also i gotta head out for a little bit but please keep sending asks i’d love to continue this barbie chat!!! and if you don’t wanna see this barbie chat, filter out/blacklist the word barbie and if anything has spoilers, i’ll tag it #barbie spoilers.
And even Hari wasn’t given a lot to do and this is going a little off topic but I’ve seen some articles say that her being in Barbie might mean Hollywood will give more opportunities to trans actresses and even though progress has been made I still think Hollywood is still a little apprehensive about casting a trans woman as a lead
Oh no not at all, she just seemed to be one of the major Barbie sidekicks I guess. Not trying to criticize it either because I think it’s really great that she is trans and there and it’s not a Thing at all it’s just awesome. But yeah I really hope it does, it’s about damn time. I think they definitely are too. It’s slowly happening more in indie movies and in blockbusters occasionally there are trans women in side character roles (now thinking about Hunter Schafer is gonna be in the Hunger Games prequel later this year as a small role). Hopefully it’ll keep getting bigger and better. The other thing is they tend to choose from such a small pool of sort of “accepted” trans women who usually pass or have been in enough things to gain cred. Which, I know that’s literally how Hollywood works. Experience and a name = audience pull/acceptance. Like Hari Nef, like Laverne Cox, like is starting to happen with Hunter Schafer. Slowly but surely. Hopefully.
im typing up a response rn for barbie and it might be kinda long so ill try to keep it short but what you've already said I agree with, the pacing and the narrative arc felt chaotic and like they have a bunch of individual ideas and then wrote the movie around them. I knew that it would never actually be able to address any concrete issues like if barbie as a brand is harmful or not, but in that case they should have just stuck to an allegorical framework and made barbies journey a coming of age as a woman movie.
Mmmmm yeah. Like they address it and quickly pull away from it (whether Barbie is harmful, she’s ultimately good but she just wants to be a woman, etc) I do think they ended up making it a coming of age as a woman movie but definitely there were a lot of like… side quests along the way and I wish it had been a little more streamlined. It’s funny because I actually think Lady Bird is a little too streamlined and a pretty stereotypical coming of age movie with too many montages (but I think about it on like a weekly basis and it’s very good and one of the best coming of age movies, it’s just not groundbreaking) and Barbie is a little too jumbled. Didn’t keep me from liking it but definitely much more uneven than Greta’s other movies imo.
Like maybe it’s just me but I feel like Issa Rae should’ve been given a lot more to do
AGREED. She was barely there rip. I feel like Hari Nef was the only Barbie who got more than like three lines which is Fine but I wish it’d been more Barbies idk
I loved Barbieland it was so gorgeous and colorful I didn’t really love the scenes in the real world America Ferrera did a fantastic job but they fell flat to me. Ryan Gosling was the perfect Ken and this is my favorite performance of his next to The Nice Guys Margot Robbie was really great and she gave Barbie a lot of depth my one complaint is that I wish they gave the other Barbies more screen time
AGREED. Barbieland was fucking perfect. Okay we are so on the same wavelength, I expressed some similar feelings in my last answers (in a less succinct way, lol). Too much at Mattel HQ for my liking and while the scenes with America (though she did a great job!) and the Barbie creator in particular and stuff were cool they just were too long and did not do it for me. (Meanwhile they’re my sister’s fave lol. All a matter of taste.) That’s where the melodrama set in. But I agree holy shit, I really think Ryan and Margot are some of the best movie stars we have today. They were absolutely perfect in their roles. And YES. It made me want to rewatch The Nice Guys once again!! It’s definitely amongst my favorites of his, I also enjoy him a lot in some of his earlier indie work like Half Nelson and then I’m a sucker for Blade Runner 2049 and La La Land. He’s so good at comedy my god. (Love his dramas too just… an ActOr!) And finally, agreed. We really didn’t get to know the other Barbies which is a shame. It was the Ken and Barbie and America Ferreira show. I’m glad we got a lot of Kate McKinnon though but she was easily the other Barbie with the most screentime. Oh well.
