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hoganherofanatics · 6 months ago

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The Barbie Movie Sucked

Let me just start by saying that I’m a huge Barbie(the doll line) fan and collector. I’ve seen many of the animated films and series’s. I own a bunch of merch, clothes, bedding, water bottles etc. Some of it being Barbie Movie merch because even though I don’t like the film, I thought it was still cute stuff.

But my goodness this movie was terrible. As a super fan it left me really disappointed. Multiple things ruined what hope I had, the politics mostly. I’m a conservative myself, but even if the movie had politics I agree too, I still wouldn’t like it. A Barbie movie should be about fun and creativity(and of course fashion! lol) so political stuff doesn’t really belong. Here’s a point by point list of things I didn’t like.

1. Greta Gerwig

I don’t hate her. I just think Universal made a really bad decision giving an indie film maker(Greta) and an actress(Margot Robbie) the chance to write a script for an already existing property that has a huge fanbase behind it. Throwing a couple million dollars at two clearly inexperienced writers doesn’t make a good movie. Just because these two are popular doesn’t mean they deserve to write about something they don’t care about.

I’m not just assuming that they don’t care about the Barbie franchise either, Greta and Margot both make passive aggressive jabs at it in interviews. The two of them, plus Ryan Gosling, pretend as though they’re the ones who gave Barbie and Ken personalities. LMAO!!!! I audibly laughed out loud, that’s so funny to me. Ryan also made a twitter post about how he made a character who is nothing but a blonde doll into a hottie with a voice of an angel. Yes he said that. If anything, I paraphrased it less pompous than the way he said it. Seriously, we need to stop feeding these three people’s egos, especially Ryan’s. I think their heads might explode with anymore praise.

Both Greta and Margot seem to have some deep seeded issues with the opposite sex. Like sexism on levels akin to Andrew Tate. Which is sad and that kind of stuff shouldn’t be in movies. Ken is a beloved character who didn’t deserve to be ruined by two pompous and quite frankly, sexist writers. I highly recommend those two stop projecting onto Barbie and Ken and maybe go to therapy. Maybe do some praying? Anything to fix their issues before working on another project.

I don’t want to bring up Greta’s husband, but based on interviews I got to. I feel bad for him because it’s clear his wife as no respect for him. I hope he wakes up and realizes that there are other women who will love him twice as much as Greta. I don’t encourage divorce though. They did get married after twelve years of dating which is kind of embarrassing ngl. Like imagine dating in your late twenties and popping the question more than a decade later lol.

2. Casting

Kind of suspicious that Margot was pretty hands on making this film and then was casted as lead actress, but I’m sure she was best for the role…. I don’t think Margot or Ryan were good fits for the roles of Barbie and Ken. Robbie only shares Barbie’s blonde hair, that’s it. Barbie has a pretty gentle face and personality, she’s kind and caring. Robbie doesn’t seem to do a lot of acting work for characters with these traits, one of her most popular roles is literally playing the worst Batman villain of all time lol. I’m not trying to be a bully, but Margot has a really sharp face and unnerving smile. Not trying to shame her, she’s prettier than I am, but just because she’s blonde and popular doesn’t make her a good fit for Barbie.

Ryan looks kind of like Ken, but again, he doesn’t really have the charm and personality that Ken has. For one thing he’s not funny, and for another, his bad attitude shines through his acting. So does Margot’s. Greta admitted in an interview that instead of writing Ken’s name in the script, she was writing Ryan’s name. So she had Ryan in mind the ENTIRE TIME. See how little respect these three have for the Barbie franchise? Also, poor Greta’s husband was sitting there stoned face and let out a little laugh during the interview. Gerwig is always drooling over Gosling, so I can imagine how the guy feels. But then again, it seems like Greta doesn’t care about the feelings of her man.

Long story short, the two lead actors weren’t good fits for the roles and were only given them because Margot was friends with Greta(plus the producer of it) and Greta had a crush on Gosling. I’m sure they had a lengthy casting process though(this is sarcasm, I can’t believe they cared so little about these characters that they didn’t even bother having a casting call. Picking what actors you want to hire is crucial to the portrayal of the character but I guess Margot and Greta are too narcissistic to give a crap)

The side characters were okay I guess. They only picked Will Ferral because they wanted another big name on the movie. Same situation with the Dwayne the rock Johnson. Dwayne is way too huge to play a Ken. I don’t expect these actors to look exactly like the dolls, but come on. He’s like a 6’5 juicer with a bald shiny head. Ken is gently toned and average height. I know he was the merman but that’s no excuse

Aquafina is a bad actress and singer, her work on the live action Little Mermaid is proof enough. So I don’t know why in the world she was hired.

