Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie

While I’m not so far off Alfred’s level of enthusiasm, or at least engagement, this is also to a degree a victim of what happens when something needs to be everything to everyone, which makes it the perfect movie for our resolutely absolutist times I guess

Weirdly enough, this is the first of GG’s movies that made me question what I regarded previously as her unimpeachable pop instincts. Three consecutive satirical musical numbers?

Have adjusted my expectations to expect this to be a *** film that still exhibits a lot of creativity and intelligence but ultimately is constrained by its blockbuster status, and if that's the case do hope Gerwig opts for a "one for them, one for me" model.

You and PBrad on the same page, Daniel:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/19/barbie-review-greta-gerwig-delirious-bubblegum-fantasy

Probably means this is a 5-star movie in that case.

do you mean Bradshaw is particularly harsh? lots of 4 stars in his recent reviews.

if it's more "if he didn't like it it must be great" I'd say *** still translates to "he liked it".

Lol@

"In interviews about Barbie, Gerwig has referenced Milton and Powell and Pressburger: judging from this, I would say the influences are Toy Story, Pinocchio and Clueless."

Why does Bradshaw have a job for life?

It me.

certified haters seeing a monstrously hyped movie get a mediocre review pic.twitter.com/KacIupgJaF

— Aidan James (@mcandidate) July 19, 2023

"In interviews about Barbie, Gerwig has referenced Milton and Powell and Pressburger: judging from this, I would say the influences are Toy Story, Pinocchio and Clueless."

The influences are generally about as surface as the 2001 opening. Late in the movie, the Kens have a dance number that's on basically the same soundstage as Singin' in the Rain's chiffon ballet

“do you mean Bradshaw is particularly harsh?”

No, I mean BS gives it 5-stars, it’s almost certainly a medicore middlebrow wash, but a lukewarm review normally means he just hasn’t got it, in my experience.

Upon sleeping on it, I am more heartened by its laser-precise decimation of male-centric cinephilia. The joke at Zach Snyder fanboys' expense alone was worth the entire undertaking.

Caspar is hardly a film bro -- though he is mediocre -- and here he is asking the important question:

"does the phrase “selling out” have any meaning any more?"

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/19/barbie-indie-director-film-maker-greta-gerwig

IMO “selling out” never had any meaning beyond “I don’t need to support myself with my artistic endeavor”

To be fair, this is a movie kinda sorta engineered to generate every sort of bad take imaginable

exactly

Can't believe someone is trying to revive "selling out".

Let's do this properly: Haneke to direct he-man or gtfo.

might be an improvement on his last couple films tbh

Greta Gerwig covers the latest issue of ELLE UK. pic.twitter.com/dQHEBDHDRm

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) July 19, 2023

The joke at Zach Snyder fanboys' expense alone was worth the entire undertaking.

I guess death of monoculture means this is different for everyone and obv it's different if you're a film critic but man, it's been years since I've encountered any mention of Zack Snyder fandom that hasn't been at its expense.

Nah, that was a joke by Baumbach aimed squarely at his partner-in-beef Arm0nd

“do you mean Bradshaw is particularly harsh?”

No, I mean BS gives it 5-stars, it’s almost certainly a medicore middlebrow wash, but a lukewarm review normally means he just hasn’t got it, in my experience.

― Chewshabadoo, Wednesday, 19 July 2023 bookmarkflaglink

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/19/oppenheimer-review-nolans-atom-bomb-epic-is-flawed-but-extraordinary

Got our RPX tickets for the Sat late show. I'm kind of excited! I also don't think I've ever seen a movie in RPX and also have no idea what it means.

The first trailer was a bunch of jokes about jacking off and the reviews are all talking about its references to Kubrick and Coppola and Snyder and like... This all sounds really smug and obnoxious for a movie ostensibly made for children?

It's not

it doesn't seem like it was made for children

Also, by "the reviews" I mean Armond White's review where he says the adult references aren't for kids (This seems like a valid complaint) and the feminist angle also isn't for kids (This is obv batshit)

I have read that the whole nine-dash line map thing, with which China claims most of the South China sea close to the borders of Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines and surrounding Taiwan, is the reason why Vietnam has banned the film

I haven't seen the film, but the one image I saw from it purporting to represent the offensive scene had a childish map of the whole world upside down and Asia portrayed sideways with some dashes coming out of it in no particular order.

It's surprising to me to see such a strong reaction, I certainly don't think anybody in this country who sees it would possibly make a connection

I wonder what the people who did the art direction for the movie are thinking about that

from what I've seen of the promos, there have to be many more egregiously wrong-footed and outright tacky things about the film, but I'm still really looking forward to it

Let's do this properly: Haneke to direct he-man or gtfo.

In which He-Man beats an unsuspecting family to death with a golf club.

Seriously, man, fuck that guy and his fucking movies, apart from "Caché."

David Cronenberg's He-Man

David Lynch Presents Thundercats

The first trailer was a bunch of jokes about jacking off and the reviews are all talking about its references to Kubrick and Coppola and Snyder and like... This all sounds really smug and obnoxious for a movie ostensibly made for children?

― sean paul akerman (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, 20 July 2023 bookmarkflaglink

You should review stuff for a living.

I have read that the whole nine-dash line map thing, with which China claims most of the South China sea close to the borders of Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines and surrounding Taiwan, is the reason why Vietnam has banned the film

I haven't seen the film, but the one image I saw from it purporting to represent the offensive scene had a childish map of the whole world upside down and Asia portrayed sideways with some dashes coming out of it in no particular order.

