A specter haunts the Internet’s angry men. The specter that the new Ghostbusters movie with all the ladies in it might actually be, you know, good.
Angry dudes have been throwing Internet hissy fits over the new lady-fied Ghostbusters since they first learned of its lady-fied nature early last year; indeed, the fellas at the famously lady-hating site Return of Kings started boycotting the film back in March, even though there was no film yet to boycott.
From RoK to Reddit to YouTube, the Internet’s angriest men agreed that the film was going to be the worst thing to hit men since the ladies got the right to vote, or something.
Now, with the film hitting theaters in the US this Friday, and already playing in the UK and Ireland, the first reviews are coming out.
And so far they’re not bad. The film boasts a 76% rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment, and some of the reviews are actually pretty enthusiastic, with more than a few critics suggesting that the Ghostbusting ladies are the best part of the film.
In the Daily Beast, Jen Yamato derided the film’s “lulls in pacing” and “choppy editing,” before hailing the gals at the film’s center:
[W]ith a crackling sense of purpose and a surplus of reverence for their predecessors, new Ghostbusters Wiig, McCarthy, McKinnon, and Jones plant their own flag on a beloved sci-fi comedy franchise.
For haters of the Lady Ghostbusters, it’s a nightmare, sweetie, as Patsy from AbFab would say, though I’m pretty sure the anti-Lady-Ghostbusters crowd wouldn’t find her funny either.
On Reddit, naturally, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. In Kotaku in Action, Reddit’s main hangout for GamerGate true believers, one of he highest-rated comments in the Ghostbusters 2016 Review Megathread blasts those giving the film good reviews as “cucks for Sony.” Others offered similar explanations.
One commenter accused the critics who liked the film of the apparently unpardonable sin of being … writers.
Over in the Ghostbusters subreddit — because of course there is a Ghostbusters subreddit, and of course it’s full of Lady-Ghsotbuster haters — some of the regulars are trying their best to keep the dream alive, the dream in question being the dream that Lady Ghostbusters will still turn out to really suck, positive reviews be damned!
One irate fellow, insisting he wasn’t rooting for the film to fail, attacked Sony for allegedly throwing a tantrum.
I never wanted the film to be “garbage”, I wanted to have a movie I could enjoy watching. But the moment Sony, Feig, and everyone else involved decided that personal attacks against the public was how they wanted to promote this film, then I simply can’t support it. It could literally be a better film than the original (which it’s not) and I still would not watch it because of the horrible taste left by the filmmaking team’s behavior.
I am not a simpleton who is pursuaded by “like this movie or you’re a misogynist hater”, and since that is the tact they choose, I have to opt out entirely on principle. I do not want this to become a recurring trend with future entertainment endeavors.
I will not be spending a dime on anything related to Ghostbusters 2016. No toys, no movie tickets, no Blu Rays, and no Lego or Lego Dimensions sets. I do not endorse childish tantrums by big studios.
So take that, Sony! This total non-tantrum-haver is taking his Legos (which include no Lady Ghostbusters sets) and going home.
The culture war is weird, man.
How privileged do you have to be to think that it’s fascism to speak in favor of diversity in movies?
For fuck’s sake. If the movie doesn’t interest you, don’t see it. No one cares!
The posited Germanic origin of hissy might not be misogynistic. Or it might be, just via another language. Definitely it has misogynist undertones in modern usage.
I wonder if my mom has seen that picture. She’s scared of moths for some reason.
@joeb
Yep, but this isn’t what they mean. Left wing authoritarianism is Stalinism or Maoism. Their ‘left wing’ really means Liberals. It is the MRAs and their insidious fanboys who like to wave the flag and support Trump and the alt (now mainstream) Right, with their Pepes and #fashthenation hashtag bullshit. They love to fling shit, but most of it comes right back in their faces.
The one that really gets me is that writer’s being writers are going to give it a good rating because they can indulge their passion for language. In my experience, writers really get going with the poetry when they are trashing something. There are so many enjoyable and interesting ways of saying something is terrible, if someone is just indulging their passion for language, they might be tempted to get into full flame out on trashing the movie. Critics do it all the time.
When I first saw the move (as a teenager), I remember being really uncomfortable with Bill Murray’s character. He was obnoxious and creepy, and possibly a potential rapist. (Besides his opening scene where he tried to use fraud to seduce a student, wasn’t there a “joke” in there about the sedatives he carried around with him being used on his dates?)
I identified more with the characters played by Aykroyd and Ramis, and how they were content to let Murray’s character take the spotlight while they stayed (mostly) in the background. They didn’t care about the fame – they just cared that they saved the city. They were the real heroes of the film.
It occurred to me today that the man-babies that are whinging on about the reboot are upset because they have nobody in the movie to identify with. In the reboot there are no asshole date-rapists. There are no shitheads who use fraud to try to coerce students into sex.
This, I think, is what the MRAs find most offensive about the remake: there is nobody for them to emulate.
So, this point was brought up with Michael Bay’s TMNT movies by Nostalgia Critic, but I’m going to apply the same logic here:
No one retconned your childhood, you gigantic manchildren. Your precious Ghostbusters still exists as it was, an all-boy’s club.
Your childhood still exists, and even if someone DID retcon your childhood, you wouldn’t fucking remember it anyways, because it would be retconned.
And now we have a reboot for those of us who just so happen to be women. It’s just another version for those of us who want it. The original still exists and you can go and enjoy it at any time you want to.
It’s not taking away anything from your childhood.
So STFU.