The rest of the actors seem to have connections or were already big stars, so none of the casting really seemed fair or right, but that’s Hollywood for ya.

3. The story itself

The whole screenplay clearly wasn’t looked over, like at all. I don’t understand how Barbie was able to suddenly grow to human size and go to the real world. I’m able to dismiss this stuff in stupid comedies, but not a movie thats seen as deep and heart wrenching by multiple of its fans and the people who made it(Greta, Margot, etc.) I personally don’t know how people think this film is deep but whatever. Also, not Greta comparing this dogpoo movie to a Greek Tragedy LMAO.

Point is, Oscar worthy movies have plots that make sense. Well, the Oscars nowadays are more of a popularity contest rather than critics actually judging a movie off its quality. Ryan also didn’t deserve an Oscar for best lead male, sorry he just wasn’t that good. Again, the Oscar’s are a popularity contest so that’s why he won lol.

Why is Margot Robbie Barbie the first Barbie to feel sad? Barbie dolls have been around for over sixty years now, no other dolls have felt this way? So many world events in that time span. There should also be more than one weird Barbie, not to mention multiple naked Barbie’s, ones who are headless, neckless, missing arms or legs, ones in homemade outfits or have bad haircuts, ones getting randomly slammed together because the kid playing with them is making them fight. The water Barbie’s should have mold on them.

What about Holiday Barbie’s? Or Barbie’s based on movies? Like the Scooby Doo Daphne doll. Just because Greta threw in a couple of discontinued Barbie’s, like Pregnant Midge and Cool Earring Ken, doesn’t mean I owe her a pat on the back. Like good job, you know about the discontinued Barbie’s that everybody knows about. If you’re writing a film for an already existing franchise, you better get your facts straight and dive into the obscure parts of Barbie history. But this movie is totally for the fans, not for people who hate Barbie because they think she’s promoting bad beauty standards. Which by the way, if you’re insecure because of a doll, you need to get some self confidence. It’s a doll, it’s not responsible for your bad feelings. Imagine being jealous of a toy lol.

What about Barbie’s sisters? Only Stacy is mentioned. Her sisters are pivotal parts of the line so kind of confused on why Greta left them out? Does she not like kids either? Maybe she couldn’t find a child actor who stroked her ego enough. Flat footedness shouldn’t be a weird thing to them because half of Barbie’s made since like the nineties have them. There’s only ever been one transgender doll made by Mattel, yet a transgender doll was put in the movie? Wouldn’t that be weird? But this film is about pandering to an audience that hates Barbie and supports that stuff, so they don’t care.

Barbies friends are also a pretty big part of the line, yet only Midge is there. I know she talks to the other Barbie’s but it’s not her already named and existing friends. I think Greta knew that it would ruin the terrible “Hi Barbie!” joke so that’s why she didn’t include other named dolls. Allan Is Midges husband so I don’t know why they weren’t shown together. Ken and Barbie are also a couple yet they weren’t together either so clearly Greta is allergic to relationships. Maybe that’s why she and her husband took so long getting hitched lol.

It was really disrespectful of Gerwig and Robbie to not do the bare minimum of writing Barbie and Ken’s relationship in. Like seriously? They’re a couple, no amount of Greta’s gaslighting and projecting will change that. Ken’s not an accessory and was made into a doll due to popular demand back in 1961. Girls who played with Barbie wanted her to have a boyfriend/husband. Ruth Handler didn’t think girls would want to play with a male fashion doll, so that’s why he wasn’t made sooner. It’s like a two year gap between the creation of Barbie and Ken, so I’m sick of uneducated people acting as though Ken was created decades later.

The beach scene was also stupid because you literally can bring Barbie dolls into the water. You shouldn’t do it if you’re collecting because they’ll grow mold, but if you have a cheap one you want to bring to the beach/pool then go for it. They literally live by Malibou Beach for goodness sake. Ken’s job isn’t just beach(he was literally holding a surf board so his job would be a surfer in that scenario but I guess Greta thought beach was funnier. Humor isn’t her strong suit.) he has a lot of jobs just like Barbie including some that she doesn’t have, like hunter or football player. So people need to stop with the Ken hate.

