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Having watched the cock-filled Ghostbusters (everyone’s cock is out, but because everyone in the film turns out to be a ghost - spoiler alert- you can’t see them because they are spectral. Make your own ectoplasm joke, I can’t be bothered), I was aware that it is a good children’s film, which is still well worth a watch 3 decades on, but at its heart (and this is no bad thing) it’s just a silly romp with a strong central performance giving it a bit of a lift.
For baby-men to hold up the new vagina-filled Ghostbusters (I don’t know if the genitals were ghosts in this due to the ridiculous internal nature of lady parts) as some kind of blasphemy or affront is one of the many ridiculous viewpoints of 2016. It’s not the most dangerous by any means, but is typical of the (hopefully) last spasm of a reactionary world that should have died out years ago (but alas is going to be giving us a bumpy ride at least for the rest of my lifetime. If you’re one of the angry men concerned that a new film destroys part of your childhood then take a look at the original film. You have no dick. It’s not even a ghost dick. That’s what I’ve heard. If you want to stand up for a false idea of manhood, at least act like a false idea of a fucking man, not a whining little baby.
Anyway I went to see the vagina Ghostbusters tonight with my wife, who had already seen it once and has declared it to be possibly her favourite film ever. It was not my favourite film ever, but it was another silly romp, which I didn’t think always quite gelled, but which had much better special effects than the original, loads of good jokes and made me laugh out loud (which is a rarity with most Hollywood comedies). I know that the people who don’t want to like this film have either not bothered to watch it (and thus got annoyed, as many idiots do, by something they’ve imagined in their own head) or gone into the cinema with their non-laughing heels firmly dug in (an impossible situation for any comedy to garner laughs from), but if they want to complain about a film being unfunny and shit and an affront to the audience may I suggest that they watch any of the last dozen Adam Sandler aberrations or “One Hundred Ways To Die In The West”, which isn’t based on another film but should be enough to ruin our memories of our childhood, just by being so terrible that it stains our whole lives with its indelible stink.
There are much, much more terrible things to get annoyed even in the world of film.
I wasn’t as bowled over as my wife, but there was only one really bad bit, where they let themselves down by having a gratuitous and embarrassing celebrity cameo, in lieu of an actual joke. But again if you were going to be up in arms about that then take a look at Zoolander 2 which is just a dozen of those knitted together interspersed with the decomposing corpse stink of the dug up first movie. And in an absolute first for me, Bill Murray’s performance, was probably the second worst thing about it. For a man who steals almost every scene he’s ever been in this was quite something. The other nods to the original were done quickly and without too much signposting and were fun, but with Murray, they’d almost tried to give him a proper part, but not known what to do with him and then had to defenestrate him when it quickly ground to a halt.
As with the original the last third of the film is mainly just action, but the new one does it much more successfully (perhaps due to having proper special effects to hand) and it’s a thrilling sequence of ghost busting (spoiler alert, though there’s a clue in the title) and a properly feel-good denouement and loads of great jokes in the credits too (stay right to the every end like us and only two other people in the cinema) which left the audience on a high and made it easy to forget some of the less successful Ozzy Osbourne bits.
On a non-emotional level it’s easily as good as the original, but I don’t think the original is a classic comedy (although a fucking amazing conceit for a film, which makes it iconic at least). My wife though was buzzing with how amazing it was and talking to her about it afterwards, with her defending it against my criticisms, I realised that although it doesn’t make any difference to the film whether it stars men or women, women are going to get a lot more out of it than men. Because this is the first time, maybe ever, that a blockbuster film as women as the kickass heroes, without them slyly being packaged to actually just appeal to men. I read something on Twitter a great article which I annoyingly can’t find now about a woman who at school was reduced to playing the receptionist while the boys played the Ghostbusters and how much having non-sexualised, quirky, stupid but cool female heroes would have meant to her. She mentions towards the end, without giving too much away, where one of the women ghostbusters busts a load of ghosts and how she does it without showing a bit of boob or to impress a man. She just saves her mates in a cool action way. And indeed, as that scene played out, I could sense an excitement in the theatre that only made sense to me when I read that article. And really it also explains why terrified weak-ass baby-men are intimidated by the film. It was properly empowering and much more significant and important than anything that could happen in the original film. Because we’d already had loads of films where men defeat the bad guy to get the girl. But how many do we have where the woman defeats the bad guy so she can save her friends. It’s this element of the film that lifts it up to another level and as much as I could snip at some of the plot or the characterisation and slightly deflate the bubble of happiness that my wife was in (which I see as my duty as a husband to do for the rest of my life) none of that mattered.
It’s a good film anyway. Certainly by the standards that all those male led films that go through largely uncritiqued despite being properly offensive to the audience by taking our money and not giving any fuck about anything else.
As with so much at the moment people get upset by the wrong thing and punch themselves in the face as they do it. And for all my comedy writer notes I think that by the end of the film most of my issues are ironed out and it sets things up for a sequel which should hit the ground running and I can absolutely guarantee (as long as they don’t fall back on rubbish celebrity cameos where the joke is just that the celebrity has turned up - which takes us out of the “reality” and also tarnishes it for future generations when no one will know who Ozzy Osbourne or whoever is) Vagina Ghostbusters 2 is going to be a fuck of a lot better than Penis Ghostbusters 2. And I don’t think even the biggest baby of the baby men is going to argue against that.
