Barbenheimar On Ice: A Tik Tok Production
Unfiltered reactions to the unlikely one-two punch that's resurrecting the movie theatre.
This is an excerpt from my diary. Click here for more information on this series.
7/25/2023
OPPENHEIMAR and BARBIE both lived up to the hype. So much so that it’s not that I’m at a loss of words, but that I have a surplus of them. These are really, truly, fabulous films that surprisingly have a couple things in common. Oppenheimer blew me away in the way that I was expecting. It was harrowing, chaotic, existential. Barbie, however, blew me away in a way I wasn’t expecting. In fact, I didn’t expect to be blown away by this film at all. But the writing was just so good. The film is witty and funny and, most of all, smart. The themes it deals with, oh so artfully, are complex, bordering on controversial. But Greta Gerwig, who wrote and directed it, doesn’t editorialize so far one way or another that she puts the narrative in a simple box. I applaud her for her nuance—she’s a Nuancer—and her wit and her timing and her storytelling prowess and her ability to go meta and deep on a movie about the Mattel doll, even though there are some aspects of it that didn’t work for me. I also applaud her for the cinematography and the Stanley Kubrick references (I should touch on this again later).
I came to the movie thinking that, unlike Oppenheimer, which I knew would get my wheels spinning a mile a minute, I’d be able to just sit back, relax, and enjoy the entertainment relatively mindlessly. However, I think Barbie now has my wheels turning faster than the story about the man who gave us the power to destroy humanity. There is just so much to explore; I have so much to say. But it was a long day: five hours in a recliner at the theatre (oh how hard your life is). And it wasn’t as relaxing as you might think because those wheels of mine were turning for 2 more of those 5 hours than I’d expected.
So, I owe you (me) some words.
But alas, I’m tired after spending my most wonderful birthday with Sarah, who has differing views on Barbie, but very similar ones on Oppenheimer. I was convinced going into today that this equation would be the other way around. I’m still learning so much about my life partner every day.
7/27/2023
IT’S AN EVENT– one of the more successful blockbusters in recent Hollywood history. Everyone is seeing it. In theaters too. It’s such a cultural phenomenon that people just don’t have the patience to wait until it hits the streamers. Christopher Nolan, the film’s director, who, I might add, seems to have the same understated temperament as my late water polo coach at Mercyhurst, fought tooth and nail (in an understated way) to ensure that the film would be “theatre-exclusive” for a significant window of time. After tussling over this with Warner Brothers, his home studio of 20 years, Nolan found common ground with Universal, which agreed to a 100-day hold on the film before it would be eligible to hit Peacock, the streaming service owned by Universal’s parent company.
That this agreement is even seen as notable and newsworthy is itself an indication of the sorry state of the legacy Hollywood model. But, hey, maybe this film will help arrest the downfall of this very model. Maybe the success of Oppenheimer—and, of course, Barbie, which has, as predicted, done far better, grossing more money on opening weekend than any other post-pandemic feature—really will rejigger the studios back into their old way of doing things. Maybe Barbenheimar (nomenclature of predictable provenance: social media) will bring about a sort of course correction in the streaming model that became the center of the universe during the pandemic. Can’t always be going up; get lulled into thinking the opposite, and you get burned on the stock market (goes for crypto too, but don’t ask me about that).
Altar the model or don’t, it’s clear, based off the high demand for both these films, that the viewer has much more of a voice than we give them credit.
Barbenheimar is a downright cultural event. Everyone and their mother is seeing these films, even the motherless or significant-other-less – a sad state of affairs that leads one to instead bring an uncle or a neighbor to accompany them to the theatre.
Yes, these films have so much hype built around them that they’re the sort you go see with that neighbor you rarely talk to other than when you’re venting about the city’s gross neglect of the road you both live on or what have you.
“Been here almost thirty years and they’ve repaved the road once—just once! Have I told you this?”
“Might’ve mentioned it.”
