#it's like barbie being feminism 101 lol

[fearandhatred]

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[anonanimal]

ok we watched the barbie movie and i must be ovulating because the emotional levers were successfully pulled and i did cry but i was also mad part of the time.

i'd say i have a few thoughts and questions about the depiction of ruth handler lol but i haven't put it into succinct enough words yet

interesting they'd do the jokes about earring magic ken and growing up skipper and uh whatever pregnant midge was called and do a joke about ruth handler's...tax evasion? did she really do tax evasion? but they didn't touch on bild lilli. maybe they can't

sooo barbie is a god and mattel are her... stewards. lmao? what the fuck is gonna happen in barbieland if god is not in her heaven... whatever. just like in preacher when god goes missing (yes i watched part of the preacher amc series with my mother). i feel like the "barbie is a god, she is every barbie and every barbie is her" would have been the explicit focus of MY barbie movie (what can i say, i love a good story about a god becoming human, it's the christianity i've been steeped in) but they kind of don't do much with it

actually ruth handler = god, barbie = jesus?

ken becomes a ... men's (ken's) rights activist. lmao?

anyone else think the car chase was filmed like a car commercial. like weirdly obviously so? i feel like product placement has come farther than this

they want people to say it's a gay or trans allegory sooooo bad between the birkenstocks and the "you don't get permission, it's something you discover about yourself" they want it sooooo bad ok you win i'm saying it. but i know you wanted me to say it. you won fuck off!!!!!! or maybe i'm reaching because it's easy to read the emotional journey of coming out to yourself in a general coming of age tale. but come on. i'm not that smart so if i'm picking up on someone wanting me to think something, they probably do. the only way this movie could have been gay would have been if the weird barbies led a new society.

so was this their way of saying they're debuting a line of kens with jobs...?

i liked the comedy of 2001 monolith barbie and the barbieland physical comedy stuff. maybe i should have rolled my eyes but i'm easy. rollerblading executives also killed

i liked the little twist that barbie's crisis was precipitated by being played with, not by a maturing child, but her mother. kind of in line with how the movie itself is an ad for the barbie brand for adults. there's quite a few moments that i thought had to be intentional references to the function of the movie itself in the real world, and they all felt weird and bad, like someone screaming "let me out!!!!!" i've forgotten a lot of them now because i'm adding this bit in an edit the next day.

*guy who has only seen south park voice* getting a lot of imaginationland vibes from this

i kind of expected for there to be like a joke about allan being in unrequited love with ken but i now think there probably was in an earlier draft and it didn't mesh with the final product and they had to nix it. or like surely someone floated it at least

you know they tried to save it from being too much about ken by having someone literally say "what about barbie's ending?" and then doing barbie's ending but...it was still kind of more about ken i think. he did a dance number for christ's sake. i almost forgot that barbie got to dance too, but barbie's dance was also mostly about ken wanting her to notice him. "he's just ken" "kenergy" "i am kenough" come on. i think the biggest laugh in the theater was actually the kenough hoodie. biggest laugh for me personally? sasha saying, (and i'm paraphrasing of course bc i'm not bothering to look it up) "are you two shining?"

i got SO close to killing the mood when we walked out by saying "hey lets google mattel factory working conditions right now" but i decided that was too far / probably in poor taste for me to flippantly use in post-movie discussion

the feminism 101 stuff was whatever. it made sense within the setting of the movie since america ferrera as a human had to introduce ideas into barbieland for them to take hold, and ideas just kind of manifest whatever happens in barbieland, but i'm very surprised they didn't do a joke like "gee i wish it was this easy in the real world" like how did they miss that opportunity, it would have worked. or maybe they did and i missed it because i had my hater goggles on

sooo velveteen rabbit?

all in all, as a member of the moviegoing public, i guess i got what i wanted. an experience that left me with something to think and talk about.

p.s. this was, for me personally, an ad for ryan gosling. i didn't find him interesting until now. they really got me there.

p.p.s. obviously any criticism i have of the like existence of the barbie movie is hypocritical because i haven't said it about gundam (yet)

[mrschwartz]

Mojo dojo casa house?

hogging this ask to share my opinions on the barbie film which i had promised i'd do!