I probably won’t go see this one because the black woman in the first trailer felt like the writers made her character using a book titled “stereotypical black woman things as written by a white man” and *only* used that as their source material.
But I do hope it turns out really well just to crush these MRAs a little more.
76% positive is excellent for a blockbuster like this.
Hell, I was just hoping it would be better than Ghostbusters 2.
Huh. I’m not usually much of a movie person, and I actually wasn’t all that fond of the original Ghostbusters (barring some Bill Murray moments). I think I’ll go see this one, though.
That picture really picked up my day. ^_^
Thank you for the picture. That was amazing. 🙂 I’m not sure if we’ll go see it, but I’m interested.
I’ll be going to see Ghostbusters & taking my twins sons as well.
What I’ve found to be true is if MRA’s are rubbishing something, then it must be really ,really good.
I remember reading their rubbishing of Mad Max, especially Paul Elam saying he doesn’t like female leads, before that movie came out.
I wasn’t an actual Mad Max fan despite being Australian…but once AVFM starting rubbishing it, I couldn’t get to the theatre quick enough & made it a night out with heaps of friends…what a great movie it turned out to be.
So off to Ghostbusters I’ll go, should be great! Thanks for the movie tip MRA’s..lol
I hate to be the one to break it to all the whinging manbabies out there, but your childhood is either safe from ruination, or already irretrievably ruined. Your childhood is OVER, and it’s high time you owned up to that very obvious fact.
Also I thought “hissy” was from “histrionic”, from the Latin for “actor”. So, not sexist, just…. hammy.
Seriously. Ray and Egon are the real experts. Venkman gets them kicked out of the university with his blatantly unprofessional practice, leading to their world-shaking research being confiscated (and, incidentally, misses a student with promising psychic potential who was right under his nose.) He goes on to aggravate Walter Peck, who had no relevant jurisdiction and could have been easily dealt with legally long before he reached the point of actively sabotaging their facilities. Ultimately, Venkman’s just a load they carry around who provides nothing in return but sarcasm.
“Personal attacks against the public”? That doesn’t even mean anything. The whole point about “the public” is that it’s not a person, it’s an aggregate of many people, so it’s not subject to personal attacks.
I understood it well enough, given the context. Basically they’re accusing the makers of the film of shaming the general public for being too sexist to watch their film… in hopes that it will somehow convince more people to watch it. People like them take that kind of thing as a personal attack, so they meant that phrase in the sense of “an attack directed at the general public which some people would take personally”.
Though even if you grant that this is would be a legitimate turn of phrase (it probably isn’t), its use under these circumstances would be kind of stupid for other reasons.
I still believe that it would have been better to do a sequel (Ghostbusters: The Next Generation) rather than a reboot. This movie has a dream cast, so why wouldn’t you want to do something a bit more original with them?
Still, I’m glad it’s doing well. A good reboot is better than all the crappy reboots that Hollywood seems to make these days.
Relevant:
http://nerdist.com/the-new-ghostbusters-doesnt-ruin-your-childhood-review/
Can’t wait to hear what the hate-watchers will be saying, assuming they got over themselves long enough to stand in line for a ticket.
Did they end up moving away from that lame “shouty streetwise black woman” stereotype? I haven’t been too keen on what I saw in the trailers, but I’m glad to hear it’s being considered generally okay 🙂
Am I the only one who loved Winston the most as a kid? Winston was your every-person, the one with no real connection to the paranormal but just needed a job and finds himself caught up in the surreal world of the other other three. As a result, I see him as being a surrogate for the viewer, voicing the skepticism any of us would have if we suddenly found ourselves in a world with the paranormal.
One of the rumors I heard regarding Ghostbusters 3 was that one of the conditions from Murray, Akroyd, and Ramis was that Ernie Hudson had to be given equal billing with them if Ghostbusters 3 got off the ground. If it’s true, I love them for it for realizing how crucial Winston was to the team and how different the films would have been without him.
Haven’t seen the original, so I likely won’t see this. Still, I hope it makes all the money. In fact I kinda hope it’s mediocre and bland, yet makes all the money anyway. Just to give these guys something more to meltdown over
I’m sorry for the loss of your 5 hours ; _ ;
Watched the original and loved it. But I am able to distinguish myself from my objects. I really have no idea how someone could connect themselves to goods to the point where the goods superimpose themselves on the individual. I don’t really have much desire for things, maybe it’s just my background but I don’t really see the appeal of nostalgia.
It’s the one thing that I truly cannot comprehend. Higher level maths and physics and language, that has rules that over time can be learned. Nostalgia just makes none of that to me.
Like I remember being raised on media, on things like Cartoon Network and Nick so it’s the same shows they would have watched, and seen the same advertisements as well, but I don’t recall “nostalgia” when I remember those things.
Psychological projection, much?
Oh, yeah, Winston’s great. Where Ray and Egon have the prior expertise, and Venkman’s their snarky friend, Winston’s the one who gets to come in and learn and grow and do protagonist-y things. In the video game sequel, he’s gone on to earn his PhD and is generally, you know, thriving.
Boycotting a movie and manipulating it’s general rating trully seems like the best way to protect freedom of speech from the evil and oppressive minds of people who don’t think sexswaps make a movie obligatorily bad.
Also, even if this was directed mainly to little girls (honestly, I don’t know who’s exactly the target audience, I gotta see the movie first), I dont see what’s the problem with it. Everyone seems to get offended when a large amount of money is invested in something mainly directed to women, but michael bay’s adaptation are a-ok.
Just the usual “Men are the default” crap I suppose.