“Damn city. I’m tellin ya. And don’t get me started on those damn power lines!”
“I won’t.”
“Say, wanna go see Oppenheimer with me? Barbara had to bail. Somethin going on with her sister.”
“Sure. Why not.”
“Heard it’s amazing.”
“Heard Barbie was good too.”
“I don’t know about all that pink shit.”
And it’s not just the common folk who are excited to return to the theatre to experience the one-two punch. It’s the intelligentsia, the aristocracy, the artists, the cinephiles, the thought-leaders.
It’s Quinten Tarantino, who, thanks to social media, we see purchasing a ticket for Oppenheimer at a Westwood theatre down the street from UCLA. It’s the same theatre that he captured in a scene for Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. And just as social media sleuths were making this connection, there is yet more footage of him walking out of the theatre and walking across the street to a rivaling one and purchasing a ticket to see Barbie. The auteur, like the commoner, is doing the double feature!
I share this anecdote with Sarah, seated to the left of me in the top row of the IMAX theatre as person after person shovels in. Usually, she couldn’t give a rat’s ass about something like this— “mmmm cool”—but today she does because she’s a bit taken by the number of people in the theatre with us. I was too, even though I knew this was going to be an event. Just seeing the range of people in her at noon on a Tuesday was a bit taking. This really was an event. And my wife, to my surprise—and hers—was excited to be on this ride with me, which made the experience better.
The first thing that strikes me as notable, and write-in-here-worthy, were the mind-bending shots of a cosmic nature that Nolan, with the help of an amazing editor and director of photography, intersperses as the viewer is getting a sense of the way Oppenheimer’s mind works. It was very Kubrickian in this regard. The visual representations of black holes and galaxies and burning stars and I don’t know what else that Nolan cuts to with an equally cosmic score humming—literally—in the background reminded me of that drawn-out scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when Astronaut Dave is sucked into another dimension.
Nolan loves Kubrick, and I think I heard him say in an interview that he intentionally didn’t watch any of his films while making Oppenheimer because he didn’t want to merely recreate—either consciously or unconsciously—shots that were inspired by the saintly cinematography. It seems, though, with these shots that are intended to show Oppie’s consciousness, that he failed in this endeavor.
I can’t blame him. Kubrick basically has a monopoly on anything that smells like consciousness and cosmology having sex (What would that smell like? Are you talking about the “Big Bang?”). The dude had first-mover advantage on that very niche, by way of his rising to directordum (let’s make it a word) when he did: when cinema, and special effects, were just advanced enough for this man to take one giant leap forward with a sci-fi tale of epic proportion.
7/28/2023
WE SETTLE INTO the film, which, I might add, has about as much dialogue as an Aaron Sorkin script. That is to say, there’s so many “walk and talk” scenes that by the end of the film I swear Cillian Murphy—that blue-eyed devil who is, I think, the only mainstream actor that could do the other blue-eyed devil of an even more mysterious nature (Oppie) justice—has walked a total of like 4 marathons (he sure looks it).
Don’t get it twisted, I love me some Sorkin. The man finds the music in his dialogue. But a little heads up would have been nice. This is a 3-hour movie—many shirk at 3-hour movies; I’ve always been of the mind that of “the longer the merrier”—that demands every ounce of your attention for every ounce of the 3 hours. Catch yourself slipping for even a second—which I wasn’t; this is merely intended as a warning, damnit! — and your grasp of the movie after hour 2, which is when the big bang that we all expect occurs, will be, how you say, suboptimal.
Just a friendly warning. Don’t want you to scratch all that dandruff off your head in public because you have no idea why you’re still watching a movie after the big bang has already come and gone. Can you imagine how embarrassing that would be? You arise from the black faux-leather recliner and your silhouette remains on the chair, etched in dead white skin cells and calcified oily head gook? Not the best look.
