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‘Ghostbusters’: An embarrassment for Hollywood
Film: “Ghostbusters”; Director: Paul Feig; Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon,Chris Hemsworth; Rating: *
Who are you gonna call?….goes the anthemic Ghostbusters song which we grew up on. Many times, while watching in reverberent repulsion, this rib-heckling franchise-buster I wondered the same.
Whom do we call to escape the drudgery of a film so awful, it makes us want to swear off successful film franchises forever. It isn’t just the abysmal lack of scriptural substance that rankles. It is the sheer wannabe-ness of a project that sucks from the word go.Whoever thought this pathetic apology of a plot would sustain “Ghostbusters” through a third film deserves to be certified and institutionalize for hysterical optimism.
“Ghostbusters” is so riddled with ridiculous gags and sickeningly misogynist barbs that you wonder if the brains that wrote the script were actually playing a joke on the franchise.A kind of revenge of the nerds turned into turds.
The original film and its sequel came out a good 30 years ago. Director Ivan Reitmen conveyed a charming sense of infantile fun as the ghost-busters played by Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray set off on a mission to rid the planet of evil spirits. Now the original trio is no more.We get some of the original actors from “Ghostbusters” in cameos in this film. But they don’t quite fit in.
Swooping centrestage are three brassy tacky ladies whose foul-mouthed antics would have you reach for the barf bag, provided you can get to it faster than the next unsavoury gag that jumps at you.The trio of female ghostbusters is played by that gifted comedienne Melissa McCarthy who plays it cool to the point of exasperating coarseness, Kristen Wiig who plays it straight to offset McCarthy’s goofy doings, and Kate McKinnon who behaves as though she has just been accidentally electrocuted in an ill-tempered washing machine. They are joined by a Black American recruit who , we gather, works on a metro station where she has just seen …you guessed it… a ghost.
Significantly the plot turns the thumb-rules of male comedies upside down. While the ladies whoop it up like boys at a stag party where the booze has dried up long back, Chris Hemsworth plays the beefcake secretary , a sort of meat-machine that the women devour with their eyes and feast on with their libidos.Hemsworth has fun wriggling his booty and mouthing bimbo lines like, ‘Oh you mean, the glasses and the handsomeness?’ when someone calls him ‘Clark Kent’.
“Ghostbusters” squanders the spirit of satire in an orgy of extravagant asininity. Every successive episode struck as me as more stupid and bilgy that the previous. By the time the narrative creaked and huffed to its laughably apocalyptic climax (with FX so jejune I’ve seen better apocalypse on Shaktimaan) I was ready to jump out of the nearest exit.
Suicide, self-immolation and even a rapid repeat viewing of Anurag Kashyap’s “Bombay Velvet” is preferable to this sassy-going-on-soggy spook satire where women try to do exactly what the men did in the original “Ghostbuster”.
Cinema owners are advised to deploy emergency numbers for viewers who may just die watching green-coloured ghosts spewing thick gooey liquids on the actors who deserve what they get.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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