Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie

Heh

Herzog has been greatly enjoying making fun of his role as Serious Documentary Maker - he's doing so in Orion and the Dark, the new animated movie written by Charlie Kaufman, and of course:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWxy9C5svFU

The world of Barbie was hellish. That is why Barbie chose to live in the real world instead, even though it is filled with suffering and injustice.

Just saw this, finally. Fun but too hetero.

Someone has to say, "Well, when he's in hell he'll think he's just in the Barbie movie," and I suppose it may as well be me.

Its funny bc I can totally imagine Herzog tossing off a cheeky joke about making a Barbie movie that matches the plot of the Barbie movie that we actually got. Like “Hollywood would NEVER allow me to make a Barbie movie because my version would be about Barbie slowly deteriorating and going insane as she realizes that she is only the plaything of a hopeless and death-obsessed mortal woman.”

the german word for house is already mojodojocasahaus

I'll see it two years from now and revive this thread so I can give all of you my fresh insights. ;-)

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, August 12, 2023 11:28 AM (seven months ago)

I'm well ahead of schedule here, but we watched this at home last night from a public library DVD on our smallish low-resolution television. I knew going in that we were too old to fit the intended audience, but this was a movie that grew into a phenomenon and that always interests me.

We laughed here and there, the production design was cartoony & clever & original, the music and dancing helped keep the pace bouncing along. Gerwig knew what it wanted to do and did it well, but as I said far upthread, when the object of your satire is vacuity your jokes are bound to cluster in a very limited range. As for the 'message', it was fine, though very basic and avoided any deep waters.

My overall opinion is that it was absolutely spot on for an audience of mothers with daughters in the range of about 12 to 16, and would be generally entertaining for more general audiences, with diminishing returns as the age of the viewer climbed above 40. These observations are not a criticism of how well conceived and executed it was. I can't imagine a Barbie movie could have been better done than this one and it clearly found a responsive chord in millions of people. So, we enjoyed it, but we just happened to be a bit too old to extract the maximum enjoyment. Not a problem, just a fact.

(also not a fact)

how do you come by this knowledge?

Well, I'm considerably older than 40, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I'm not saying you have to! But the bogus generalisations are... bogus

I think I came pretty close to maximum enjoyment. I wonder what's going to happen to me in the next 7-8 years to make that impossible to achieve.

xp otm

As long as we're here let's immortalize this too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhWqpvGq6b4

All-time, that lerfirm

Performance

John Grisham's Ler Firm

xps - Both of you are welcome to your opinions, but I think my saying "we enjoyed it, but we just happened to be a bit too old to extract the maximum enjoyment" is hardly the stuff of harsh criticism you seem to think.

We are 69 and 75 years old. That means we grew up in a somewhat different era of pop culture than someone who is at present 50 or 60. That fact won't change no matter how much more time passes. I made zero claims that this fact had any relevance other than it affected our frame of reference. My other generalization about diminishing returns above the age of 40 was based on the observation that the creators of the movie mainly wanted to speak to a life experience relevant to their imagined target audience and they chose their pop cultural frames of reference to match their audience. That PG-13 rating was not an accident. It's not like older people can't understand the frame, but its emotional meaning drifts further away as it becomes less an integral part of one's youth.

I don't think this anything I said was bogus. I was careful to use qualifiers and gradations to say what I consider some pretty innocuous things. But now I've said my say. Respond if you wish. It's not worth a prolonged argument.

It didn’t work for me either (I’m close to fifty, love Gerwig’s work) but I’m still trying to puzzle out why. My four year old’s quite into Barbie and I guess I slightly resented the impenetrable adultness of everything (for a very young person, not a teen or tween). I also struggled to stay interested once Perlman and Roth and Ferrera (so boring!) fell into the mix. I wasn’t sure how the “mothers stand still” line was meant to be interpreted but I’m not sure I like either possible interpretation. No bitterness - just curious why it didn’t work for me.

Stil

Aimless, we still love you. No need for that response!

Nor that response, Alfred.

It's okay if you don't respond to a movie in the expected ways. See: The Zone of Interest thread.

It's okay if you don't respond to a movie in the expected ways.

Why do I get this feeling of being patronized? Maybe it's because you are not responding to what I said, but rather to some vague need to soothe me, as if I were a child acting over emotionally, rather than simply providing my reasoning behind an opinion that was called "bogus", but with no specifics of what was bogus supplied.

What was implied by Andrew in his post was that I'd said something that contradicted his experience of enjoyment "the hell out of" the movie although he was over age 40. That reading of my post was incorrect and I wished to address that. So I did.

I'm using this ultra-formal tone for a simple reason. Since the presumption has now been forwarded that I was over-reacting and therefore implies was some lack of legitimacy, I'm scrubbing my prose. But I won't be gently chided for enlarging on an opinion that was questioned as "bogus". This is supposed to be a conversation, an exchange, not just zings dropped serially, and I will not be patronized for simply pursuing the conversation.

It's not worth a prolonged argument.

two hours pass...

zing!

now do you have anything of value to say?

Why do I get this feeling of being patronized? Maybe it's because you are not responding to what I said.

I've no idea. It's not my intention. Your first post was fine. Chuck's too.

now do you have anything of value to say?

It's not worth a prolonged argument.

I'm just dubious about age being a barrier to extracting maximum enjoyment from anything.

exactly, it's actually a pretty offensive thing to say and then triple down on

In fairness to Aimless, I do appreciate the clarification that he's talking about being too old _right now_, that it's the specific extra years he has on me that make the difference, not the years that I have to make up to get to him. I don't think he's right, but I'm now aware that he's not talking about me, which is always what causes the reflex.

My take on Barbie is that it was very funny

agreed (age 57 here)

My take on Barbie is that people who were children in 1961 (when Barbie was introduced) would like it well enough.

fwiw I think "I'm not the target audience for this" - which is more or less what I took Aimless's post to be saying - is a reasonable thing to say, which doesn't mean you can't enjoy things that aren't targeted at you ofc. at any rate preferable to assuming everything in the world was made for your specific sensibilities and getting angry when something doesn't fit into that.

or someone else doesnt like it