i only watched it once so obv i'm gonna catch a lot more in subsequent viewings and might even change my opinion on some things but

at first view what impressed me the most were the production and costume designs! the barbieland set and the barbies' outfits are really impressive and fucking awesome, they helped a lot in the immersive nature of the film and to sell the premise. the commitment to the rules of the doll universe was fucking stellar, the walking on tiptoes, her floating down to the car, there not being any actual liquids or food

and like okay. the plot. phewwwwwww. it's metamodern and i get it, and while it certainly was Extremely self-aware it often seemed like said self-awareness was being actualized by someone with a very specific, not necessarily privileged but oftentimes limited, worldview. for example, america ferrera's speech was great but didn't it feel like feminism 101? i thought the film was going to commit to some more radicalized notions, i guess lmao

but i don't want to judge it based on my expectations, let me judge it for what it is! something that i have to give it credit for is the critic given to barbie dolls themselves, especially the ones from sasha (maybe it's bc i'm zillenial so i've been her lol). i wasn't expecting the film to open that discussion and that gave it a turning point that i think was much needed. what i will say is that i think too much importance was given to the historical significance of barbies lol ("you set feminism back 50 years you fascist!") but i think that's a given since the movie was produced by mattel iself

i would love to analyze this film for what it is and not mostly for the message it's trying to send (bc i'm The Biggest believer that stories don't have to have a moral lesson, and in fact are probably better when they don't tbh) but it truly only works when you take into account the discussion it's trying to sparkle. and good for it! it did its job, people are fucking talking about it lmao. we're in a weird cultural moment where people like me think the film would've benefitted from being more radical (by GOD not in a terf sense, terfs can die and burn lmao, but in a let's free the nipple and grow our body hair and raise boys and girls the same way sense) but conservative people think it IS radical for supposedly sending the message that women should hate men (???)

on that note. i'm Definitely not siding with the conservatives here (my god please god Definitely not) but the film kept hammering on the fact that we should fight the patriarchy (and i've seen people saying that you're missing the point if you don't realize that the film is us vs patriarchy and not women vs men) but i think that's giving too much credit to the film vnfjvnfjv like i said, it's feminism 101, so in the end the barbies still take back barbieland, no? they go back to the beginning of the film, this idyllic world where one gender rules all and occupies all of the space. and like I GET IT, it's a comment on how the opposite is what happens in our world, i'm not stupid lol. i'm just angry that the dichotomy IS there, is all i'm saying. the film criticizes the things women are associated with and the expecations we have to live with, but also plays straight into it when this world governed by women is all pink and glamourous and perfect lmao does my critic make sense? that particular message of the film feels very girl power 2014 tumblr core

speaking of which, anyone else not happy at all with the capitalist recuperation this film brought about? "let girls dress in pink and wear barbie merch to this blockbuster multimillion dollar movie!! this is our moment, if men can cosplay to watch mcu films then the girls can have this one!!" oh honey. "movies for girls" and "movies for men" much? there goes the polarization again. AND the commodification of something that Should be counterculture. thanks for contributing to both <3

all of this not to say that i didn't like the movie! i did it was great i laughed a lot! sometimes its self-awareness bothered me for how "biased" it was but most of the time the film really benefitted from it in its comedy! depression barbie made me HOWL lmao, and the kens serenating the barbies with an acoustic guitar gave me war flashbacks bc literally what woman hasn't been there, stuff like that

and. it did make me cry lol. the final scene when barbie is talking to ruth handler and finally understands what it's like to be human and more specifically a human woman really touched me bc it was a commentary on the personal. it wasn't getting at broad social subjects, it was all about internal conflict and acceptance. reminded me of the epiphany scene from soul and the parking lot scene from everything everywhere all at once. i feel like metamodern films rely a lot on these self-referential and social commentaries, but are also slowly walking towards looking inwards a lot, and that means so much to me. the examples i've observed so far in cinema are fucking beautiful, i hope it's here to stay

[taohun]

okay whatever that’s a super pick-and-choosey reading of the plot but that doesn’t even matter to my original point anyways. i don’t even care about what’s happening IN Barbie I’m talking about how public discourse just in general has seemingly just slid into this state of pure surface level “feminism” that only ever addresses the experiences of feminine white cishet women in a consumerist lens. address anything else and you’re being a buzzkill and like, a fucking pick me lol. like we’re not even at gender 101 anymore.

we’ve circled right back around to pink is for girls and blue is for boys and women should be “allowed” to be super feminine as if like, there’s ever any real resistance to that.