NYT film critic Manohla Dargis: Love the new all-female “Ghostbusters” or I’ll kill your dog

From my latest blog post for the Independent Women’s Forum:

Laugh or die: Manohla says these women are funny–over and over till your head hurts

 

Here’s the headline, lifted from the text of Dargis’s piece: “Girls Rule. Women Are Funny. Get Over It.”

Is this a movie review or a threat?

And here’s how we, the audience, are supposed to react—or else:

“[W]hatever else you can say about the new ‘Ghostbusters,’ it’s a lot like the old ‘Ghostbusters,’  except that it stars four funny women instead of, you know, four funny men. In other words, it doesn’t have a lot of XY chromosomes and basso profondo voices….”

OK, Manohla, if you say the women in the new Ghostbusters are funny, they’re funny.

And in case we didn’t get the message, here’s Manohla telling us one more time that the women in the new Ghostbusters are funny—get it, they’re funny:

“’…Ghostbusters’ is also a female-friendship movie, but without the usual genre pro forma tears,  jealousies and boyfriends. Friendship here, even at its testiest, is a given, which means that [director Paul] Feig doesn’t have to worry it and can get on with bringing the funny with his stars and toys, his ghosts and laughs.”

Oh, and did I tell you that Manohla Dargis says the women in the new Ghostbusters are funny?

“Part of what makes ‘Ghostbusters’ enjoyable is that it allows women to be as simply and uncomplicatedly funny as men….”

And also:

“It’s no surprise then that Sony Pictures wanted to resurrect the ‘Ghostbusters’ franchise in some form, just as it’s no surprise that it took someone like Mr. Feig to figure out how to make it work, mostly, by not really messing with it. Even so, what he’s doing onscreen — by helping to redefine who gets to    be   funny in movies — is what makes him a thoughtful successor to original Ghostbusters director Harold] Ramis….”

There’s that “funny” again.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Charlotte Allen

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