The beaching each other off joke was just gross and the constant discussion around Barbie and Ken’s genitals was just weird. This happens a lot with documentaries around Barbie also. Why are so many of these Hollywood creeps obsessed with doll genitals? And if Barbie doesn’t have a coochie, how was she able to go to the Gyneocologist? How was she even able to turn human in the first place? Ruth Handler isn’t God lmao. Ms.thing may be an angel but she doesn’t have that kind of power. The joke about Handlers double mastectomy was in poor taste. Haha breast cancer, I guess? Ruth made breast implants for other women who lost their boobs to cancer, she actually made a change in the world, something Greta will never do. Though she seems to think she has because people are pretending like her movie is some sort of masterpiece that changed their lives. The only thing Greta did was trick hard working Americans into wasting their money on her shitty movie.

3. Ads

They didn’t even bother hiding the car commercial. I literally saw the commercial on TV and it was legit a scene took from the movie. Same with whatever luxury handbag they were trying to sell. Do better.

4.The sets?

The sets, costumes, and even the dolls, were from different eras. It’s pretty clear they just tried to shove in a bunch of references to appeal to the different ages of the audience. Whatever. It’s implied that all these dolls belong to the mom(America Ferrara) so not only is it odd that this woman owns a bunch of dolls and doll clothes from the past sixty five years, but why is Margot Robbie’s Barbie the only one that’s sad. Is the mom only playing with her? I mean, all the dolls we see belong to her, so shouldn’t all the Barbie and Ken’s be facing the same problem?

Margot Robbie’s Barbie is also aware of the real world, which would imply that she’s aware that she’s a toy. But when weird Barbie tells her that she has to find the girl playing with her, she says “Playing with me?”

How are you aware that you’re a toy and of your creator, but you don’t know that someone is playing with you???? Did anybody proof read this????

The what was I made for song sucked heavy ass. Barbie is a toy, she was made to bring joy to kids. I understand Greta was trying to ask “What were women made for?” The answer is simple. Both men and women were made in Gods image and put on earth to spread and live his message and multiply. Also to love one another.

This existential stuff Greta thinks she’s unique for is corny and overdone. It’s normal to wonder about our humanity, but at the end of the day, it’s not that deep. Also, that whole rant that America Ferrara went on about what women have to be was stupid. We don’t have to be anything. I don’t feel societal pressure about my looks because I don’t care about what others think. Obviously, dress and look appropriate, but don’t care about what others think. It’s that easy. Stop making up problems. We live in America, the country that treats its citizens the best. Women aren’t oppressed here so Greta needs to stop pretending.

In the end, this movie is a piece of trash filled with dumb politics instead of a sensible plot. Nice job Greta Gerwig, you managed to write something more unoriginal and stupid than the Scream remakes. It hurts as a Barbie superfan, but I’ll have to move on and wipe my hands of this filth.

#barbie movie #barbie 2023 #margot robbie #ryan gosling #greta gerwig #complaining #rant post #i hate it here #barbie #mattel #barbie doll

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gretagerwigarchive · 7 years ago

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Greta Gerwig & Joe Swanberg: The Penny-Pinching Future of Indie Cinema

By Steve Dollar | March 2, 2009

source: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/03/greta-gerwig-joe-swanberg-the-penny-pinching-futur.html

There’s low-budget guerrilla filmmaking and then there’s low-budget guerrilla filmmaking. Greta Gerwig, the 25-year-old star of indie-cinema micro-faves such as Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nights and Weekends and Baghead, recalls an inspiring moment during a visit home to her native California. Making an overnight stop at a motel in Santa Barbara, she flipped through the TV channels until she was stopped cold by something on the local public-access station. There, she discovered a very curious action flick called The Pharaoh Project.

“It was beyond amazing,” Gerwig says, her cadence by turns hesitant and headlong, as she recalls the insane saga about an elite squad of legendary warriors (Genghis Khan! Alexander the Great!) reincarnated to wreak havoc on the modern world. Really, it was like the director and his beefiest bouncer buddies were trying to create a Steven Seagal sci-fi/action epic on a PBR budget. “The most official-looking car they could get their hands on was a cream-colored Toyota 4Runner, but they played it like it was an FBI armored vehicle.

