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Barbie Movie (2023)

Okay, hear me out, what if Lilith actually created Barbie, and then Ken, as a response to being thrown out of the garden of eden.
 
Yeah, Will Ferrell's role feels a bit like Mattel or someone at WB wanted "the next Lego Movie" and casting Ferrel gave Gerwig and team the freedom to do their fun deconstruction of Barbie and dolls. A fig leave to point to when the money people get cold feet about Gerwig's plans beginning to sound "too creative". But what ever, I'm fine with Ferrel and the rest looks amazing.
 
Ken responding to the doctor with "I'm a man" makes think two different things:
- Ken picked up some toxic traits from real life men
- Ken is going through a process of self-actualization after realizing men can be more than boyfriends, and doesn't yet understand that the idea of certifications
 
Every detail about this film is incredibly funny, like Gosling talking about seeing a Ken doll left face down in the mud and feeling he had to take the role is the kind of bit that no one could come up with in a million years.
 
Leaning into the surreal was probably the best creative decision given the source material.

Zor
 
Ford Prefect said:
Every detail about this film is incredibly funny, like Gosling talking about seeing a Ken doll left face down in the mud and feeling he had to take the role is the kind of bit that no one could come up with in a million years.
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This is increasingly sounding like one of those movies where I am eager to see the movie, but I am also almost as if not more eager to see a making-of documentary
 
www.hollywoodreporter.com

Warner Bros. Knew Exactly What It Was Doing With That Racy French ‘Barbie’ Poster — Here’s Why

The raunchy pun embedded in the French poster for the film was too obvious not to be deliberate.
www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
The French version of the poster looks innocuous enough. It features star Margot Robbie as the pink-clad doll-come-to-life and Ryan Gosling as her blond sidekick Ken. But the French tagline: "Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c'est juste Ken" — meaning "She can do everything. He's just Ken" — has an NSFW double-entendre meaning in French slang, where ken is another word for "fuck." So the tagline becomes: "She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to fuck."

... [T]he pun was so obvious — ken as slang for "fuck" is common parlance for anyone under 30 in France — many began to suspect the poster's NSFW message was a deliberate act of guerrilla marketing.

A closer look at the tagline seems to confirm this. The original, English Barbie tagline is: "Barbie is everything. He's just Ken." But the French translation of the first line isn't "Barbie est tout" ("Barbie is everything"), the literal translation, but rather "[Barbie] peut tout faire" ("Barbie can do anything"), a line that feeds nicely into the slang-y Ken line with the dirty connotations.

Asked for comment, Warner Bros. refused to confirm or deny whether the raunchy French pun was deliberate or accidental. But they made no secret of their delight in the social media buzz the poster has generated, in France and abroad.

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www.hollywoodreporter.com

‘Barbie’ Box Office: Greta Gerwig Breaks Opening Weekend Record for Female Director

The movie about the world's most famous fashion doll debuted to $155 million at the North American box office.
www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
The Barbie movie opened to an estimated $155 million at the North American box office over the July 21-23 weekend, a historic sum that easily surpasses the $103.3 domestic opening of Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman. In 2019, Captain Marvel also broke the glass ceiling when debuting at $153 million. That movie was co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

Other stats: Barbie scored the top opening of the year to date, as well as one of the top openings since the pandemic, and it towered over Christopher Nolan's male-skewing Oppenheimer this weekend.

... Women of all ages and girls made up nearly 70 percent of the audience, according to exit surveys. Audiences and critics dug the PG-13 film, which landed an "A" CinemaScore and 90% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Barbie — which brings to life Mattel's iconic fashion doll — is also strutting to big numbers in certain overseas markets. The pic opened to a huge $182 million from 70 markets for a global start of $337 million ahead of Wonder Woman's worldwide launch of $228.3 million. (Captain Marvel opened to $455 million globally.)
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So after seeing it, I was hoping for more.

