I was rewatching John Landis's Animal House a few months ago when it occurred to me that I was rooting for Dean Wormer. He gets the best line in the film, after all: "Drunk, fat, and stupid is no way to go through life, son." Best, because in the grand scheme of things, it's so true it hurts. All of the Deltas in Animal House are dicks of the first order, who are only "better" than their more uptight rivals by virtue of being designated anti-establishment anti-bourgeois smartasses. This sort of thing was big in the 1970s. Indeed, I've always chafed at most of the National Lampoon-derived films from that era: Caddyshack? Chevy Chase's character is a total dick. The Blues Brothers? Jake Blues is a total dick (Elwood is kind of a cypher). Stripes? Bill Murray's character is a total dick. Trading Places? Well, that film gets by on an attitude of anti-racism until it fumbles it all at the end with Dan Ackroyd's blackface Jamaican disguise (would that character actually do that? I think not) and a joke about one of the villains getting serially raped by a gorilla. Gross. Murray's Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters? Man, that character is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Who takes sedatives with him on a prospective date? A guy who is using his "research" to creep on blonde coeds, that's who. And what about that blowjob Ray gets from a ghost? Again, gross. So when I say that I think the new Ghostbusters (2016, directed by Paul Feig) is an improvement on the original, you should bear in mind that I don't think all that much of the original beyond a certain nostalgia for my moviegoing youth. The new film, for all its faults, doesn't ask me to identify with dickish and unlikable central characters.
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