7/29/2023
AND ABOUT THAT Big Bang at hour two, also known as the “Trinity Test”: the first-ever detonation of an atom bomb; when theory became reality. What a harrowing moment. Nolan has publicly stated that he was motivated to make this movie after reading in American Prometheus, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oppenheimer for which this biopic is based, that Oppie and crew believed there was a very small chance that their bomb might set off a chain reaction that would permanently destroy Earth’s atmosphere. The fate of human civilization was literally in the hands of this man, and the U.S. military machine that weaponized him.
We all knew it was coming, and yet we were still on the edge of our seats gripping our popcorn bins and large Diet Cokes, the condensation on the outside turning warm in our palms. The countdown—and the score, done, surprisingly, not by Hans Zimmer, who assisted in audio for basically every Nolan movie to date (the score for Interstellar being his best), but Ludwig Goransson, whose career, up until this point, has centered around collaboration with such recording artists as Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, and Adele—gets into the lower half of the single digits.
4 3 2 1
Music stops. You can hear a pin drop. Nothing but BRIGHT LIGHT ON THE 65MM FRAME.
It’s the first time we see unfocused shots.
And this QUIET LIGHT occupies the large screen for what feels like a minute, the camera panning to scientist after scientist as they watch their classroom theory become no-shit reality.
7/30/2023
I’M STRUCK BY THE smug look on the sloppily-sunscreened face of the actor playing Edward Teller (Bennie Safdie; co-director of Uncut Gems), the physicist who would soon become known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb” – a weapon that would be 1,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and whose development would kick off a wider arms race with the Soviets, following their perfection of their own atom bomb, thanks to a British mole at Los Alamos. Tellers got that same mad scientist look as Dr. Strangelove (and the eyeglass frames to match) – another one of Nolan’s maybe unintentional, maybe deliberate, nods to Kubrick.
The other thing that strikes me in this extended shower of light is the fly that’s buzzing near our heads, which are right under the projector because we managed to secure the middle two seats on the tippy top of the theatre. It looks like a firefly when it loiters in that light beam.
Just as I lean over to point this out to Sarah—who is, to my surprise, tearing up (Nolan built up the suspense and existentialism so deftly that this, I sense, is not an uncommon emotional response)—that beautiful atomic tension comes to a head.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.
Light may travel faster than sound, but it doesn’t pack the same punch.
IT’S A WEIRD THING because whereas everyone on the screen is joyous and congratulatory, everyone watching the screen some 80 years after the fact is downcast and somber.
But that is very quickly where Oppie will find himself too. The man had, by that point, convinced himself that it was necessary they push forward on the bomb’s development even though Germany had already surrendered. The war in the Pacific raged on, and while it was clear it was only a matter of time before the Japanese followed suit, military brass believed a mere nuclear demonstration, say, in Tokyo Bay, wouldn’t be enough to get them to the negotiating table. Japan had to bear witness to the unfathomable damage this sucker would yield.
There likely were some other motivations for its use too. The U.S. was to be the big cock on the block: the guarantor of new international order moving forward. And it was important that everyone, including the other soon-to-be-winner, the Soviet Union, understood that.
Oppie understood that his invention had become a geopolitical tool that would be wielded for aims less black and white than merely beating Hitler to the punch. But he kept on confabulating. This here, was his life’s work. And it was already out of his hands, anyways. All he could do was justify, and hope that those justifications proved true. One such justification he shared with his fellow physicists:
“They won’t fear it until they understand it. And they won’t understand it until they’ve used it.”
That 3rd hour that I warned would be unintelligible if you hadn’t kept up with the dialogue in the prior 2 deals with the personal and professional cumupins Oppie got for voicing opinions that ran contrary to the Truman Administrations stance on the H-bomb development in the early 50s.
