YES! Dramadies have found a sweet little niche that work far better than most outright comedies do these days. A nice mix of drama with some laughs can do far more than stretching hit-and-miss laughs across an entire film. Have you seen the trailer for the upcoming "Office Christmas Party" movie? That's a prime example of the type of lowest common denominator film the studios are making.

It stems from the days of comedies largely being the cheapest kinds of films to make because they're predominantly dialogue driven, or slapstick, but as audiences have come to expect more, high-concept films like "Spy" and it's ilk are starting to become more popular. I think the key indicator of where the genre has gone in the US is that moment Melissa McCarthy did a shit in a sink in Bridesmaids. Best joke of the film = studios go "lets have more of that please" because it's what dunderhead audiences reacted to most strongly.

Sorry if I came off a tad brusque mate, wasn't my intent. I was generalising my statement as a commentary overall rather than what you said earlier. 😉

Eeeeaaaassssy, Rodney. I'm most certainly not going to label you (or anyone else) a sexist for simply disliking this movie. One has to earn that title from me. That said, I totally agree comedy is the most subjective genre. It splits along national lines, gender lines, racial lines, age lines…it just continually fractures to the point where you get households like mine. There are five people living in my house, and often, five different ideas of what's funny. I suspect the rise in "shouty" American comedy is merely a case of studios seeking out the lowest common denominator. For the record, I'm sort of hit-and-miss when it comes to this. For instance, I generally like McCarthy, but can't stand Adam Sandler. I know, many consider them interchangeable, but it is what it is.

I do like some British humor, but some of it is lost on me. To be honest, these days, I find myself laughing more at dramas that incorporate humor, rather than straight-forward comedies. They seem to include funny things much more naturally. I suppose it's easier to do when being funny isn't the entire focus of your production. In good stories, which tend to be dramas, characters may often find themselves in funny situations as a function of their lives. Most comedies feel like a never-ending barrage of jokes, so everything is forced, and yes, unfunny. Still, more of the jokes in Ghostbusters landed for me than a lot of other recent comedies, so I'm okay with that.

To clarify: yes, the post-millennial trend towards shouty obnoxiousness. Up until it became fashionable to push the bounds of vulgarity and simply scream at people to be funny, I've lost all interest in American comedy. High volume and broad crude language only go so far before they become tiresome. The likes of Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Melissa McCarthy, Kevin Hart, and to a lesser degree Will Ferrel and his mates, have brought a coarseness to American comedy that I personally find hard to take much of.

I agree, American comedic output has typically been terrific – the early silent film performers (Chaplin, Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle), through the forties, fifties and sixties (Astaire, Marx Brothers, Stooges, Bob Hope and his colleagues, et al) right through to the 80's work of Pryor, Carlin, Candy etc etc, are rightfully legends of the medium.

Do you mean you dislike recent American comedy, or the entirety of it? I suspect you mean recent, because it has become "shouty" and annoying. I agree with you there. But overall, I think the American comedy output has been phenomenal over the years. I mean, just look at all the great stuff like Ghostbusters, a lot of Bill Murray's work, the John Hughes stuff, Woody Allen films (at least the early ones), Rob Reiner, the Cohen Brothers, and let's not forget Mel Brooks, the man is a national treasure. Sorry for the rant, after all, I'm pretty sure you just meant recent stuff.

The trouble with anyone who criticises this film has been that they're labelled sexist or whatever for daring to dislike a film with four women as the lead (I guess). Which means giving it a drubbing for finding it patently forced and unfunny (i don't find American screamy-humour to be terribly amusing) equates to a lot of people thinking I somehow hate women. To that end I've tried to find legitimate arguments in my rebuttal to the film's very existence. Having said that: I think the idea of it being some kind of meta-gender-swap comedy simply for its own sake was a terrible idea. The film never plays up that element as farcical like it ought if that's the tone they were aiming for, resulting it it either being mean spirited (no, not a fan of the Hemsworth dumb-blonde role – take a look at Annie Potts' original character in the first film, who is not the sharpest tool in the shed but certainly never played for cheap gimmicky laughs on that score) or flat-out grating.

To be fair, comedy is probably *the* most subjective film genre going these days; I'm a big fan of British humour, less so of American humour, which could be accurately described as bias on my part towards disliking the film in the first place. But there's been some great comedy films this year – Bad Moms was one I saw most recently, and as much as the film was fairly pedestrian overall, I had some genuinely good chuckles out of that – and if only Ghostbusters had spent more on character, making these people likeable rather than tiresome or annoying, it might have struck me in the right way. It's probably for this reason you see so few comedy film reviews on my site. I tend to find the genre out of America has become largely annoying.

Ha ha, thanks man. I really enjoyed writing this one. Way more than I enjoyed the film. It's a shame, because as much as I genuinely tried to give this film a chance to succeed, despite my misgivings, but it never achieved anything near what was needed to rectify the hate and bile shoved in its direction. I really do think Ghostbusters should be a studio cautionary tale about how to piss off franchise fans and the public generally with a creatively bankrupt usurpation of a known property in the chase for dollars.

It was a bad idea to begin with, and the result is simply the product of that badness.