Gerwig, a Barnard-schooled playwright, screenwriter and director, has won glowing reviews for her comedic acting skills, mostly channeled into fetchingly flaky characters as romantically befuddled as befuddling. But even if the Los Angeles Times calls her “an ingénue for the text-message set,” and even if she’s about to start shooting John C. Reilly in her next feature, she still shares a nothing-fancy Williamsburg pad with a roommate. Make fun of The Pharaoh Project all you want. Gerwig won’t. “I just kept watching because there was so much there to admire,” she says. “It isn’t that far removed from the kind of movies I’ve made. The ‘let’s just go do it’ attitude. We’re interested in different things. I’m interested in the million tiny deaths that occur in everyday human interactions, and they’re interested in sweet-ass roundhouse kicks. But the motivation to make something is similar.”

Along with her friend and sometime collaborator Joe Swanberg, 27, Gerwig is one of the most prolific characters in a new wave of young filmmakers lighting up the indie landscape. The past few years have seen the arrival of a slew of talented, original directors who have thrived despite—and sometimes because of—miniscule budgets and improvised means: The list includes the Duplass brothers (Baghead), Aaron Katz (Dance Party, USA; Quiet City), Todd Rohal (The Guatemalan Handshake), Ron Bronstein (Frownland), Mary Bronstein (Yeast), Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound), Ry Russo-Young (Orphans, You Won’t Miss Me), Frank V. Ross (Hohokam, Present Company), Kentucker Audley (Team Picture), Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) and Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation).

Early on, Bujalski’s sound mixer, Eric Masunaga jokingly referred to one of the films as “mumblecore,” and the label stuck for a while. It was catchy, and spoke to the indie-rock flavor of efforts like Swanberg’s LOL, in which urban post-grads stumble in and out of relationships, bands and poorly furnished apartments, endlessly discussing feelings they can’t always articulate. The use of consumer-grade handheld digital-video cameras, spontaneous dialogue and casts comprised mostly of other budding directors are also common tendencies, although by no means exclusively so. Katz gives his actors scripts. Bronstein, who co-starred with his wife Mary in the Swanberg-shot Web series Butterknife, works in 16mm. So does Zobel. Not everyone digs Final Cut software. In other words, these filmmakers are hardly clones—but they have more in common with one another than they do with everyone else.

This movement, as such, has branched out as Swanberg and his peers have begun to mature after years of film festivals such as Austin’s annual SXSW, which became a flourishing seedbed for the movement around 2005.

“The technology changed in the mid-to-late ’90s,” Swanberg says, giving his socio-cultural analysis as he takes a chair next to Gerwig in a photographer’s studio near the Manhattan Port Authority. It’s a brittle winter evening after a day of hiking around bleak locales in upstate New York, where the pair posed as Depression-era vagabonds—even as all-too-real panhandlers proliferate on the streets outside. “The resolution got better, and the Internet allowed social networking to happen like it hadn’t before. The threat of the actors strike in 2001 that paved the way for a lot of reality TV to hit the mainstream made a huge impact on the way mass audiences perceived handheld video. Because they got used to watching it, all in one year, with Survivor and every other show that came along shot in a run-and-gun style on a small camera.”

It wasn’t long before young filmmakers hit the festival circuit with their own low-budget projects, though, as Swanberg notes, “A bunch of celebrities had to make movies on [digital video] to legitimize it. Ethan Hawke had to make one, and Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming made The Anniversary Party, and everyone said it was cool, and even then it took a lot longer.”

Swanberg began shooting so-called “webisodes” in 2005 with Young American Bodies, a series for the erotically minded Nerve.com, which reflected the diaristic—OK, blog-like—intimacy of his features. “This whole idea of exposing very personal inner thoughts to a general public whether they wanted it or not seemed really crazy five years ago,” he says. “But it was around the same time that these smaller movies started to do something similar: I’ll tell my story and my friend’s story. If it plays festivals and people see it, great, and if it doesn’t, it still exists. I made my first two movies for less than 3,000 bucks.”

