The 2009 to 2016 period was a dark age of cinema and I struggle to think of even one good American movie from that period. This slew of terrible capeshit, lazy game adaptions, and half-baked remakes of old IP is now commonly referred to as “Obamaslop.”
I wouldn’t say movies have improved since then, but the transition into Obamaslop came as a shock, as there were quite a few iconic films from the 1990s and 2000s, like Starship Troopers, Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the first X-Men movie. Then all those cool action flicks with awesome special effects were replaced by a deluge of garbage with cheap CGI yet incomprehensibly inflated production costs.
Ghostbusters (2016) was possibly the most terrible Obamaslop movie because not only was it entirely derivative and unfunny, it also had a ton of preachy political messaging that fans of the Ghostbusters franchise found ridiculous and insulting.
Not to say the original Ghostbusters wasn’t political, because it absolutely was, just much more fun and competently executed. Bill Murray’s character at the start of the movie is a lazy grifter who freeloads off government grants, and his ‘experiments’ are just an excuse to flirt and sleep with pretty college girls.
Then he loses his grift and has to enlist the help of his much more hardworking friends to start a small business, harnessing the ghost-related technology they had developed on the taxpayers’ dime, which of course is a complete success. It is accurate to describe Ghostbusters as a libertarian fantasy, even the main bad guy of the film is a bureaucrat from the Environmental Protection Agency. But it’s all fun and much more subtle than the 2016 remake, which throws the feminist messaging into your face every second of the runtime.
Oddly enough, the 1980s version even handles race issues better. The black guy (played by Ernie Hudson) who responds to a job ad later in the movie. He presumably has a much lower education level than the scientists, but that’s not treated as important and no one even asks about it. There’s no difference in how Ernie’s character is treated, and he’s not portrayed as the “dumb muscle” of the group. So I do find it ironic that the libertarian movie isn’t racist at all, while its tryhard socially progressive remake comes off as extremely racist.
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Ian Kummer
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I strong suggest to see the following fanedit: https://fanedit.org/ghostbusters-iii/ it won’t make it a good movie; but definitely a serviceable one.
I strong suggest to see the following fanedit: https://fanedit.org/ghostbusters-iii/ it won't make it a good movie; but definitely a serviceable one.
A Quora commentator once explained that the reason the Marvel Cinematic Universe took off in the 2010s was that really, they were producing the only movies, or really only American pop culture offerings, that were consistently somewhat decent. Of course, that didn’t last. Movies did seem to improve towards the end of the decade, and then the industry jumped off a cliff.
Thanks for the phrase “Obamaslop”.
A Quora commentator once explained that the reason the Marvel Cinematic Universe took off in the 2010s was that really, they were producing the only movies, or really only American pop culture offerings, that were consistently somewhat decent. Of course, that didn't last. Movies did seem to improve towards the end of the decade, and then the industry jumped off a cliff. Thanks for the phrase "Obamaslop".
OMG, I knew a remake exists, but I didn’t know they turned ALL characters into women. I could even understand changing one character into a girl, might be fun, if done with wit and good scripting, but why all of them?
OMG, I knew a remake exists, but I didn't know they turned ALL characters into women. I could even understand changing one character into a girl, might be fun, if done with wit and good scripting, but why all of them?
I’m not sure how to take the ladies’ Ghostbusters. There are three levels to my thinking on it.
On the surface, it seems like it was an attempt to make a feminist remake that only undermined the feminist argument – the chaps from the original clearly did the job far better than the ladies. However, this inferiority was so obvious, so “in your face”, that I wonder if it was intentional, that someone deliberately made it bad precisely in order to undermine the agenda and waste hundreds of millions of the studio’s money to punish them for regularly producing propagandistic rubbish.
But then I think – may that is the point. You know it is crap, we know you know it is crap etc. but it still gets made, released and everyone gets to read rave reviews for it by regime hacks. It is an almost ritual humiliation of the public who thirst for entertainment and get “I can’t believe it’s not entertainment!”
I'm not sure how to take the ladies' Ghostbusters. There are three levels to my thinking on it. On the surface, it seems like it was an attempt to make a feminist remake that only undermined the feminist argument – the chaps from the original clearly did the job far better than the ladies. However, this inferiority was so obvious, so "in your face", that I wonder if it was intentional, that someone deliberately made it bad precisely in order to undermine the agenda and waste hundreds of millions of the studio's money to punish them for regularly producing propagandistic rubbish. But then I think – may that is the point. You know it is crap, we know you know it is crap etc. but it still gets made, released and everyone gets to read rave reviews for it by regime hacks. It is an almost ritual humiliation of the public who thirst for entertainment and get "I can't believe it's not entertainment!"