excited to hear your thoughts on Barbie I was about to ask yesterday if you'd seen it yet but didn't wanna harass you about it lmao. I didnt like it as much as I hoped I would (writing related reasons) so maybe talking about it with you will turn me around on it 🤞
Ahhh that is sweet of you and hopefully so! I mean I also am very much of the mind that not everything is for everybody but I’m always happy to share my thoughts!! I think before its release I bounced back and forth between having very high and very low expectations that kind of ended up in a sort of medium place (yes maybe I’ve been rewatching The Good Place haha) and that was nice to come in at.
I think that the focus on feminism and social issues being at the forefront of the marketing and critical response (granted, I haven’t read many professional reviews, because I only just saw the movie the other day and had been avoiding up until then) makes total sense. And like, it is about as political as a movie about a billion dollar business doll can be. I have mixed feelings about movies being made for so much money and to make so much money and like, pre-existing IP and on and on, but I also think that there’s no stopping that train and to see something good and semi-original come out of it is really cool.
All that said: in my previous ask I got into it a bit, but yeah, I do think that the writing sort of varied between being extremely good and quick-witted and funny and being melodramatic. And there wasn’t a lot of in between. I think the parts with the humans, while the most popular because of feminism and all, while important and stuff, were often the worst and felt rushed (in the writing process maybe, like Amy’s speech in Little Women, except kinda longer and worse) versus a lot of the Barbieland stuff. The heist at the end to take back Barbieland from the Kens also felt too short. Idk! The pacing was definitely off to me, however I did stay engaged the entire time and like if my friend called me up and wanted to see it tomorrow, I’d jump back in my pink tshirt and go see it with her. It’s imperfect but super fun to me. Part of it may be because my expectations were not super high, and I didn’t know many spoilers going in so I got surprised by a lot.
I dont think this counts as barbie spoilers. I can talk with more specific details once you've seen it. but I have to admit I might have had too high expectations for the social commentary aspect because everybody kept talking about how it was this amazing portrayal of womanhood. I didn't feel like it was bad, but sort of ironic because ken's arc and narrative felt a lot more coherent than barbies by the end. I didn't think it was bad if you just go in for a fun time then it's such a fun ride but the narrative as a whole felt oddly disjointed. theres tons of individual ideas and concepts that work really well but it felt a bit directionless?
Sorry it took me so long to answer this, I wanted to go in as blind as I could (despite advertising bombardment). But now that I’ve seen it, I know exactly what you mean and feel very similarly. I was laughing my ass off at a lot of the movie and hating men a little and stuff and I think it was like largely very well directed and written but I agree, disjointed is a good word for it. Parts of it felt choppy and the flow wasn’t what I’d hoped. (Especially when I find Lady Bird and Little Women to be veryyy tight movies with good flow, however, I probably liked Barbie as much as them overall tbh. I rank them all as more or less 4/5 movies, with different highs and lows. Little Women maybe my favorite? Not what this convo is about though.) And I agree, by the halfway point it felt a little like Ken became the main character and Barbie’s arc was pushed aside for almost half the movie. Which I think was on purpose because of The Patriarchy and everything being upside down in Barbieland? I also felt a little like some of the monologues were out of place, though they were 100% right and stuff. Idk. I think it’s back to what you said and it just felt a little uneven, it was either silly or serious and the two didn’t blend so much at certain points. (Some parts it did!!! Others it obviously didn’t.) I feel like I need to see it again to have fully formed thoughts on it but lol.
But yeah I don’t think it’s like the foremost feminist cinema but I did like it a lot anyway. I was there for a silly goofy time and got it.
Hey Kyra can I share some thoughts on the Barbie movie with you?
Yes! Good timing, I was actually just about to post that I have finally seen it! I liked it a lot!
