Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie

What’s the big deal, nobody remembers the 1977 craze of Salòday Night Fever?

Totally forgot about this, but there used to be double feature drive-ins in Illinois. I went to one when I was 4 and have vague memories about it, but I think they were all gone by the end of the ‘90s.

I’ll probably catch Barbie later and skip Oppenheimer but the whole double feature concept is a nice bit of nostalgia. I do it all the time during the summer (A/C helps as do an easy, quick lunch breaks that are typically around my go-to theaters) but it’s especially nice when they’re programmed as such. Film Forum used to do a lot of ones and the summer before the pandemic had a great one on the ‘80s programmed by Jim Hoberman courtesy of Lincoln Center.

Forgot about this too, but the kids I used to babysit back home told me they and their friends used to hang out inside the multiplex and just see movies all day for essentially the price of one (obviously not what you’re supposed to do).

The weather in most places is helping people want to spend upwards of 5 hours in an air conditioned theater too.

When you don’t have AC at home, it’s really hard to leave the theater - I’ve spent entire 100 degree days at MoMA watching movies.

In Westwood after seeing “Oppenheimer,” Quentin Tarantino walks across the street and buys a ticket to see “Barbie.” pic.twitter.com/w7TdfCE04n

— Saul Gonzalez (@SaulGonzalezCA) July 23, 2023

I took 1 star reviews of #Barbie from furious men on letterboxd and put them on the posters because it makes the film seem ever cooler. pic.twitter.com/V4YzmnB8bj

— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) July 23, 2023

"confusingly attractive" one is my favourite

Barbie vs Oppenheimer: Which is the most searched movie in the Balkans in the last 24 hours pic.twitter.com/NdGhhZ9IUw

— kos_data (@kos_data) July 22, 2023

Cultural divide

Ope, even bigger...

#Barbie opening weekend has soared to $164 million, a big jump from Sunday’s already record-breaking estimate of $155 million. https://t.co/h1HwxXYFA8

— Variety (@Variety) July 24, 2023

Walter Chaw's take sorta reads like Armond White's review as written by a reasonable person: https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2023/07/barbie.html

You're better off tracking down a bootleg of Todd Haynes's Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, in which the singer's downfall as she struggled with an eating disorder and the social pressures on a woman in the spotlight is told exclusively through the use of Barbie dolls. Mattel's had that one hidden away in copyright limbo for decades now. Funny, that.

this is reasonable?

Stereotypical Barbie not having a vagina is fascinating, however, and I wish they would have shown her naked: hairless and nipple- and vagina-free. Ditto Ken, who jokes about his smooth genital mound without our ever getting to regard the Cronenbergian uncanniness of an entirely castrated Ryan Gosling.

Question: if they showed Barbie or Ken naked but smooth, with no genitalia or nipples, like the dolls (that kids play with), would the movie have gotten an R?

Undermentioned "Barbie" stat is that the movie runs under two hours, which allows for more screenings and hopefully encourages others to cut down a bit on bloat.

I think the entire review is reasonablein the sense that is that it is a take that considers the film in terms what it appears to be trying to do, and fails.

Again, haven't seen, and probably won't, but it strikes me as reasonable to expect that a film that aspires to a metacommentary on an iconic product to explore the full implications of its subject.

oh crumbs, my mate watched it at the weekend and said it was mostly awful.

The more I read the WC review, the more sane Arm0nd's take almost seems in comparison?

("The devil you know" etc.)

can't believe they dedicated this movie to valerie solanas.

The post-credit sequence, which was just a supercut of Town Bloody Hall, was also a shock

This is the track they should have put over the end credits:

https://soundcloud.com/lighghtmusic/lighght-pulse-b-aqua-x-youngstar

saw it this weekend, it's hilarious and yes America Ferrera's monologue is unsubtle but it also got cheers at my screening so it clearly works. The movie has what I would describe as a degree of metacommentary that blockbuster audiences will find interesting without being alienating (no, you don't get any Cronenbergian body horror and the folk biology of a come-to-life Barbie is not in fact fully realized or consistent, but then they couldn't manage that in Blade Runner 2049 either so I'm not sure why it's an issue here). Only weird thing is that it's a movie about Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken pretty much steals the entire show.

Gosling was great in it but at a certain point I did think "okay, that's enough of you."

Since Barbie and Ken have no genitals, it wouldn't have hurt to have shown him nude a couple times imo

You're better off tracking down a bootleg of Todd Haynes's Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, in which the singer's downfall as she struggled with an eating disorder and the social pressures on a woman in the spotlight is told exclusively through the use of Barbie dolls. Mattel's had that one hidden away in copyright limbo for decades now. Funny, that.

Funny, but wrong. It's Richard Carpenter that has blocked distribution of Superstar.

I unequivocally do not think Gosling steals the entire movie. Robbie is magnificent in it.

Yeah, Gosling has just enough screen time. Also: he has a gift for not overdoing his effects when he senses we might be tiring of him.

it is a take that considers the film in terms what it appears to be trying to do, and fails.

Again, haven't seen, and probably won't,

ok then

Again, haven't seen, and probably won't, but it strikes me as reasonable to expect that a film that aspires to a metacommentary on an iconic product to explore the full implications of its subject.

expectation is a prison, etc

I saw it last night, loved it, generally. The music is great! I loved the “Hi, Barbie” song and the “I’m Just Ken” sequence

It did feel strange that the film’s larger crux was about the crisis of modern masculinity rather than anything present-tense feminism. Also it did feel like it had an essentialist thesis, the denouement was nice and appealing ”Barbie becomes human woman, acquires a vagina” but, well, yeah. I had fun

Called my kids, who are seeing the movie today with their conservative grandmother, to make sure they know what "patriarchy" and "gynecologist" mean.

me: "Do you know what a gynecologist is?"