One also gets the sense that Oppie believed his souring image was punishment for his role in the deaths of as many as 220,000 Japanese. There’s a gripping scene where he’s giving a speech to the Los Alamos crew after word of the Hiroshima blast had hit the airwaves. Outwardly, he is as patriotic and hawkish as the crowd. Inwardly, he’s in Hell. Every time he blinks, he sees a woman whose skin on her face is ripping off effortlessly, like the pages of a sopping wet book in the wind. Nolan kicked it out of the park with the editing in this sequence.
As I’m watching this sequence, I’m reminded of the book Hiroshima, originally a piece of narrative journalism in The New Yorker, which was required reading not just in high school, but for that college elective I had with that red-haired professor who frequently broke down mid-instruction under the pain of crippling migraines, as if suffering from radiation poisoning herself. “I should re-re-read that book,” I think to myself.
That third hour may be easier on the eyes (the normal dark of a theatre returned), but there’s some insidious noise that I can’t put my finger on.
Then I do, minutes later, as I’m realizing just how forced it feels that the narrative vehicle Nolan is using to articulate Oppie’s fall from public grace—a Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who was Eisenhower’s nominee for Commerce Secretary—is.
What I’m hearing is the same string of clicks and clacks that a radiation monitor would make. It’s of course fitting, but ominous. And I’m pretty sure my mind had completely manufactured these sounds. Or was it part of the film? I never got fidelity on this. But there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to. It would be sort of apt if my subconscious was hearing something that wasn’t there. It would mean that the film affected me in what I think is its intended purpose: to wake people up.
We still have the bombs. As do a lot of other countries. And these bombs are oodles more powerful than their first iterations in the 40s and 50s.
There is some truth to Oppie’s embellished quote about how man had to detonate the bomb in order to fear it. The world fears them all right; the U.S. government fears them. The nuclear era has accompanied the most peaceful era in human history. No nuclear weapons state has dared detonate another one.
But this—human history—is all so tenuous. It hasn’t even been 100 years since the bloodiest war of wars befell our species. The world is far more insecure than it may seem—and that may soon become more apparent as the post-Cold War promise increasingly caves in on itself.
Oppenheimer is a phenomenal movie that I endeavor to see at least one more time in the theater. I already knew the story. And I’ve long had Oppie’s voice seared into my brain thanks to my longtime listening of Daniel Caeser’s song “Entropy” off Case Study 01, an album that’s as emotionally cluttered as the great physicist’s mind. That song starts with the famous clip in which Oppie reflects on the Trinity Test, twenty years after the fact:
“I remembered the line the Hindu scripture—the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu was trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty. And to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form, and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” That might be the most resonant line in the history of lines that’s also grammatically questionable.
But the line I’m more concerned with comes at the very end of the film.
Oppie is conferring with Albert Einstein long after the Trinity Test. “When I told you we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the world,” he says, “I believe we did.”
It’s hard not to think that he could be right. Is it only a matter of time until the unthinkable becomes thinkable again?
China is in the process of quadrupling its arsenal of nukes in order to reach parity with the U.S. and Russia. Putin has openly threatened to detonate one in Ukraine. The U.S. is gearing up for a brutal election in which the keys to the nuclear codes will either remain in the hands of an eighty-something with diminishing mental faculties or be handed back over to an egomaniac of epic proportion who’s called for the termination of the U.S. constitution.
It really is tenuous, isn’t it?
8/7/2023
WHO WOULD’VE THUNK that a movie about the world’s most popular doll would pay homage to the most existential shot in the history of cinema?
Movie two in the double feature was, in my eyes, going to provide fun, mind-numbing entertainment that I could enjoy 75% awake as I lay reclined in the theatre’s black leather chair in its backward extent.
I should have known better with a movie written and directed by Gretta Gerwig—the force behind such arthouse films as Lady Bird and Frances Ha—with a major assist by her equally-as-arthouse husband Noah Baumbach, who’s screenplays for Marriage Story and The Meyerowitz Stories and The Squid and the Whale I’d love to just print out and study with a fine tooth comb if not for my cheap HP® printer, which I worry would blow up in a plume of smoke not dissimilar from the one I just witnessed in theatre 7 if I were to put it to task on such a herculean job.
