Quick Review: Ghostbusters

I have to say I was a bit concerned with the social media and other commentary regarding Ghostbusters, the latest franchise reboot, being a bad idea because the Ghostbusters are now women. After all these years Hollywood is still unfair to women, whether it's the type of roles and scripts they're offered or their pay compared to male actors. So I made sure I saw it during opening weekend, and the box office report says it earned $46 million.

And it deserves it, because despite a bit of a slow start to set things up, it's quite funny. The new 'busters (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones) work well together, and Chris Hemsworth gets to ham it up as their receptionist, hired despite being dumb as a post but pretty to look at. The plot involves a scheme to open a portal to release malevolent spirits and bring on the apocalypse. There's a post-credits scene to set up a sequel, and though I tend to frown on them I want one in this case. If nothing else, it may help shut up the sexist Twitter trolls...no, they're like the cockroaches that will survive nuclear holocaust. My grade: B-plus.

P.S. Classic title song >>>>> New theme song.

My Halloween Playlist

In the past I've written about my playlist of summer music. (Not going to bother posting the links. You can search for them if you want.) I haven't done so recently, and now that we're past summer it doesn't seem like the time, but I'll mention in passing that it's up to 213 songs (plus five mixtape compilations from DJ Jazzy Jeff and his DJ cohort MICK, formerly Mick Boogie). A while back I created a playlist for winter as well, but I don't have many songs on it. There's no special vibe about a winter song, unlike summer songs. As a result, I only have songs with "cold" or "chill" or similar words in the title. So I need to work on that at some point.

I also have a Halloween playlist. It's now up to 77 tracks, including TV and movie themes, songs that are obviously Halloween-centric and others that merely have a word such as "evil" or "ghost" somewhere in the title and aren't necessarily (or aren't at all) scary or creepy. It's just over five hours long. (And I've got a list of songs I need to add to my iTunes library.) Instead of listing them by artist or alphabetically, I'm gonna group them here based on various keywords or other categories...