Director: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Had ambitions to do a true Barbenheimer double feature with Oppenheimer (2023) last week, but the fates of schedules saw that it didn’t happen.
Did I Like It: It’s going to be very difficult to find a unique or unusual take on this movie. It’s so thoroughly captured the zeitgeist, if you are reading this, you probably have a very particular opinion about the film. You probably have thoughts on the subject regardless of whether or not you’ve seen the film; the only qualification is being alive in any sort of rudimentary way.
A subset of those people are men. Well, we’ll broaden the definition of that word to include male persons allowed to vote. They feel attacked by the film.
I really, truly, don’t understand how someone can come to that conclusion. Let’s forget for a moment that the movie is genuinely very funny and far, far weirder than one has any right to expect from a major studio release. The notion that Barbie is somehow anti-man is laughable on its face. Even though the Kens, led by Beach Ken (Gosling) try to bring the patriarchy to Barbieland, when the plan falls apart they are not pilloried. They’re forgiven. Ken himself doesn’t get the girl, but he wasn’t going to get the girl even if he hadn’t made all of the mistakes he did. He gets an opportunity to find some degree of happiness without Barbie, and presumably without using every photoshoot Sylvester Stallone exposed us to in the 80s as the Platonic ideal of masculinity.
What they mean to say is it empowers women, and that’s all they need to hear before they could even try to realize it is not only empowering to women, but oddly (in the best way) life affirming to men as well. I say that not as someone who might view himself as better than the complainers, but as someone who got called out pretty thoroughly by the Kens’ behavior, too. (The scene with The Godfather… struck a chord, but it was definitely a fair hit.)
I’d be willing to put money not only on the fact that it has an inside track on best picture in the spring, but also that we are about to enter an age not of mega-budget superhero-fests in hope that they have the next Avengers: Endgame (2019) on their hands, but instead of female-skewing, unashamedly weird, IP-based movies that cost about 100 million dollars. If Mr. Zaslav, head of Warner Bros. Discovery is reading this, haaaaave you met Batgirl?