Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie

I haven’t seen anyone else describe it in those terms but it really does feel that way - I almost want to compare it to a typical Pixar movie where it doesn’t shy away from exploring complex ideas but has a broad and direct approach to the way it presents them, self-conscious that it’s trying to reach a much younger audience too.

And it has one of the all time greatest closing lines ever. Up there with "Some like it Hit" easy.

Hot

Damn speling korrector

"Forget it, Ken. It's Barbieland."

"Barbies everywhere, I absolve you! I absolve you!"

"You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

I definitely lolled when the car radio switch from Indigo Girls to Matchbox 20.

finally saw this. probably never thought i'd enthuse about a Barbie movie but it was generally great. i thought Gosling was grade A but Robbie was def even better, truly A++. i thought America Ferrera was great too - her speech could have felt vv perfunctory as far as messaging but it came from a true place, a good example of what this movie was being used to get across.

obv it had to balance pleasing Mattel w/giving the side-eye to Barbie to an extent, but it achieved that pretty well without feeling like it was product placement for a mega IP. which it was, but it didn't feel like a pandering take on things.

the Kendom stuff was great, we were dying at Ken's Century City epiphany.

oh and the Matchbox 20 zinging was solid work

to top off this extremely successful year, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach apparently got married and celebrated by seeing Billy Joel at MSG last night

Which one was right, and which one was crazy?

sounds like the plot to their next blockbuster collab

Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, Pauly Simon's feeling groovy
Rock and roller cola wars, Ken can't take it any more

Margot Robbie, plastic dolls
Ryan Gosling has no balls
We didn't start the fyah

A fun part of this (really good) directors' roundtable.

GERWIG (To Haynes) I was going to say, you made the original Barbie movie. There was a bootleg of it at Cannes.

COOPER I saw it in film school. At Georgetown, the teacher had a print of it. Am I going to jail?

HAYNES This is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

GERWIG It’s a wonderful thing that we’re sitting at the table right now because I think genuinely, you made (the Barbie movie’s backers) nervous about the possibilities about what it could be.

HAYNES Are you kidding? I mean, my use of Barbies was as a subtext to a story about how women’s bodies are commodified and this incredibly heartbreaking story of a young woman suffering from anorexia nervosa. But you took on the cultural meaning of Barbie, and you exploded it and also made a concoction … a confection that everybody could share.

It is a confection - campy, silly and fun - but it's hard for me to see it as anything more than that! A campy, silly, fun, dumb movie. The actors are serviceable, but imo they absolutely do not deserve any acting awards recognition whatsoever. Its innovations are slightly more cerebral than with a lot of current pulp movies, so maybe in 50 years it will be seen differently, but I don't know, I don't think so

Bringing Up Baby was a campy, silly, fun, dumb movie. And a stone cold classic.

maybe Barbie will be seen that way in the future to some extent, but I don't think it's a stone cold classic

But it is a Coldstone classic

https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2142604/36_16_1446_CSC_2023_Barbie_Digital_Assets_IG.jpg?p=publish

"serious films about serious men will - and, gentlemen, must! - prevail"

Don't really care what people 50 years from now think, I'll likely be dead. Travelling back in time and showing it to my grandparents in the 50's might be interesting tho.

so maybe in 50 years

come again?

Someday we’ll know

i'm just here to applaud jaymc ppl

Now I want Cold Stone and a dismantled patriarchy

like there are going to be 50 more years

I wonder how this movie reads to people who have no context of the toys (which will probably be even more true in 50 years) -- would it feel to them like Malibu Stacy in the Simpsons -- an invented reference to/pastiche of something else?

Not if the Mattel Corporation has anything to say about it!

like there are going to be 50 more years

somewhere there is a trash gyre community of barbies and i'm bitter gerwig didn't visit it

You mean here?

somewhere there is a trash gyre

...festival

trash gyre and gimble

First, who cares about the Oscars. But second, talking about the Oscars, it's all too fitting that this movie was nominated for best picture, but not best director or best actress, though Ken gets a nom for best supporting actor. Also, what's up with "Best Adapted Screenplay"? Adapted from what?

Adapted from the Barbie Lore

^not joking

Yes. https://variety.com/2024/film/awards/barbie-moved-adapted-screenplay-oscars-1235848136/

I guess anything adapted from an existing IP, even an inanimate object, counts a an adaptation. Like, I guess The Lego Movie was considered an adapted screenplay, too.

FUN FACT: In 2014, the Academy deemed THE LEGO MOVIE an adapted screenplay even though we had already won the National Board of Review Best Original Screenplay award — because it was based on LEGO bricks and had a LEGO version of Batman as a character https://t.co/UzTl9tS4jj

— Christopher Miller (@chrizmillr) January 4, 2024

And all sequels are adapted from the original film

So would anything incorporating an existing IP, like a Dracula or a Frankenstein('s Monster) or a Mickey Mouse or a Bugs Bunny, count as adapted? What about something like, I dunno, Spirit of the Beehive, which features lots of Frankenstein? Or anything that riffs on The Godfather, like Zootopia?

it's all too fitting that this movie was nominated for best picture, but not best director or best actress, though Ken gets a nom for best supporting actor

And Ferrera getting a nod for saying only "it sucks to be a woman, doesn't it?" for three minutes, and doing practically nothing else throughout the entire film

uh she did a lot more than that

Not compared to Robbie it isn't

well to be fair it is a supporting role nomination. but I agree her performance wasn’t particularly notable

The Maestro is nominated for Best Original Screenplay--kinda odd. Aren't biopics usually seen as adaptations of some sort? I mean someone had to have read a book or two about Bernstein.

They adapted Bradley's nose.

2023's Oscar Nominees

I think biopics can slide if they're not also explicitly based on specific works (i.e. Cooper & Singer based the script on research from several books, articles, interviews etc.).

I would argue that Barbie is probably a more original work than The Maestro