Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Bill Murray in the original Ghostbusters (1984)

Ghostbusters (2016): a Hillary Clinton Story

It’s been the guts of a year since the height of the boom industry of Ghostbusters (2016) opinion pieces, and, I guess, since Ghostbusters (2016). The thousands upon thousands of words written about Ghostbusters were many things, but mostly they were exhausting. For months before the film was released, the Internet was alight both with backlash against the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters and with subsequent condemnation of the backlash as sexism. Somehow an all-female remake of an eighties comedy about hunting ghosts became a touchstone of socio-political debate in a year where the UK voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump was elected the American president.

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the clock on the Hudsucker building in the snow in The Hudsucker Proxy, with the words "The Future is Now"

In Defense of The Hudsucker Proxy

Joel and Ethan Coen make two types of films. Both types are comedies.

The first type sometimes gets mistaken for a drama. They’re the dark comedies that usually operate within a specific genre. Some of these are easily spotted – even Wikipedia calls Fargo a comedy – but it’s easy to get distracted by how serious they look on the surface. The Man Who Wasn’t There is a black-and-white period noir, which somehow overrides that the whole film is set in motion by someone coming up with this totally crazy idea he’s calling “dry cleaning”. The closest to a true drama that the Coens have directed is probably No Country for Old Men, but it has a huge amount of funny hair for a very serious, tense movie.

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