When it dawns on me that Greta is parodying, albeit in a visually beautiful and tonally respectful way, the opening sequence in Kubrick’s 2001, my neck is suddenly lifted off the recliner, suspended in an entirely un-ergonomic posture that I will no doubt feel later. I’m like Rick Dalton (Leo Decap) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when the has-been spaghetti western actor alerts his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), to a scene he has facetime in as they’re watching some mid-grade television show in the comfort of Rick’s home, which happens to sit next to Roman Polanski and Sharron Tate’s own home. I point at the screen with the sort of shock and awe that Rick Dalton did and turn to my companion (still Sarah) to make sure she’s paying attention. The only difference is that, unlike Rick Dalton, the sound I make to accompany my extended arm and pointer finger is not a whistle and a “Hey Hey,” but something between a whisper and a whistle, like a loud exhale with a high-pitched inflection.
Sarah has a confused look on her face because I’ve given her no context whatsoever. She’s mouthing the word “what” as she begins to grimace – the sort of grimace one has when they’re unconsciously mad that they can’t understand what you’re saying.
But she could understand me on a higher level. She understood the sentiment even if she didn’t understand the substance. She understood that I was nerding out about the film in front of us, which, after just watching Oppenheimer on 65mm IMAX, initially looked a bit fuzzy (Barbie is the DVD to Oppenheimer’s Blue-Ray). In some ways that’s all she needed to know. Movies, for her, are for entertainment, so whatever I was trying to communicate to her wouldn’t have hit anyways. She would have humored me, though, had I said something intelligible because she’s an awesome and caring wife. She understands that dissecting films is sort of my latest interest that’s sort of bordering on my latest obsession. And there’s so much to dissect in this one!
Like 2001, that scene opens with beautiful shot of a barren earthly vista, the horizon far off in the distance.
Only, instead of it being a shot of our ape-like ancestors of millions of years past discovering, with the help of an extraterrestrial slab of space metal known as the “Monolith,” that they can fashion weapons out of animal bones, it’s a shot of a group of young human girls, circa 1959, discovering that playing with baby dolls is so, how you say, lame!
We’re not babies, so why are we playing with babies?
In swoops Mattel, conglomerate toymaker, who drops its own Monolith in this desert cliff oasis. It’s not a slab of space metal, but a perfectly chiseled plastic statue that bears an uncanny resemblance to Margot Robbie, its hair golden blonde, its skin tan as a Mediterranean goddess, its legs slim and long and flawlessly contoured in those shiny black heels. The next iteration in the evolution of play dolls has presented itself—Is it really an evolution? —meaning the young human girls can go about trashing and thrashing and slamming their baby dolls into the earth.
And when one of those girls throws her has-been play toy up into the sky—parodying the ape in 2001 who throws an animal bone up into the sky—we’re catapulted not millions of years into Kubrick’s imagined space-centric future, but 60 years to the present day where these plastic adult women dolls live in a picturesque imaginary enclave just a hop and a skip from the “State of Los Angeles” in the “Country of California” (think Catalina Island only with more pink).
In this world, everything is perfect for Stereotypical Barbie (also Margot Robbie). She lives in a house with a pink slide and a heart-shaped bed; gets swooned on by all the Kens, including the bleach-haired Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, whose specialty is “Beach”; and throws opulent dance parties every night.
But suddenly strange occurrences begin to disrupt Stereotypical Barbie’s plastic life. She’s having thoughts of death. Foreign textures are appearing on her skin (cellulite). Her feet suddenly sit flat on the ground, meaning they’re not permanently flexed in the heel-wearing position. FLAT FEET?!?!
Something is awry, which means Stereotypical Barbie must pay a visit to Weird Barbie, played, hillariously, by Kate McKinnon.
Shrug. Hiss. Eye roll.
Weird Barbie? But she’s so…WEIRD.