8 year old: "A scientist that studies guys?"

No that's an anthbropologist

i think one of the points the movie is trying to make is that the full implications of its subject are the full implications of, well, a lot of things

Gosling was all I heard anyone talking about walking out of the theater afterwards... perhaps he benefitted from his musical number being at the end instead of the beginning

Miss this Brody driveby until now:

Barbenheimer '57: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? vs. Bridge on the River Kwai (OK, not same opening day but same idea)

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) July 19, 2023

I'm driving by it, yes.

If you think “Barbie” vs. “Oppenheimer” is hype, remember that Christopher Nolan had “The Dark Knight” open against “Mamma Mia!” in July 2008.

Incredible battle. pic.twitter.com/MaBpHhDqNk

— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) July 19, 2023

Details he added:

Mamma Mia:

$609m on a $55m budget
(~11x return on production budget)

The Dark Knight:

$1B on $185m budget
(~5x return on production budget)

would rather rewatch mama mia than TDK

Here we go again

A non-exhaustive list of all of the so-called "woke" things the #Barbie brand has been doing for years that conservatives don't know about because all of their outrage is fake and they've literally never been Barbie's core audience. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/3PKGEetQ4m

— BJ Colangelo (STRIKE FIRST! STRIKE HARD!) (@bjcolangelo) July 23, 2023

wait - I'm starting to think this isn't a biopic about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Barbie ?

Phew, finally saw it. My guess that it was secretly a musical sorta held up!

Expectations fulfilled, great set design, fun cast, tons of good jokes - occasionally a bit basic and essentialist but it wears it well.

Feel like the whole corporate part of the story could've been done without, there was enough juice in the mother-daughter stuff, the existential crisis and the Barbie/Ken stuff. No real major spoilers forthcoming but just in case: The scene of Barbie discovering all the Mattel execs are male as part of her blackpilling is good, but after that they don't fulfill a consistent role, they're kind of antagonists but also ultimately "good" (Ferrel refusing to just go with the Ken version even though it's selling well) and end up not really doing much of anything - a few funny moments but they could all have been better delivered by the Kens imo. Also I love Rhea Pearlman as any right thinking person does but that final speech felt endless and failed to hit, the previous resolution was satisfactory and I get it had to end with the focus on Barbie herself but it didn't really deliver.

This movie is such an interesting intertwining of things that are really interesting and fun, with all the countervailing choices that have to neutralize those and turn them into "have your cake and eat it too" material. I had a lot of fun watching it, no regrets, also loved all the design work, most of the jokes, and the overall plot idea of a redpilled Ken trying to remake the Barbie universe as a dude-bro playboy paradise, albeit a sexless one. But I wasn't delighted in the way I could tell most of the crowd was.

For me, all the Mattel scenes just highlight the decision to address critiques of Barbie solely in terms of "is she a good role model," which quickly swerves away from a quick litany of actual real life critiques (consumerism, 'math is hard,' etc.) to "well, we all agree that Barbie has always tried to offer an amazing array of career role models, but how can we reckon with the fact that despite this, patriarchy endures?" This self-pitched softball is not exactly hit out of the park; the film just talks about it a lot, and sort of lands on this jumbled brand-messaging slogan as a thesis: "Well, Barbie was trying her best to inspire us, and Mattel was too, even though they were a bunch of men only trying to sell toys, except Will Ferrel who sort of believes in the dream in a doofy way." Critiques of Barbie in terms of body image issues get lip service at best. Very disappointingly there is exactly one non-skinny Barbie, who is basically not a character. (A tangent to this: "Weird Barbie" is also barely weird at all - did Gerwig and McKinnon have funkier visions that got quashed?)

A related shortcoming, I think, is the VERY clear decision to not do anything with the plain fact that millions of kids used these toys as avatars of their limited knowledge of adult sexuality. Everybody I've talked to who played with Barbies as a kid has commented on this --- it's like THE biggest thing you'd be hoping to see explored in a satirical Barbie comedy for adults. You have to imagine that was on some of the creators' minds, and that it was an absolute 'no' from the toy company.

I actually thought it was the mother-daughter material that felt grafted on --- as if someone at Mattel insisted there needed to be a kid-friendly aspect of the story, and Gerwig did her best to shave it down to a minimum. The result is that those characters kind of get lost for long stretches, and feel like they're missing the setups to their own climaxes, for me anyway.

A related shortcoming, I think, is the VERY clear decision to not do anything with the plain fact that millions of kids used these toys as avatars of their limited knowledge of adult sexuality.

Explain?

this is secondhand but: i am told that one major way of playing with Barbie was to put Barbies and/or Kens in bed and/or sexual situations together. a way of gaining a grip on 'what adults do,' or of beginning to realize one's own inchoate desires/fantasies, etc. the film engages very briefly with the idea that we'll see a Barbieland existence that reflects the way Barbie is played with, for example floating down from her house rather than descending on stairs. that's dropped like a hot potato in general, but at least for my crew, it really highlights the forms of play that we don't see.

I do agree with the comment upthread about the Mattel execs. when they returned at the very end, I actually had forgotten they'd traveled to Barbieland in the first place.

Overall I did enjoy this a lot, though nothing made me laugh more than hundreds of Kens singing Matchbox 20's "Push" simultaneously

also very good points Doc C!

oh I see. Actually, I was thrown out of the movie during that Ken-Barbie exchange about sleeping together. Barbie responds (I paraphrase): "And do what?" The audience roared.