Ghostbusters

Gender-flipping genre films can have huge appeal—if they get past the clichés.

Jaime Weinman on why we shouldn’t look to ‘all-female’ versions of anything to solve Hollywood’s gender balance problems

Not only is Ghostbusters still popular, it may have created a new kind of film comedy

It’s a stuffed animal house

Ghostbusters mogul blesses a gem from Quebec, and our critic skis to a silver medal

So a blond walks into a courtroom, A royal plot goes for naught, and a partridge in a pear tree

Newsmakers of the week

Strange days for Canadian auteurs. David Cronenberg is making a movie with Tom Cruise. And Atom Egoyan is making a movie for Ivan Reitman. Ivan has hired Atom to direct Chloe, a remake of a French erotic intrigue that’s now being shot in Toronto. It’s Egoyan’s first feature based on a script he didn’t write, and it’s also quite a departure for Reitman, best known as the man who gave us Ghostbusters. I wrote about this odd creative marriage in this week’s issue of Maclean’s. And I was on the set at the Windsor Arms hotel to shoot a video of our photo shoot. Here is the result:

I was wondering what would be Time-Life’s next complete series set after its successful mega-packages of Get Smart and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. I have to admit that “The Real Ghostbusters,” a late ’80s cartoon series based on the film, was not high on my list of shows I wanted to see in a big 26-disc(!) set. It wasn’t bad for an ’80s Saturday morning cartoon, and the choice of Lorenzo Music to voice Peter Venkman was the next best thing to actually getting Bill Murray (Murray and Music sound similar enough that Murray took over as the voice of Garfield the Cat after Music died), but any show that got re-tooled to focus more on Slimer is not a show that I’d pay Time-Life prices for. Still, it’s good that they’re continuing with the complete-series sets, I just hope their next project is a little less DIC-ish.