4 Complaints People Always Have About Women-Led Movies

4 "This Movie Is Pandering!"

Ghostbusters is a reboot of Ghostbusters, a 30-year-old sci-fi comedy classic. You can tell because it features a cast that is a gender-swapped mirror image of the original cast, and virtually every scene in the trailer is a copy of a scene from the original movie. You might think that this means the movie is pandering to 20- and 30-somethings who remember this movie from their childhoods, but you'd apparently be wrong. According to the Internet, what this means is that the movie is pandering to SJWs ("Social Justice Warriors").

It seems that everything is pandering. The Oscars were pandering. So are the Marvel movies and Batman v. Superman and politicians and comic books and video games that feature women and I am falling the fuck asleep typing this. The word "pandering" gets puked up all over our pop culture so much that I don't even hear it as a word anymore. It just makes me think of pandas.

We good here? Great. Next entry.

3 "The Original Ghostbusters Is An Untouchable Classic With A Rich Mythology"

You probably thought that Ghostbusters was the thing I said it was in the above entry, but in reality, it has a rich and beloved mythology. Look at what the MRA blog Return of Kings is saying. (No, I'm not linking to them. Just take my word for it.)

Hey look: rape jokes and nonsensical metaphors. That's exactly what I expected to find when I typed "Ghostbusters MRA" into Google. Below that article about "ruining" Ghostbusters, there are people talking about how making Boba Fett Maori in the Star Wars prequels ruined Star Wars, and how the only way to save this film would be to have a shot of a naked Jennifer Lawrence covered in ectoplasm. These people just can't contain the creep within.

This is the same complaint people make about every comic book mythology, which reboots itself every, oh, three months or so, and every video game, even though video game stories are generally afterthoughts at best. And yet the complaint about preserving the source material only shows up when we talk about adding women and minorities. I've pointed this out before. Here are more pictures of pandas.

Alright, we're halfway through this. I guess I'll change it up just a bit.

2 "Any Criticism Means That The Movie Will Flop!"

You probably think that this kind of SJW pandering means that they shoehorned in all kinds of annoying leftist slop, like "black people who are smart" or "transgender characters who don't get murdered." But no, that's not what happened. The truth is that a lot of people were made uncomfortable by the fact that the only black character in this trailer is an uneducated woman who exhibits a lot of what could charitably called "sass" and uncharitably be called "a very racist depiction of a black woman." Several people have expressed their opinions about this, and apparently that means the film will flop.

Right, because spirited discussion of the racial implications of narratives in pop culture isn't the kind of thing that generates massive Oscar-winning hits. It's definitely a sign that a movie will fail.

There's an entire portion of pop culture devoted to commenting on other pop culture. This is exactly what Cracked does, so you're neck-deep in that part of pop culture right now. And if you're commenting on the new Ghostbusters trailer, you're a part of it too. And yet everyone who loves pop culture enough to have strong opinions about it is somehow never happy. Criticism of movies is impolite, apparently. Having opinions is ugly. Everyone should just agree that everything is great and never feel anything otherwise.

Unless they're being pandered to.

My Fast & Furious sketch idea is that all the characters speak in tough-guy gearhead metaphors, but don't actually know anything about cars and can't understand each other. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but this is a new medium for me, it's fun to push myself as a writer, and it's definitely a more interesting idea than this misogynist claptrap about Ghostbusters. Anyway.

1 "A Saliva-Streaked Explosion Of Incoherent Goober Malarkey!"

Here's my final catch-all entry for all the poppycock I stumbled across researching the other entries. This rounds the article out and ends it on a goofy note. I'll show you these tweets and then have a few jokes about them. Here's is a final space-filler sentence for this opening paragraph.

There hasn't been a new Ghostbusters movie in 27 years. How is anyone still so passionate about it as a franchise? What does "Let's learn you some GB lore" mean in English? What relevance does Winston Zeddemore's post-Ghostbusters academic career have in this conversation, or any conversation that any two human beings have ever had? Not even Ernie Hudson cares about that trivial flim-flam.

I think that about does it. Thanks for going through this with me. I hope we can all agree that it is too early for anyone to have a worthwhile opinion on what the new Ghostbusters movie will be. Maybe it will be fine and maybe it will be garbage. Maybe it will ruin our memories of the original and maybe it won't. Probably safe to assume it'll have ghosts, but even that's up in the air at this point. One of the characters in my Fast & Furious sketch is named "Grits Lowjack" and rides a panda. Take care. Have a good weekend.

J.F. Sargent is a senior editor for Cracked, and you can tell him why is Ghostbusters opinion is wrong on Twitter and Facebook.