I didn’t. I felt the movie was meant to appeal to adults with nostalgia for the golden age of Barbie (1960s/70s I am guessing).
My niece is in her 20s now and I think she barely ever played with Barbie. Certainly she knows about it and had some Barbie stuff but it wasn’t really her thing. (I get that is a small sample size but I think it is safe to suppose the sample is bigger since if her peers played Barbie she would have too.)
This is probably as good a time as any to bring back Nissan’s 1990s-era commercials featuring not-Barbie, not-Ken, and not G.I. Joe.
Saw it yesterday. It’s Great! It’s trippy, has lots of laughs and is thought-provoking.
I saw it last night. It was good entertainment with some good laughs. I loved Alan and Weird Barbie, especially when she was first introduced - the chopped off hair and the marker on her face!
This movie was an absolute delight! I laughed a lot and there were some very sweet and thoughtful moments too. The collective viewing experience was very enjoyable. I haven’t felt that type of energy in a theater in a long time.
In my head, Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds have a Paxton/ Pullman thing going.
I’m a guy, and as a kid I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of girls. So in my immediate vicinity, most kids my age were girls, and I had many friends who were girls. If I went to play with them, they often played Barbie. I was glad Ken was there to play with.
I was not the target demographic for the toys, obviously, and never actually owned any of them myself.
In my head, Gosling never stopped being Young Hercules. To this day when I see him, that’s what I immediately think of. I can’t help it.
I think it’s interesting how the movie set itself up to point out that prior to Barbie, you mostly only got to play Mom to a doll. But with Barbie you could play at being an adult woman with any job or even just enjoying leisure time. I think I took that for granted growing up in the 80s and 90s. It’s not that the arguments about harsh beauty standards aren’t valid, but there’s a whole aspect of Barbie I never even considered before, which is that it enabled generations of little girls to envision a future which wasn’t exclusively focused on motherhood.
That Ken takes a backseat to what Barbie is doing is also something I never considered. It takes this idea of womanhood a step further by allowing girls to explore their relationship to men without being subsumed by what the male desires.
Pretty cool stuff.
Ken probably did.
Saw it yesterday–echo the trippy, fun, serious comments. My wife got a little teary a couple times. We haven’t been to an in-theater movie in some time–is 45 minutes (literally) of ads and trailers the new norm? Pretty annoying. Any opinions on whether Ryan Gosling is that ripped normally (at 46, IIRC) or if he got buff for the movie? He really is a fantastic actor.
Just want to echo the sentiment that this movie was great fun. It got my 12-year-old daughter asking about patriarchy and gynecologists, which is an added bonus.
Several laugh out loud moments for this middle-aged guy, but the two that stand out are the Kens singing Matchbox 20 on the beach and Barbie’s last line of the movie.
“I’m suddenly intensely interested in the Zack Snyder cut of the Justice League!”
All the Kens beach off in the movie. Maybe they even beach off each other.
Don’t forget the “beach you off” talk.
Not in my experience. Once the show really starts, a few commercials before the trailers is normal, but not 45 minutes.
Now, what is normal is to show looping advertisements prior to the showtime. If you arrive extremely early, then yes you might subject yourself to any number of ads.
Back in the day if you got to a theater early there would be a dim screen until the film started, then you’d get some trailers followed by the movie. Someone realized that a blank screen was a wasted opportunity and instead started putting ads up on the screen for that time period. Just another revenue stream for theaters.
Yeah. I’ve never gotten to a movie that early, but yes, they’re going to run ads nonstop until things get going.
I’ve noticed the amount of motion and sound-filled ads steadily increase over the past 10 or so years. Previously, the ads were mostly for local businesses and were just still shots of ads. Now, they still have that, but also have 15 or so minutes of slickly produced, loud, full-screen ads before the previews. And then 15 minutes of previews. I don’t actually mind that many previews per se, although I might if I went to the movies a lot and kept seeing the same previews. What I don’t like is that there is always some small amount of silence between previews which makes you think the feature is starting. Sometimes there are even official announcements after a preview, the kind of which usually presage the feature starting, only to then fade to black and then show another preview or, sometimes, even another ad.
It’s sort of like being put on hold and the music pauses, but instead of an agent it is only an assurance by a robotic voice that “your call is important to us.” I just want to know that this is the very last preview!
I wonder if this is a theater chain difference, like Megaplex versus small count theater. We usually get four or occasionally five trailers before every movie, certainly not 15 minutes worth, but at least 10. I do wonder if movie trailers have lengthened, though; they seem to run between 2 1/2 to 3 minutes these days.
ETA OK then, AMC reports running 5 to 8 trailers before every movie, for up to 20 minutes. Definitely a chain difference.
This was Regal, so another chain. The ads started just before showtime and ran for 40 minutes (we checked). 3:15 showing and we got out around 5:45.
As a consistent AMC Stubs moviegoer (I get three free movies a week and usually use two of them- I get my money’s worth):
Once cleaning is done, there are non-stop ads and something called “Noovie”, which is like an informercial for upcoming features (but no trailers). Gone are the days of slides advertising Joe’s Barbershop.
AMC is consistent with trailers; trailers run 20 minutes starting at the listed start time (occasionally with big blockbusters, there are 25 minutes or more of trailers, but that is unusual). Local indie theaters run 10 minutes of trailers.
Yes, after a while, one begins to long for the opening date of some movies, simply because this means you will never have to see the trailer again. (I’m looking at you, Strays!)
After the trailers, AMC runs the (infamous and parodied) Nicole Kidman short and the usual cute warning about cellphones, but it really only adds up to another 2-3 minutes.
In order to sit through 45 minutes of “ads” at AMC, I think you’d have to show up about 25 minutes before showtime. And no judgement; you do you, I guess.