Yeah, I appreciated the overall thrust of the monologue, but it didn’t completely jibe with my own experience. I chalked it up to my age - feminism, like anything else, changes over time, and I think a lot of younger women don’t see gender issues quite the same way as I do, because we came of age in different eras. I don’t find that especially distressing - I know that first wave feminists didn’t quite understand second wave feminists either.
But while I don’t know your age, I know you are a lot younger than I am (I’m 64), so it is interesting to me that the monologue didn’t entirely connect for you either.
I liked the movie but I did note that the monologue was basically just saying that it’s hard in life to find the right balance of things - being nice vs. being tough, being funny vs. being serious, etc. Too of anything is bad and figuring out that sweet spot is a process, through life, for all individuals and not a problem that is particular to a gender.
I got the sense that the monologue was a range of examples broad enough to resonate with most women about why “real life”, as opposed to a fantasy life, is tough. You could come up with a similar list that would resonate with most men, but that’d be in a different movie.
I have more to say about the movie, but for all the controversy about its “wokeness” I found it not at all misandrist.
I saw ‘Barbie’ with my brothers and we thoroughly enjoyed it and laughed the whole way through. I keep telling people it is better than they’d guess but many will not be convinced. Their loss. Best time I have had at a movie in a long time. It’s just fun. Yeah, you can get into the deeper messages and those were not lost on me and are great for discussion later…it’s still just fun though.
That got a rousing cheer from the women in my nearly filled theater. I think a similar speech could be made for men because, in the end, life is hard. But she’s not wrong and I’m 100% fine with her speech and loved it.
Really good movie all-around. Worth going to see IMO.
Yes, it could be that’s it’s so broad that most women will relate to some of it but not necessarily all of it.
No, to think it’s misandrist is to miss the point, I think. In Barbieland men are oppressed the way women were oppressed. So if you look at the treatment of Kens and feel outraged on their behalf… That’s the point.
My husband thinks there should be a sequel that takes Barbieland the rest of the way toward an equal society.
Gosh I would love it if kids could at least play at equality… That’s a start. I didn’t want to apply too many gender stereotypes to my son so I bought him dolls and stuff but he wouldn’t touch them. But he’s autistic, so understanding symbolic representations of other people and imaginary play isn’t really his thing. Of course he’s interested in trucks and dinosaurs, but as a little girl I played with those things too. But for him, nothing in all the world is as exciting as numbers, and those are for every gender. I do notice he calls inanimate objects “she!” He has a nurturing side as he sometimes feeds his stuffed racecars and brushes their teeth. That’s about the limit of his imaginative play but it’s not much different than taking care of a doll, I don’t think.
Saw it the other day and thought it was mostly good fun. The Mattel stuff was kind of stuffed in time-filler that served little purpose aside from a reason for Barbie & Co to head back and a way to get Ruth in there, both of which could have been done some other way. I don’t dislike Ferrell but he didn’t add anything to this movie.
I won’t comment on the monologue except to say that it now occurs to me that the Barbies had been living a pretty idyllic existence so it’s hard to image that they’d relate to the trials of Real World Womanhood. I didn’t think about it at the time though so it didn’t distract.
Overall though, Robbie & Gosling (and McKinnon) did great, the film was fun to watch, good overall message and worth the theater visit.
Interesting, I hadn’t considered that the Kens were facing the equivalent misogyny of the 50s.
My take while watching it was that the entire Ken storyline was an exploration of the question, “What would life be like for a Ken in the Barbie universe,” and nothing more. I think the script works better when taken at face value – that these are fundamentally weird toys, and wouldn’t it be interesting to explore some of that – than as an allegory for social issues. At least as far as the toys in the movie go – America Ferrera et al bring the social commentary, but that makes sense because they’re people, not toys.
