…you’ve proven my point. How much of gamergate can be traced back to the Return of the Kings MRA’s? Gamergate congregate on other parts of the internet and follow a specific pattern of behaviour. The ROK people are morons: but they are relatively self-contained morons and they weren’t the people that went after Ghostbusters.
Gamergate didn’t go after Star Wars because its fricking Star Wars and had Luke and Han and Chewie and thats “just way cool man!”. They didn’t go after Fury because who knew that it was going to be a movie with a solid feminist outlook until after the movie was released?
No: what made Ghostbusters unique was that it wore its feminist outlook on its sleeve: and why the fuck shouldn’t they? Nearly every blockbuster movie made since forever have had male dominated casts: if the cast and the crew of one of the only all-female blockbusters want to celebrate breaking a few barriers then what is wrong with that?
Those “aresholes” made a choice to behave the way they did: and the filmakers and the cast and the crew are not responsible for other peoples behaviour.
You’re only responsible for your own actions. I’m a pragmatist–I’d rather get the right outcome, and I think that by wearing “its feminist outlook on its sleeve” it has actually damaged the cause, because its status as a flop will be tied to the strident tone taken by both sides. That really isn’t a win.
By buying into the debate, Feig, McCarthy and Sony essentially signalled to potential audiences that the only thing the movie had going for it was the gender of its cast. How is that helpful? How does that move the discussion forward?
It makes some people feel good to “stick it to the haters” and fight back, but it quickly becomes a race to the bottom when the stars start shooting back with nerd stereotypes about basement dwellers and so forth. At that point I tend to feel like, “You can have each other.”
The Oscars have been awarded since 1929. Do you know how many female directors have been nominated for the Directors Academy Award?
Do you know how many have won? Just 1. 440 people have been nominated. 437 of them men.
Have a read of this blog.
Women have been shat on by the film industry since it started. It actually got better for a while back in the 80’s, but since then has gotten much worse.
Do you really think “shutting up” is the best strategy going forward? Exactly how well has that worked out?
Can you quote specific things that Feig, McCarthy and Sony have done that you think weren’t helpful and “hasn’t moved the discussion forward?”
No: you really just don’t get it. These aren’t “trolls” in the traditional sense: they aren’t fishing for a reaction. They are “true believers.” They are obsessed. They are the kind of people that spend hours combing though twitter accounts looking for any detail at all that they can spin into a “conspiracy-like-narrative”. One of these goobers emailed me and threatened to report me to my employer because I supported someone on patreon. What emboldened the goobers was the discovery that they weren’t the only goobers in the world: the discovery that en masse they were an extremely powerful entity that could create some very significant “waves”.
I’ve spent two years helping support people who have been battling these goobers on the net. And one of the key lessons learnt is that staying quiet isn’t always the best answer and sometimes staying quiet actually hurts. If you stay quiet you end up loosing your twitter account. You loose your support base. You get pushed out of spaces and communities that you’ve been part of for years. This isn’t about “sticking it to the haters.” Its about not changing your life to accommodate the assholes.
We’re talking about commercial Hollywood here. Either a film has appeal and pulls in the dollars or it doesn’t. If it does, and women are prominent, that is a victory. If it doesn’t, I guarantee you that it’s not because some dude ranting on Twitter used misogynistic language. You fight back with the only argument that matters in Hollywood: money.
As soon as a film is successful, there’s no comeback for the gamergate types. And honestly, they have no real power anyway unless it’s bestowed upon them with comments like this:
Subtext: “We’re listening and you’re having an impact. Keep at it, because it’s working.”
Thinking about this more, I think Ghostbusters is different to The Force Awakens in that I think Feig was deliberately trying to be provocative. Which is fine, and I approve in a way, but it’s disingenuous to act shocked when nasty elements are provoked. And it’s also a huge gamble to take. This time it didn’t pay off.
…you fight with the tools that you have. And you fight for what you believe. Dollars aren’t a guarantee of jack squat. Catherine Hardwicke directed “Twilight” and the movie made nearly $400 million worldwide. But she couldn’t get another movie after that. The doors closed down for her. The writer/director of Debra Granik thought she had “made it” when her movie “Winters Bone” reached critical acclaim. It only made 6 million dollars domestically: but that was still 2 million more than what Collin Trevorrow made with his indie flick “Safety not Guaranteed.” But Granik struggles to find directorial work: while Trevorrow was personally shoulder-tapped by Spielberg (Spielberg said Trevorrow reminded him of a younger version of himself) to direct Jurassic Park.
What a load of bullshit. As outlined below:
They are fucking comedians. They were asked a question by a reporter, they responded with a joke. They weren’t particularly funny jokes: but so what? You don’t think that people who have stated the “all female version of Ghostbusters has ruined their childhood” deserve a joke or two thrown their way?
But don’t worry: the subtext of your post is clear. I’ll let all the women that I know that they shouldn’t make jokes anymore. Especially comedians. I mean hey, they only worked their arses off for the last year or so to make a movie they are very very proud of. But lets not speak their mind lest some poor soul takes offense and decides to call Leslie Jones a gorrilla. :rolleyes:
…I asked before what Feig and Sony have done that you think weren’t helpful and “hasn’t moved the discussion forward.” Can we add “can you show where Feig has been deliberately provocative” to that list as well?