It's surprising to me to see such a strong reaction, I certainly don't think anybody in this country who sees it would possibly make a connection

I agree it's obviously a gag, not a political statement, and not saying Vietnam was right to ban it lol, but I also don't think it's surprising at all - being neighbours with an aggressive global power tends to make you touchy about things like this, even moreso when it's a power US studios have a semi-official policy of pandering to. In the end the movie got lucky with where it squiggled its lines really, imagine the online discourse if they had put Russia over Ukranian territory.

Ok.

surely this––a world in which acclaimed and successful and award-winning auteurs can only rise above the microbudget by directing advertisements for toys––represents capital's final destruction of the concept of human culture https://t.co/Xc0jl1wJdt

— Ben Miller (@benwritesthings) July 20, 2023

Surely

The Uno Movie. Draw 4 - Friend or Foe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY_TiaJGjdo

From the New Yorker article:

If some movies are toyetic, many toys are in no way cinematic: there’s precious little human drama to be mined from such games as Flushin’ Frenzy or UNO. “Look, my kids and I played UNO every night during the pandemic. I love it,” Barber said. “Is there an UNO movie? I don’t know!”

When I met Marcy Kelly, a cheerful thirty-eight-year-old who has become Mattel’s de-facto screenwriter and punch-up artist, last November, she recalled the moment when Kevin McKeon asked her if she wanted to pitch a script based on the card game: “My reaction was the reaction that everybody has, which is ‘What?’ ” McKeon, she said, sent her a slide deck that “highlighted how cross-cultural the game is, and funny things about how seriously people take it, and little seeds of ideas for things to work into a movie,” including “a meme of Beyoncé holding UNO cards.” The mandate, inexplicably, was for a heist movie.

Kelly got to work. The script she emerged with wasn’t quite what Mattel had had in mind. She’d set “UNO” in Atlanta’s hip-hop scene. “The first draft that I sent in was ‘fuck’-heavy,” she recalled, sheepishly. An executive flagged every instance of the obscenity in the screenplay. “It was something like fifty pages,” she said. “And then the next draft had one. I got my one, well-placed, PG-13 ‘fuck.’ ”

Kelly stressed that, despite such censorship, Mattel had given her real creative freedom. “They’ve been open to so many kinds of unexpected ideas,” she said. She’d submitted screenplays for four titles, and ran the writers’ room for several others, including one about Bob the Builder. The work had helped her find her footing in the industry; before joining the company, she was best known for her contributions to the mobile game Mean Girls: Senior Year.

If Kelly sometimes struggled to please Mattel, the executives didn’t always seem to know what they wanted, either. Not long after we spoke, her “UNO” script was set aside, and a one-day writers’ room took another run at a concept. A heist, Mattel reasoned, might not be the way forward after all. Some bank vaults can’t be cracked.

Looks like Lil Yachty had been attached at some point.

Look, until we get to the point that Barbie and Capt. Uno are seen asking the Magic 8 Ball questions in the background of a scene from Planet Popple, I'm still less annoyed at this admittedly early point in the cycle than I was approximately three Marvel movies in

How quickly we all forget the "Battleship" movie. Movies based on games, movies based on toys, movies based on theme park rides, live action remakes of animated musicals, movie musicals based on stage musicals based on books inspired by movie musicals ... at least the Marvel movies are based on stories, not objects.

I just found out that Mattel purchased Bluebird toys in the 90s, and I've decided that I'm ok with talented auteurs being forced to waste their talents on toy commercials if it means we get that Manta Force film I've been waiting for since I was 6.

Directed by Celine Song?

"Clue: The Movie" ... was this the first film of this kind, based on a game or toy?

Apparently so, quickly followed by The Garbage Pail Kids Movie and Masters of the Universe

How many millions of dollars have been spent on the Monopoly movie that hasn't even been filmed yet? It's gone from a Ridley Scott comedy, to a Goonies knock-off with no director, to a serious Ridley Scott movie compared to Blade Runner, to a Kevin Hart movie that will probably get cancelled because of the strike.

The Monopoly plot where it last stood...

The story starts off with a montage of Chuck as a child growing up and how monopoly has always been there for him. The first time he played it with his parents, the first time he bought a property, the first time he landed on a space with a hotel on it and flipped the board, arguing over the real rules of the game v.s. “house rules” that other use, him playing too aggressively while on a first date with a girl thus ruining his chances for a second date. You know, things we have all done. The montage ends with Chuck rolling the dice on himself, after noticing that his childhood neighborhood is taking a dark turn toward the vilest of beasts, gentrification.

Chuck creates a business plan to save his neighborhood, which he is going to propose to his bosses the Alpha Brothers, he calls the plan “Gentrification with a Soul.” His bosses love it, except they hate the soul part, you see, soul affects profit margins. So, now his neighborhood is going to get gentrified worse than New York. For those of you that don’t know, used to have the nickname “Fear City” but that’s all changed now that Harlem is full of kids from LA with rich parents.

His mother, who thinks his proposal went off like a success, surprises him with a gift, a first edition monopoly board. Not wanting to break the bad news to his mother, he does not tell her what happened. Little does Chuck know this board is special, and the next day he is in for a rude awakening when he goes to buy his morning cup of coffee, all he has is Monopoly money, his pockets are overflowing with the colorful cash that looks like Canadian money. The barista happily takes the cash, which is weird, but what’s even weirder is what he sees outside. That’s right, he’s in Monopoly world.

Praying for a Stratego movie.

"Turn around, sir . . . good Lord, you're the Field Marshal!"

Give me Fireball Island or give me the fake jewel

The Stratego film would be funny if some filmmaker signed on just to use it as a chance to make a big-budget Napoleonic Wars film.

Kinda akin to Joe Johnston finally getting his big-budget WWII dieselpunk film (of sorts) by doing the first Captain America.