It has corporate apologia, and the ken issue I feel takes away from the movie. Ken is an incel, but he is also a stand in for women in the Barbie world which is already yikes. On the stand in side, the ken's take over, and everything goes downhill, so it's subtly pushing the idea that if women got power things wouldn't work out. On the incel side, the movie has Barbie apologize to ken, but I don't remember ken apologizing to Barbie for how he acted.

It says all the right things. It calls out the issues that women face. But it's all just words. It's a case of telling and now showing. Not dealing with. While the movie says the right words about being about women empowerment, what the movie is about is more focused around the programming and deprogramming of an incel. And that responsibility shouldn't be placed on women (Not that they can't chose to take it up, but it shouldn't be assumed that incels are their fault, or that they have to fix them).

It made promises at the start that it didn't keep. After the opening (and later when both the mother and the daughter give their rants) I wanted to see those issues explored instead of taking a backseat to some cishet blond white guy that can't accept a girl he thinks he likes not being into him. I wanted more 'Thank God I'm Pretty.' Why must women always take a back seat to men in movies?

And what's worse, it acknowledged the issues. But it had to do more that. It's a better movie than most others, but I think it still falls behind the likes of something like Everything Everywhere All At Once. And it hurts because of that opening promise. If it didn't have those moments, I probably would be less critical (though still unhappy about making CEOs just goofy instead of the sociopaths they are).

It had some catchy songs though.
 
barbie is the greatest movie of all time lets get in the box and help manifest another barbillion dollars girlies
 
Jakinbandw said:
And what's worse, it acknowledged the issues. But it had to do more that. It's a better movie than most others, but I think it still falls behind the likes of something like Everything Everywhere All At Once. And it hurts because of that opening promise. If it didn't have those moments, I probably would be less critical (though still unhappy about making CEOs just goofy instead of the sociopaths they are).

It had some catchy songs though.
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To be honest, I'm not convinced you understood the movie. Ken wasn't central to the movie's resolution, he caused the problem, but Barbie pointedly didn't make her arc about him. There weren't grand solutions to the problems raised because there aren't grand solutions to the problems raised and the movie wasn't willing to lie about that.

The point of Ken taking over Barbieland isn't 'If women were in charge things wouldn't work out' and I'm genuinely not sure how you came to that conclusion.
 
Havocfett said:
To be honest, I'm not convinced you understood the movie. Ken wasn't central to the movie's resolution, he caused the problem, but Barbie pointedly didn't make her arc about him. There weren't grand solutions to the problems raised because there aren't grand solutions to the problems raised and the movie wasn't willing to lie about that.

The point of Ken taking over Barbieland isn't 'If women were in charge things wouldn't work out' and I'm genuinely not sure how you came to that conclusion.
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As to the second point first, I'm not sure how you can't, considering it's directly called out at the end of the movie with the whole 'ken's will have as much power in the political system in Barbieland as women do on earth'. Their position is treated by the movie itself as a direct stand in for women. This has fairly unfortunate implications when we see what happens when they gain power.

As to the other point, I'm not sure where I said that ken was central to resolving the issues? I honestly don't understand your criticism of my critique. Ken is an incel and wrecks everything, but it's Barbie that apologizes to him for pushing him to be an incel in the first place. I don't like that part of the movie either. I don't like it's corporate apologia either.

I'm not asking for grand solutions to women's problems in the movie, I'm asking for more exploration of them, than a brief mention without any exploration of them. And I know it can be done better because of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
 
mothematics said:
barbie is the greatest movie of all time lets get in the box and help manifest another barbillion dollars girlies
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This is an objectively correct statement. Never before have a laid eyes on film so full of everything.

Music numbers
Jokes
A journey to a faraway land and back
the rise and fall of an empire
Awakening to societal deceptions
Meeting god

It has it all.
 
Just got out of seeing it. Extremely funny film, with a script I almost couldn't believe got through Mattel. Highlights include the non-horizontal wall and the acoustic guitar gags. Absolute riot.

Now onto Oppenheimer.
 
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