CEO who Fired 900 Employees via Zoom is Back

About six weeks ago Better.com CEO Vishal Garg was in the news for firing 900 employees via Zoom (my blog from then). It wasn't just that he fired them in a callous manner, BTW. He also insulted them as idiots and literal thieves, continuing a pattern of communication creating a hostile work environment. Under pressure from the public and the board of directors he took a leave of absence a few days later (Daily Beast article, 10 Dec 2021). This week he came back from leave to resume his role as CEO, proclaiming himself a changed person.

In a memo announcing Garg coming back off leave, the Better board of directors crowed that it is “Moving forward with strong, dynamic CEO leadership" (Tech Crunch article, 18 Jan 2022). While everyone can certainly hope Garg is a better person now, I doubt he's changed. His tirades against employees during and after the mass firing weren't just one botched move; they were part of a pattern of hostile behavior stretching back years. The board's actions smack of the "Promise change and lay low until it blows over, then go back to business as usual" school of PR.

It must be nice to be Garg, being able to come back to his old job with the slate wiped clean, unlike the 900 employees he fired and the many who resigned over his behavior.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife [no spoilers]

This week we watched Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It's playing in theaters as well as streaming on Amazon Prime and other services for $20. We opted to watch it at home. Paying $20 to watch it from my own couch irritated me, but we judged it was better than paying even more to see it at evening prices in a theater potentially full of coughing strangers and with the temptation to buy ridiculously overpriced drinks. At least at home I could pour myself a top shelf Manhattan.

The other reason I was apprehensive about paying $20 to watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife was that it wasn't reviewed well. Critics called it things like "Formulaic", "Corny", and "Fan service". But here the thing: it's not that bad.

There are elements of fan service. The main actors from the original all make at least cameo appearances, except Harold Ramis who passed away several years ago. Seeing the old characters is satisfying, though. And there are plenty of hooks back to the original. Some of them are played straight, like when characters watch file footage of the ghostbusters saving New York City in the 1980s; some of them are tongue-in-cheek, like when the small town sheriff challenges a character who's being held in custody and wants to use the phone, "Who you gonna call?"

Overall the plot is satisfying. It's fairly linear... but then so was the original. The main character, Phoebe, played by 12 year old Mckenna Grace, is charming. The trope of her being a super brainy 10 year old is pushed to a ridiculous extreme, though. Like, she looks at a busted proton pack and diagnoses it right away... and knows how to swap in spare parts. On the other hand, the kids get in plenty of snappy dialogue, like this:

Gozer: Are you prepared to die?
Phoebe: No. I'm 12. Are you?

The OGs get in some snappy lines, too.

Gozer: Are you... a god?
Winston: Ray?
Peter: Oh, come on, Ray.
Ray: YES.

Now that I write them out like this I see that they're probably way funnier to fans of the original movie than those who've never seen it. Consider that a fair assessment for whether you'd like this movie.

While ultimately the plot of the movie was fulfilling and the nostalgia factor came in at "just right"— not too much derivative from the original, not too little— what made it borderline unwatchable for me was its lack of aligning real world. I mean, yes, it's science fiction. There are ghosts and gates to hell and unlicensed nuclear accelerator backpacks. But the real-world setting bore too little relation to reality. These things interrupted my suspension of disbelief repeatedly:

• The setting is a fictional town in western Oklahoma. The film was actually shot in Alberta, Canada. The Canadian spellings on some signs (e.g., Centre vs. Center) didn't bother me, though. I barely noticed. Instead it's everything else....
• Once in town we quickly meet characters living there who are Black, Korean, Indian, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern. A small, remote, working class, south-central US town would not be racially diverse like this. I appreciate the effort toward inclusion, but it's not realistic for the story.
• Also speaking of a small, remote, working class, south-central US town, it would have Trump flags everywhere. Everywhere. Yes, even though the election was months before the summer 2021 setting of the movie. In fact, post-election half the flags and signs protest "TRUMP WON". In small town America these flags are ubiquitous virtue signalling. Seriously, without these it doesn't look like actual America.
• No guns. In this kind of area practically everyone has guns. Not just has them but displays them as part of their identity. I kept waiting for one of the "Oh, no, the monster's chasing me!" scenes to end with a few locals showing up with AR-15s. *blam* *blam* *blam* *blam* "blam* "Go back to where you came from."
• Another thing about summer 2021... no Covid. There's not a single indication it exists or ever existed. I get it that scriptwriters are happy to opt out of dealing with all the mess that the global pandemic has caused, but c'mon it's only completely changed everything about our lives over the past 2 years. And especially because there's a plot point late in the film about years in which major-fatality disasters occurred... how can you not portray the reality of Covid at all?
• Oh, and the film plays one of the usual cheap tropes about why the characters can't just solve their problems by calling each other on their cell phones. The whole town has no cell service. Totally weak.

All in all, these failures of portraying the reality of the situation in 2021/2022 read to me like the script was written 20 years ago and sat around until production was funded. Then they took the setting of "generic midwest small town America" and made it look like a Disneyland theme park full of visitors from Los Angeles.