She is weird, but we learn that it’s not her fault. Because in Barbie the movie, the dolls take on the shape and temperament of their mortal owners back in the real world. In Weird Barbie’s case, her pixie haircut, crayoned-on face tats, and legs that are locked in a near-constant split position are symptoms of an over-zealous owner who played “too hard” with her. But in her alienation from mainstream Barbieland, Weird Barbie has learned the secrets of the universe. And she has the solution to Stereotypical Barbie’s woes.
8/8/2023
STEREOTYPICAL BARBIE—who’s having thoughts of death because her owner back in the real world is having her own existential crisis—must travel to the real-world and console her owner. Only then will her cellulite go away, her feet return to permanent-arched, and her brain turn back to ignorance-is-bliss mush.
On her journey between realms in her Barbie convertible to do just that, we discover that Ken (still Ryan Gosling) has stowed away. This is a crucial chain-link in the narrative that is about to unfold.
The pair then pop up in Venice Beach—Is there a more fitting portal connecting the real and imagined worlds?—adorned in florescent rollerblades and outfits to match. It’s here where Barbie is introduced to catcalling and Ken realizes that men in the real world have a major leg up, even if corporations, still largely run by men, are getting better at hiding this (I think Greta is also making a comment on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” campaigns at big corporations, which are mostly marketing ploys motivated by the bottom line).
While Barbie is waking up to the notion that her plastic perfection has been far from empowering for human girls— the daughter of her owner, who thinks of herself a sort of feminist intellectual, goes so far as to call her a “fascist”—Ken is busy in a school library reading books about trucks and horses, the latter of which he excitedly characterizes as “Men Extenders.” Hah!
Ken, empowered and teaming with purpose, goes back to Barbieland to share all that he’s learned about the “Patriarchy” with his fellow Kens.
Barbie, panicked, goes running to Mattel HQ in El Segundo, where she finds that its whole corporate staff, including the CEO (Will Ferrel), are men. Will’s character promises Margot’s character that all would return to normal if she just got back in the display box (a life-size Barbie display box). Barbie, anxious to get rid of her cellulite, is about to oblige, before she has second thoughts – a symptom of that annoying human consciousness that is slowly taking over her.
Now she’s on the run. And her owner, Gloria (America Ferrera), who is conveniently an employee at Mattel, is there to help. Barbie hops in her car, where the daughter, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who seems to have magically gotten over her feelings that the Barbie doll set back the feminist movement 60 years (one hole in the story), is sitting in the backseat.
Where to go? Back to Barbieland, of course.
Only it’s not the same Barbieland she left. It’s called “Kendom” now. The order has been flipped. The barbies are subservient to the kens. The all-Barbie supreme court has been sacked. Flags with horses on them adorn all the buildings. Ken has taken Barbie’s house as his own and demands that everyone refers to it as his “Mojo Dojo Casa House.”
What to do?
Consult Weird Barbie, of course.
But it’s not she who has the answers this time, but Human Gloria, who rants about the tightrope women have to walk in contemporary society. (Whether Human Gloria turned plastic when she entered the play realm is never clarified).
“It’s literally impossible to be a woman…You have to be thin, but not too thin… You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time.”
And that’s the solution: by passionately venting about this tightrope one-on-one with the Barbies they can deprogram the subservience out of them. It of course works, even though a big question mark is how such words of vent would resonate with dolls who have never experienced the real world (it’s a movie, dude). Then all the barbies get cracking on phase 2 of the plan: pinning all the Kens against each other by exploiting their petty dramas and jealousies. It of course works, and provides some of the funniest moments of the film.
The old order is restored just as the Mattel CEO and his dutiful minions make it to the Barbie realm (why they’re necessary to the narrative fabric of the film is beyond me). Only, it’s not so much an old order, but an updated one: the Barbies are back in charge, but they no longer require the Kens to be their supplicants. They encourage those tan dolls with blobs for genitalia to figure out who they are on an individual level. Agh, how wise!