I know dozens of adult women who went to see just because of all the MRA whining. Myself included. As it happened, we all really enjoyed it too, and have recommended it to other people, at least some of whom have then gone to see it themselves when they otherwise wouldn’t have. So, yeah, I agree.
I wasn’t planning on going until I heard that they’d been attacking the black actress for not being “pretty enough” and being “too big”. That scene where she saves the blonde from the posessed brunette? Yeah, I can totally picture some pixie-sized waif doing that, u-hu… well, I can picture some pixie-sized waif attempting it and needing re-inflation, I mean
Went yesterday, enjoyed it. All six main actors did a good job; yes, even the dude playing the bad guy - “stiff as a plank” works very well for that particular character. The public included a mixture of ages, among them several families where the parents had evidently seen the original (they laughed at the cameos, which aren’t funny unless you do know they’re cameos). I think my nephews will like it, plan on asking their dad if he’s going to take them.
There is no “all the MRA whining” - it was primarily a marketing strategy to stir up hatred against “nerds” by blowing the tiny bit that was bigoted trolls being bigoted trolls out of propotion and claiming that they represented the sum of opposition to a comedy trailer that didn’t make people laugh, so that people would watch their shitty movie out of spite. And you fell for it.
At the risk of being considered a misogynist, I have to say I didn’t like this movie.
Just didn’t find it funny. And it’s nothing to do with the main four characters being female (I didn’t really like the original, either).
No-one, as far as i can tell, has said that the very fact of disliking the movie makes you a misogynist. In fact, much of the misogyny about the movie came precisely from people who hadn’t even seen it. The misogynist whining and hostility (which Grumman incorrectly suggests has been blown out of proportion) started as soon as the female cast was announced, and continued through the release of the trailer and the subsequent build-up for the movie.
There are plenty of decent reasons not to like the movie. I happened to like it, and i had fun watching it, but it was not a ground-breaking piece of move-making, and some of the criticisms that i’ve read seem justified to me. If you’ve seen the movie, and didn’t like it, that’s fine. The misogyny was the people who deluged IMDB with negative reviews before the movie was out, who railed against the very presence of female leads, and who made disgusting sexist comments on a wide variety of websites and social media.
I’m amazed that people are so agog about this. The damned original was a cheap SNL/Second City knockoff who featured the top players from the past few years - Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray, and Eddie Murphy were to be the leads until Murphy decided to do, IIRC, Beverly Hills Cop, and got replaced with Ramis. These people all happened to be male, but nobody gave a shit.
The second film is a, surprise, SNL film that featured the most popular SNL players of the past few years: McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones. Who all happen to be female, but apparently, people gave a shit about this without realizing that there hasn’t been a breakout male star from Saturday Night Live since Will Farrell - and he left in 2002.* Oh, there have been some names - Andy Sanberg, Keenan Thompson (my favorite) - but none of them have dominated the way Pohler, Fay, Wiig, McKinnon, Jones, and Maya Rudolph have.
*BTW, I don’t consider hosting a late-night TV show to be “breaking out” as a star. YMMV.
QFT, and thank you for saving me some typing as well.
I’m about to be mostly off the grid for a few days anyway, but since this thread is ostensibly for people who enjoyed Ghostbusters (2016) I’d like to suggest we go back to talking about how great Kate McKinnon was. I haven’t really watched SNL in years, although I’ll see the occasional sketch online, and was only vaguely aware of her as the person they’ve got doing Hillary Clinton impressions these days. So maybe her performance in Ghostbusters didn’t come as a surprise to others more familiar with her past work, but I was really impressed. (And am also totally in love with Holtzmann.) Everyone I know who’s seen the movie, ranging from a friend’s 7 year old son to my 60-something mother, said she was their favorite.
They’re pretty different characters, but the closest comparison I can make is to Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. That’s a character who eventually wore out his welcome for me, but thinking back to the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie I remember what an unexpected delight his performance was. In both cases I think these are roles that on the page probably weren’t that interesting, but became something very specific, weird, and wonderful thanks to what the actors brought to them.
…oh there was plenty of MRA whining. And there was plenty of goobergate whining as well.
Rediculous. Nothing was blown out of proportion and there was no “marketing campaign” based on the hate.
Thats a bit insulting, don’t you think? You don’t think that ruadh is perfectly capable of observing people loosing their shit over a movie all by themselves?
Are you talking about nonsense like this?
Yep: goobers (as goobers do, because they are stalkerish horrible people) went through Jone’s twitter feed and found some things she said two years ago that all of a sudden have upset a few poor souls. Jones is a comedian and has said nothing more racist than a classic Eddie Murphy routine. Here is George Carlin calling Richard Pryor and Murphy a n@@#er at the 37 second mark. Its clearly racist if you skip the context at the start of the joke and the end of it: and by calling Jones a racist you are skipping all the context and focusing just on the words.
