Today’s review is a true story review, one like no other. It’s all about one word, “Barbie”.
Well actually Barbie and me! Let’s do it!
Greta Gerwig directed the 2023 comedy film BARBIE from a screenplay she wrote with Noah Baumbach. And it is the first live-action Barbie film produced after numerous computer-animated films and specials.
Now, the film stars of course Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken
So, as the story Barbie and Me goes, you're not going to believe it. I bought tickets to see Barbie twice and left the theater each time. The first time was opening day, July 17th, when I had tickets for a doubleheader, opening day of Oppenheimer followed by Barbie, aka the Barbenheimer.
After seeing Oppenheimer, I could not for the life of me conceive of watching a doll movie. A phenom or not, I just couldn't, so I left the theater amongst the crowd of young and old women all dressed up in pink and black and white outfits for the Barbenheimer.
Now, this was the strangest dichotomy in a theater I've ever seen. So, after watching Oppenheimer, I jumped on the first elevator going to leave that theater alongside a young father and his teen daughter, a cute girl all dressed in pink, and he asked his daughter:
"Honey what button should we press for the lobby. “I think it’s the red button, Dad,” she replied.
Since I was closest to the elevator buttons, of course I looked over at the big red button and said,
"Oh my God, please, not the red button, you guys. I just watched America bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki and today is not a very good day to press the red button..."
The dad got it immediately and blinked, and the daughter looked at him like, "Whaaaaaaat?!"
So, I then purchased a second set of tickets to see Barbie online, went to the theater a second time, and yeah, I couldn't do it. Yup. I just turned around and left!
It was so bizarre, and anyway, it seemed that whenever it came time to actually watch Barbie, or even discuss it, I always had anxiety, and I couldn't figure out why.
So, my first thought was that all that lauding of a stupid doll turned real life movie seemed so pointless at the time, but I knew it had to be deeper than that. And, In the end, I knew I had to review it since everybody knows it's a mega blockbuster. But the thought of a Barbie movie just made me very anxious, and I now refer to that condition as Barbiexiety.
Finally, I decided to just purchase the damn movie on cable for $19.99 and be able to watch it at home whenever I could get past my Barbiexiety.
And so here we are today, last night (December 16th!) I finally watched Barbie from beginning to end--and I'm going to talk to you briefly about some of what I didn't like about Barbie, what I was concerned about the most, and what I loved a lot about Barbie.
My first concern was the monologue at the beginning of the film, in which it is explained why little girls played with baby dolls before Barbie appeared.
Neither I, nor most of my friends played with our fat baby dolls or simply dolls, as we called them, pretending or feigning to be mothers. actually no, that is not completely correct. If anything, the dolls we played with were unintentionally used as a way of learning or practicing how to treat or “care” for or “nurture” people in general—because it's part of who we are as women. I don't know, ask God. it's in our DNA.
Further, when I was a little girl, this was a doll someone that looked like me, had some weight on her and had brown skin:
So Barbie here never appealed to me at all .I always thought of Barbie Dolls as sticks, she was so skinny, Yup, fake doll even.
And so, when I first heard they brought “Barbie” to the screen, I thought why keep pushing this stereotype to all women. Not good, not interested, don't mess with my head, and so my Barbie Anxiety began.
Additionally, after seeing Hollywood's overuse of time warps and character/world exchanges from the epic Michael J Fox's Back to the Future role to Marvel's infamous multiverses, as well as all the time warp travel movies in between up until TODAY'S Stranger Things with its Upside World view, I did not see any reason for another Barbie Doll world exchange film.
How-big-ever, the Barbie film flipped the crossover world concept and has taken it to an even greater level as she does in fact leave the perfect "Barbie World" for the REAL UGLY WORLD.
Boom!
Overall, the movie while great, great, great for girl power, and all that, I thought went a bit extreme in that area too—and I read some people said it didn't go far enough with feminism issues. Whoo!
Well, I said it, because while younger women today love to say, “I don’t need a man” yet all we hear about on the flip side on social media is "I just want me a life partner, I need somebody’’. Well okay, that is what Barbie’s World was saying to me.
Yep, Barbie was pushing that.
You cannot tell me that Barbie did not like Ken, but I believe it wasn't always about "I don't need a man." Ken himself said it in the film, "It’s “Barbie AND Ken”, but, y'all, once Barbie experienced the real world, I definitely related to her desire to do and/or die as humans do to experience it.
Because being a stereotypical (thank God the writers used that word over and over in the film, not me) - so yes, being a stereotypical blonde female, aka dumb blonde type of female, that never appealed to me as a young girl or young woman, so hell yeah, Barbie! Get yo' azz out of that damn dollhouse and learn how to be a real woman in today's world, with all its good, bad, and ugly.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Yeah, after all that, I'm still baffled by all this attention and the whole Barbie phenomenon, and I think the film is over nominated. And I believe this is partly due to the fact that Barbie's movie provides great escapism from our real world problems, and when watching Barbie deal with those issues in a way that reminds me of the 90's woke-fashion time warp, with all the social, economic, patriarchal, and other ills of today, and at the same time ignores even more pressing problems I suppose due to their sheer magnitude. I guess people want to be lost in Barbie's world for a while.
Barbie does draw a great parallel between the real-world and the Barbie world today. And to think, most days I feel the real world is the same as the mixed upside-down Barbie world, so there's that!
Boom.