Second Look

So let's get this out of the way right up front: I believe there are very few things wrong with this planet that cannot somehow be linked back to our current "president." So very much of what is vile and bilious can be followed upstream to his gaping maw. He positively emanates negativity. It is his very nature.
But I draw the line at Ghostbusters.
Recently, director Paul Feig has been insisting that it was the pro-Trump and anti-Hillary forces that was the undoing of his 2016 reboot of the 1984 original. The reaction at that time was a loud and misogynistic one. Feig's version, you see, had a cast of women taking over for Bill Murray and his crew. Those voices were pretty loud and pretty vicious. Then-candidate Donald "Rotten Tomato" Trump had his opinion: "And now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women! What’s going on?!” A pretty cranky old man thing to say, but compared to his typical anti-woman rants it doesn't hold a lot of weight. The third American president to be impeached has said much, much worse things about women. He has certainly had more awful things to say about the relative state of cinema since he became president. 
And please understand that I am in complete agreement with anyone who suggests that women have a much more difficult path in any industry, and Hollywood may be the nastiest place to find that out. A liberal sanctuary, with all the same testosteroni underpinnings as the rest of the country, often disguised as a more accepting and welcome landing spot. One need only to look at the relative salaries of women in the motion picture business and read just one essay on the objectification of women on screen to feel the need to wash your hands for more than twenty seconds. 
But maybe the 2016 Ghostbusters just wasn't that great. It was a remake, after all. Sorry, reboot. A reboot of an established classic of its genre. Getting past the obvious comparisons is a terrible chore for anyone, and if you don't deliver something profoundly unique then it will probably suffer by comparison. My quick review goes like this: It was pretty funny. There were not a lot of surprises, and I would imagine that if you had never seen the original this would do in a pinch. 
The trouble is when you start pitching an all-female cast as a gimmick. This would be a dividing line between a film like Bridesmaids, which brought its strength from story and characters not just a bunch of women acting just as gross as a bunch of men. Part of my reaction to the 2016 version of Ghostbusters hinged on the idea that "it can't be that bad." And it wasn't. 
It just wasn't that good. 
And that's probably the "president's" fault anyway.