm

    Any film that gives that many cameos to that many talented artists gets my vote.

  3. Mike
    July 11th, 2016 @ 3:37 pm

    I’m waiting with bated breath for the next flurry of replacing male casts with fems. Remake The 10 Commandments with a female Moses? Very hip! Bridge Over the River Kwai? Stalag 17? Could get very creative. And then there’s Kevin Sorbo as a transgendered Xena…

  4. Jerry Beckett
    July 11th, 2016 @ 4:25 pm

    “The Exorcist (1973) was not nearly as good a movie as the novel on which it was based, which was one of the scariest books I ever read in my life.”

    Holy crap – get out of my head, RSM! I said this exact same thing earlier today to an officemate, perhaps the first time I’ve said anything about either the movie or book in years, and then I read the above here a couple of hours later…

    Freaky.

  5. Man-Hater @AlannaBennett Promotes #Ghostbusters as Feminist Revenge : The Other McCain
    July 11th, 2016 @ 7:48 pm

    […] In other words, if you don’t like seeing old movies hijacked by feminists and turned into anti-male propaganda, you’re a hater. As I’ve explained, the whole project is just a feminist political statement: […]

  6. DeadMessenger
    July 12th, 2016 @ 3:45 am

    Yes, but that’s a really marketable skill, so your efforts won’t be wasted.

    I have to say also, I’ve had a tough time for the last seven months. Real tough. Life changing for the worse tough. But you gave me a great big heart-felt smile at the thought of hearing you say “Yes, Ma’am.” So thanks for that.

  7. DeadMessenger
    July 12th, 2016 @ 3:48 am

    I agree. I would’ve said the whole idea of completely changing an established character is just BS, but I guess your way of saying it is nicer.

  8. DeadMessenger
    July 12th, 2016 @ 3:48 am

    Misspelling their name? Trigger warning!

  9. DeadMessenger
    July 12th, 2016 @ 3:56 am

    True story: I have a cell phone under the name Jake Blues with an address at 1060 West Addison. =)

  10. DeadMessenger
    July 12th, 2016 @ 3:58 am

    Must be nice to be him.

  11. DrGreatCham
    July 12th, 2016 @ 10:44 am

    The irony is that Wrigley Field has an apartment under the bleachers that used to be for the groundskeeper back in the Veeck era. It’s used for storage now, but it is a legitimate residential street address.

  12. NeoWayland
    July 12th, 2016 @ 12:25 pm

    I’ve kinda been thinking about this since they announced they were replacing Jackson on the $20 with a woman.

    If they had announced they were replacing Jackson with Tubman to begin with, that would have been one thing. But no, they announced the replacement would be a woman and then announced it would be Tubman. It would always the token woman.

    With one announcement, the Treasury tokenized half the population in the name of empowering women.

  13. DeadMessenger
    July 12th, 2016 @ 3:58 pm

    True, that. And kind of tokenized more than half, on account of her being black. Lucky she wasn’t half black, half hispanic or something. I guess they’ll have to cover that with the Sotomayor $3 bill.

  14. NeoWayland
    July 12th, 2016 @ 9:44 pm

    ?No, there will be a woman on the ten dollar bill because she is a woman.

    With one move, the Imperious Leader’s [Obama] administration tokenizes half the human race.

    Because the reason she will be on the bill is because she is a woman.

    Not because of what she said.

    Not because of what she did.

    And certainly not because she is as worthy as a Real American Man™.

    No, the paternalistic, compassionate, powerful government will elevate a woman.

    Because everyone knows she couldn’t have gotten there on her own.?
    – Token