We finally got to watch Barbie (2023). Now we can listen to all those podcasts I've been saving.
It starts in Barbieland, where all the Barbies live in Dream Houses. Margot Robbie is just a regular (Stereotypical) Barbie. Of course, everyone - the President, Supreme Court, doctors, scientists. CEOs - all Barbies of one sort or another. The Kens all hang out on the beach - in fact, their job is Beach. Robbie's Ken is Ryan Gosling. He's jealous of the other Ken's and only wants Robbie's attention. But of course, she is busy with girl's night sleepovers, and doesn't really have time for boyfriends.
Then one day, she has thoughts of death. Soon, her breath turned sour, ceelulite started to appear on her thighs, and she no longer walked as if she were wearing high-heels when she was barefoot. She needed the help of Weird Barbie.
Weird Barbie, Kate McKinnon, is a Barbie with hacked hair and crayoned face, who lives in a weird house with some discontinued or otherwise unacceptable Barbies. She tells Robbie that the problem is the child who is playing with her in the real world. She will have to go there to solve the problem.
So she heads out to the real word in her pink convertible, singing along to the Indigo Girls. Gosling pops up in the backseat, stowing away. They end up in Venice Beach on roller skates, blending right in. While Robbie heads to school to find her real-world owner, Gosling went to hang out in the library.
It turns out that the girl who was playing with Robbie is Arianna Greenblatt (65), a mean, gothy adolescent who doesn't even like Barbie. Her youthful malevolence manages to crush Robbie's irrepressible spirit. But we've seen her with her mother, America Ferrera, a depressed working woman who sketches Barbie variations, like Persistent Thoughts of Death Barbie. She works as a receptionist (/designer?) at Mattel.
The Mattel board, led by Will Ferell, has found out about the Barbie escape, and are freaking out. Fortunately, Robbie shows up at the headquarters and Ferrera shows her into the boardroom. She just wants things to go back the way they were. She doesn't like the real world - the men aren't respectful, and the woman can't get a break. Heck, the Mattel board are all men. So the board plans to put her in a package and send her for remanufacturing. But Ferrara breaks her out, they grab Greenblatt and head for Barbieland.
When they get back, they find out that Ken has returned first. He read up on Patriarchy and decides to impose it on Barbieland. And then, Ferell and the board show up.
This may sound a little scattered and unfocused, becuse it is. There's a lot going on. Barbie's awakening and Ferrera's quest for meaning sort of fit together, but the Ken plot seems sort of shoehorned in - and it's about 20-30% ot the movie. He has the song that got the Oscar, plus another country-folk number (I like that one better. although it's pretty rough). Plus, he's Ryan Gosling. He has most of the jokes, and he has the biggest problem: He has no purpose, except Barbie.
There's a scene I loved where, after the Patriarchy is overthrown, he re-unites with Robbie. He is delirious with relief, babbling about what he went through, how he didn't even care about patriarchy when he found out it wasn't mostly about horses. I've been there, babbling to my crush about everything I've thought and dreamed while we were apart for a weekend, not even realizing that she didn't really care. He confesses his love for Robbie, but she doesn't love him. That's refreshing.
Barbie's arc is a little more hard to pin down. You can see elements of the hero's journey (from Barbieland to Real World and back), but I have trouble finding the center of the story. Maybe it's because Barbie isn't a real character, she's just dreams and playtime. But I also wonder if this was Greta Gerwig's story from the start, or did someone offer her a Barbie movie, and she just threw stuff at it until it was 2 hours long.
I guess I'm not really the audience for this movie, anyway.
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