That vow of insularity can’t stick forever, though. Swanberg’s new film, Alexander the Last premieres March 14 at SXSW and, on the same day, becomes available by demand on IFC, as part of its Festival Direct series. The idea, Swanberg explains, is to make the film broadly accessible while it’s still playing festivals, and not wait for interest to fade. “The way people are watching stuff is changing,” he says. “If I don’t start putting these movies out very quickly they will start backing up on each other. Theatrical distribution doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Benten Films, a DVD outfit run by two film critics—Andrew Grant of FilmBrain.com and Aaron Hillis of GreenCine.com—has done an impressive job of packaging and promoting work by Swanberg and fellow indie upstarts like Audley, Rohal and Katz. But it’s not easy. “There aren’t enough distributors to go around,” Hillis says. “If you’re an independent filmmaker there are not a lot of options out there. There’s no more middle class. It’s just a matter of time before it becomes either The Dark Knight or mumblecore, with nothing in between.”

If that’s the case, Swanberg’s work doesn’t suffer from a smaller screen. Alexander—a slender (72 minutes) but quietly observant drama that says as much with silence as with its improvised dialogue—is lucky to have an irresistible center of gravity in Jess Weixler (Teeth), a rising star whose face is a delicate map of feeling. About nothing if not process, the film charts the keenly attenuated emotional swings of Alex, a young actress drawn to her handsome co-star Jamie (Barlow Jacobs) while her rock-musician husband is on the road. To further complicate matters, she has introduced the fresh-from-Kentucky Jamie to her older sister Hellen (Amy Seimetz), who actually engages in the fling Alex and Jamie pretend to have onstage. The milieu may not be too far away from the tempest-in-a-beer-can angst of The Real World, but the spirit is much closer to the bedroom intimacies of the French New Wave. Yet, even if Swanberg’s actors are at home with casual nudity and candid couplings, their journeys of self-discovery are not linked to a larger political or philosophical agenda. They prefer singing their own songs and tinkering on thriftshop keyboards to dropping postmodern allusions to art and cinema. Their point is not to be clever, but to be honest. The film also broadens Swanberg’s professional circle. Jane Adams (Happiness) takes a small but key role, and Brooklyn filmmaker Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), for whom Swanberg has been working as a cameraman and assistant director, helped produce when another project failed to jell. Likewise, the Duplass brothers, whose ambitions skew more mainstream, have cast John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill for their next comedy. And Reilly also takes the lead in Gerwig and collaborator Alison Bagnall’s Funny Bunny.

“There’s an audience now, and I’m wanting things I didn’t want before,” Swanberg says. “I want to shoot in other cities now, and I want to shoot in HD. I want to rent apartments, and I want sailboats and all these other elements. But before, I was content with a few people in a room.”

Gerwig—who spent the past year racking up performances in neo-grindhouse genre flicks like Ti West’s House of the Devil and a non-mumblecore indie in which Iggy Pop plays her dad—has a good laugh about her efforts to go Hollywood. “I’ve made a bunch of audition tapes,” she says. “I start cracking up because I can’t get through the scenes. Some of them, I have to cry and say things in Southern accents.” She drifts into her best Scarlett O’Hara: “Johnny did not kill that bay-buh! I killed it! Because I hated it!” Nonetheless, the actress confesses, sure, “I’d love to be the girl in the dinosaur movie.” Well, OK, maybe a movie with little plastic dinosaurs.

Gerwig says she was astonished to learn that the guys who made Cloverfield are fans. “The woman who casts Gossip Girl loves Aaron Katz. What!? But maybe I’m not supposed to say that. The number of people who are around watching you out of the corner of their eye is amazing.”

Swanberg—whose output has increased since he brought on Anish Savjani (Wendy and Lucy) as a producer—won’t likely be taking on any Cloverfield sequels, even with his handheld-video skills. If his films don’t make money, he’ll still shoot. “It’s a compulsion for me,” says Swanberg, who also finds time to continue acting in his friends’ movies, shooting Web projects and helping his wife, Kris Williams, with both her filmmaking and burgeoning gourmet-ice-cream business. “It’s not like I started doing it because I was good at it. Nor is it that I continue to do it because I’m good at it. I do it because I can’t help it, and I don’t know what else to do. I already know there will be a period when I will make 10 of them that nobody sees or likes or writes about. But the reason why I will continue through that period that nobody cares is not because they will care again but because I can’t help it. It’s selfish. I’m making these things for me.”

#Interview #2009 #Joe Swanberg #Greta Gerwig

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