Stereotypical Barbie has saved the day. But she can’t shake that humanness that has corrupted what used to be her hollow plastic brain. With the permission of the ghost of Ruth Handler, the woman who founded Barbie in 1959, she decides that she wants to become a full-fledged human. And that’s something that’s doable because this is a movie about talking dolls.
It’s here where Greta concocted a real tearjerker that I wasn’t impervious to. Ghost Ruth grabs Barbie’s hands and, as if a human USB drive, uploads all of female existence into her, visually collapsed into a slideshow of home videos of girlhood, which, paired with an emotional Billie Eilish song (aren’t all of her songs emotional?) that accompanies this slideshow, sets up a real blubber bash. We know the upload is complete when Greta zooms in on Barbie’s blue eye. This is an eye of a complex consciousness, its black pupil becoming smaller as it gets into focus for the first time.
The plastic doll has become a sentient being. And it’s not until this writing that it dawns on me that Greta has made an ironically human movie out of what would normally be a dystopian tale. This is where she takes a different tac than Kubrick. Barbie is no HAL 9000, the conniving artificial intelligence character in 2001 that revels in its growing individuality to the detriment of real humans. Or at least she’s not that yet: Do I smell a Barbie sequel directed by Jordan Poole?(Also, if Mattel ever decides to stick an AI in a Barbie, let the record reflect that I think that would herald the end of us.)
BARBIE IS AN AFFECTING movie that leaves your spirit unexpectedly nourished when you exit the theatre. But it’s also, as Richard Brody, critic at The New Yorker, put it, a film that’s straight up “fun as hell.”
The script—add it to my list of printer-killers—is riddled with witty jokes and funny one-liners and pop-culture easter eggs of a range that will find laughs in basically any demographic (except maybe for those like Ben Shapiro, who seem to think the film constitutes hate speech toward men, which is obviously an over-the-top read).
The jokes are lopsided in the direction of what a critic at The Washington Post calls a “knowing humor” in the sort of highbrow, literary mold that Greta and Noah Baumbach certainly represent (I caught, for instance, at least two references to Proust). But I’m all for it because I think Barbie successfully made the case that corporate intellectual property can be fun and fresh and notable if paired with a visionary filmmaker who has a distinct style and artistic sense (take note, Marvel). And for those who claim that this sort of humor will kneecap the universality of the film, what say you of the fact that Barbie just surpassed the $1 billion dollar mark at the box office? Great marketing campaign? Sure, there was that. But surely that only explains the half of it.
While it kind of pains me to say this, I think Ryan Gosling’s performance as (Beach) Ken catapulted this film to higher heights. I’m usually a little suspicious of Gosling because I feel like that cute, ironic humor he’s known for is a bit of a gimmick (now I’m the one sounding like Ben Shapiro). But here I think he masterfully merged that persona—maybe it really is who he is—with a sort of boyish innocence to create the most laugh-out-loud moments of the movie. And now, as you have it, I can’t think of anyone more fit to play this role. Some critics are even saying that it’s his best performance of his career, which is really kind of funny for an actor that was a leading man such in films as La La Land and Blade Runner 2049 and First Man.
Greta expertly walked her own sort of tightrope with this film: Barbie is subversive but not too subversive as to disrespect the brand; it rags on gender norms and inequities but not too heavily as to be preachy and divisive; it’s funny yet also packed with higher emotional goodies.
Mattel took a gamble by greenlighting her script, judging, it seems correctly, that by airing the dirty laundry out in the open, it could sort of reset the Barbie brand in the public’s consciousness. I think it’s going to pay off, especially for all those Ken dolls that have been collecting dust on their shelves.
To answer your question, I don’t foresee myself purchasing one of those plastic hunks with perfectly coiffed hair.
But ask me again after my third viewing, which I’m about to schedule. I just can’t get “Kenough” of this movie, which has been the biggest surprise of all.