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by throwaway13337 3631 days ago
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.

3 comments

The movie looks really bad but as someone who saw the movie, it's actually pretty good and funny. The quatuor works perfectly, there is no feminism message at all, it's just a good comedy.

Maybe it won't be your type of humor, but this is not a bad movie in any way. People are just rating the movie without seeing it, which is pretty stupid in the first place. Because of that I expect the score to be much higher, hopefully a lot of people won't listen to the haters and see for themselves.

Simply casting typically male roles (comedic lead, scientist, etc.) with female actors is feminist. The movie doesn't need to have a feminist "message" to be feminist. Note: when I say feminist I mean that entirely as a good thing.
> Simply casting typically male roles (comedic lead, scientist, etc.) with female actors is feminist.

No, it is not. Print roles as male only that is mysogenic. Comedic lead and scientists are only typically male roles because they are - and a lot of freak White guys are trying to "fight hard" to prevent that móveis and the internet changes it.

I find that trailers are almost always a bad reflection on the movie.

- Sometimes the trailer is great, and the movie sucks.

- Sometimes the trailer sucks, and the movie is great.

- Sometimes the trailer sucks, and the movie sucks for totally different reasons

But very rarely do I see a trailer, and then watch the movie and think "oh yeah, the trailer captured that pretty well".

The fact that the trailer looks bad (and it does!), tells me very little about what the movie will be like, except for highlighting which actors are in it, and triggering my personal responses to those actors (I'm personally not a fan of Melissa McCarthy).

[edited to add, because I forgot]

> Is this really about sexism?

The fact that people don't like the trailer? No.

The fact that so many people are going out of their way to rip into a movie they haven't seen, in ways that are more caustic than they would typically be for an unsatisfying reboot/sequel that hadn't switch the gender roles? Yes, I think that is based on sexism.

  it's not a thing about women leads, it's that it looks
  really bad in a way the original isn't
If the article was just about negative reviews from professional reviewers who had seen the film, sure.

But if there are 12,000 reviews when the film isn't out in cinemas yet? That sounds like a symptom of activism by people who haven't seen the film.