The remainder of my thoughts on the movie are that, boy, Gerwig crammed a lot in here. Barbie is a:
Comedy
Musical
Corporate cash grab
Meta take on corporate cash grabs
Social commentary
Conceptual fantasy
Everyone who watches it should find something to enjoy. Personally, I found most of the humor to fall flat – I laughed a few times, but there was a group in the back of the theater who lost their minds on every single joke. My wife and I found that quite distracting. But we loved the dance/musical numbers and both wished there were more of them.
More interesting to me than the social stuff was watching how the movie handled Mattel, and I appreciated that they didn’t let Barbie’s controversial aspects go un-discussed.
Another Ryan Gosling movie recommendation: The Nice Guys with Russell Crowe.
Did anyone think walking in that Barbie would be a “kids movie”? I think the trailers did a good job of suggesting it wouldn’t be one, but it was still more “mature” than I expected. I didn’t know exactly what it would be.
I loved that movie. I missed it when it first came out, but we watched it earlier this year and couldn’t stop laughing. And I loved him in The Big Short. He is a really versatile actor.
Not much to add, other than another strong upvote. I was planning to wait for streaming, but a couple of friends said I promised to watch it in the theater with them. I’m so glad I did. All the jokes worked for me and I found the moving parts more moving than a movie about a doll should be. The Will Ferrell bits were the only parts that could have been different but I’m just not a big Ferrell fan to start with. Other than that it was perfect, and a lot of fun to see in a theater full of people laughing along, some of whom were dressed up.
I was wearing a black band t-shirt, black jeans and shoes. Which I didn’t think about till I got there.
Does anyone know if this movie is supposed to take place in the 90s? I didn’t see a single cell phone in Real World, and it seemed more like where women were in the 90s than they are today. And Matchbox 20?
Hmm, my take was that the treatment of all the male characters in the movie had a strong undercurrent of “What would a movie be like if all the male characters were basically nothing but plot mechanisms and/or silly comic relief and gender stereotypes, and all the characters who get to be actual people with thoughts and feelings taken seriously were female?”
There are a shit-ton of movies out there (fewer nowadays than formerly, natch) where all the “actual people” characters are male, and female characters exist simply as a foil to them or background set dressing. Barbie swaps the genders in that style of filmmaking, and I suspect that that’s why some male viewers found it absolutely insulting and offensive. A fictional universe where no men get respected or taken seriously as individual human beings WHAAAAAAAAT.
Mind you, I don’t think the movie was trying to imply that men shouldn’t be respected and taken seriously. It’s a parody. Moreover, it’s a sometimes-incoherent mix of parody and direct social critique, which IMHO is somewhat less effective than sticking with one or the other.
Still, very enjoyable movie, fresh and funny in a lot of ways. I’d probably say B+, but I am likely underrating it because, as I’ve noted, as a moviegoer I am crap at noticing or appreciating any of the artistic visual/cinematographic stuff that movies do, and I hear that Barbie was quite highly praised in that regard.
As a longtime cinema nerd I can confirm that Gerwig directs the absolute shit out of this movie. Masterful control of tone and camera. The script is a bit lumpy (and Gerwig would probably agree because there’s a go-for-broke attitude to the writing, like they believed they wouldn’t get another shot, so they didn’t want to leave anything out), but the quality of the filmmaking is totally top notch.
It’s basically a lock at the Oscars for production design, too. You can take that to the bank right now.
I hear you, I guess my point is that Gerwig didn’t take a toy line featuring strong male characters and make this decision. Kens in the Barbie toy line are an afterthought, and the gender roles are already reversed in all Barbie IP. If anything, the movie gives the Kens more to do and more agency than the toys and previous media would grant.
I’m not sure what the Ben Shapiros of the world were expecting.
Now, if you took the Ken storyline out of this movie, would it still fail a reverse Bechdel test? I think so, unless any of the Mattel employees has a conversation not about Barbie that I don’t remember. Everything in the “real world” was focused on women, and that was great. More movies like that please.
My informal and unscientific poll of my friends who played with Barbie definitely had Ken as an afterthought. They would play with Barbie. If the day’s adventure needed a man, out Ken would come. If it didn’t he stayed in the toy chest. No one ever played with Ken by himself.
