We got 4 trailers, which were preceded by a long run of Maira Menounos chit-chatting about stuff with various B-listers.
One of the things I appreciate about modern theatres is the buying reserved seats ahead of time online. Now you’re not forced to arrive early and sit through a half hour of advertisements just to get a decent seat. You can wander in 2 minutes before showtime and take your perfect reserved seat just as the lights go down.
We get more than that for sure. When we saw Oppenheimer, my daughter and her boyfriend were meeting us at the theatre but got stuck behind a train, and so arrived at the theatre at 5:30 for a 5:00 start time and, I shit you not, only missed the first ten minutes of the movie.
Your experience sounds consistent with peccavi’s information (and with my own experience, for what that’s worth). Namely, theater chains run 20 minutes of trailers starting at the movies’s scheduled start time. So the feature film in the 5:00 showing you went to actually began at 5:20, and you missed the first ten minutes of it by arriving at 5:30. Checks out.
Let’s see, Barbie has about a 2-hour runtime (specifically, 1:54). So if you got out “around” 5:45, then the feature began “around” 3:45 for a 3:15 showing?
The word on the street is that Hollywood Reporter sez:
So yeah, it’s credible that at a Regal you saw about 10 minutes of pre-start-time ads and about a half-hour of ads and trailers.
Saw it this afternoon. I thought it was entertaining and beautiful to look at but if I’m being honest, I feel like I must have missed something. Maybe knowing Greta Gerwig is at the helm had me expecting more depth(?) Kind of like my take on The Haunted Mansion, it feels like the site gags / jokes were all laid out and then a story was written around them afterward.
I hadn’t realized Will Ferrell is in it. I’m a fan of his but that storyline contributed nothing, IMO. As soon as I saw a white haired Rhea Perlman, I knew she was supposed to be Ruth Handler. My dad was big in the toy industry and Ruth and Chet Handler were household names ; I think they may have attended my brother’s bar mitzvah. Anyway, that was a nice bit to me, but I wondered if it landed with anyone else.
I didn’t understand the Kens’ obsession with horses nor why they were singing Matchbox 20 (though to be fair, Push is one of my favorite tunes from the 90s so I didn’t mind at all). Hell, I didn’t even understand what the Barbies’ big plot was. Something about getting the Kens to fight amongst themselves while the ladies reprogrammed each other?
I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it but to me it’s pretty forgettable.
The character first identified herself as only “Ruth” and I also assumed she was supposed to be Ruth Handler. But later she explicitly said her full name, so of course everyone in the audience would understand who she was.
“Her ghost keeps an office on the 17th floor” to me was one of the funniest lines in the movie.
Another funny bit was when Barbie said “I’m not Stereotypical Barbie pretty,” at which point Narrator Helen Mirren said, “Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point.”
That comment by Helen Mirren was priceless!
The reprogramming part did not have to do with the fight. The fight was so that they would forget the vote they had scheduled in the morning to essentially change Barbieland into Kenworld.
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I FINALLY saw it! My brother saw it with his girls (12 and 14) and he loved it. My BFF saw it with her daughter (11) and they loved it. I saw it with another of my girl friends and we both laughed the WHOLE time (I am kinda mad about that because I’m having a bad time with my TMJ and it was exhausting! but worth it!)
I think my favorite character was actually President Barbie. It truly felt like Gerwig wanted Issa Rae to play the character, and told her “I didn’t write any dialogue just say what you might say if you were Issa Rae playing President Barbie” and she nailed it.
I also liked who I am calling “Dumb Ken” (Kingsley Ben-Adir) the Black guy who kept staring at Ryan Gosling as if he were trying to learn from him. That guy didn’t have too many lines but his physical acting had me LOLing a lot.
I can’t believe Rob Brydon (Sugar('s) Daddy Ken) got a part! How random! Fans of British panel shows will know who he is. I was hoping that Earring Ken was Ken Marino but alas, no.
I think I’m right in Gerwig’s wheelhouse, so I totally totally felt this movie. Especially all of the “how to distract Ken” scenes. Me and my friend were howling!! I too have been held hostage by The Godfather, Pavement and an acoustic guitar!
I went and gave it a 10 on IMDB. I think I’ll buy the DVD too because I want to hear the commentary.
I was hoping Simu Liu would throw in a little Shang-Chi reference but oh well. It seems like everyone was having a blast, and the Dua Lipa song sounded great but somehow as if I’d heard it before.
I saw it over the weekend and I loved it. So clever. I LOLed out loud at the “Dawn of Man” sequence.
I thought it was near perfect, except for a couple spots. While Alan beating up the road crew was funny, I’d really like a movie that doesn’t resolve everything with a fistfight (MCU, I’m talking to you!). Barbies retaking control of Barbieland with cleverness instead of combat was a nice change.
And I like the meta-ending. Barbie dolls are about empowering girls to be more than the world expected them to be, and Barbie empowered herself at the end to be more than she was expected to be.
I can’t be the only one who, when Barbie was saying goodbye and driving off to Real World, got a strong Wizard of Oz vibe, can I?
[ramble]Seems like in the '80s and '90s, all the Barbie spoofs, if they mentioned Ken, went “Ken got the procedure and became Kendra, and now he and Barbie are closer than ever, awww.” Except, I always saw Ken as very straight, but the kind who would eventually cheat on Barbie, with Midge, or one of the stewardesses, since he was an airline pilot. Alan, though…well, look at him in that fruity striped outfit! He’s always had Ken in his sights, and in fact, only dated Midge because she’s Barbie’s friend and it put him in contact with Ken. But since the eighties, he’s been happy together with Earring Magic Ken and has given up on the ur-Ken.[/ramble]
I enjoyed the movie. I thought it was fun!
I rewatched The Gray Man and don’t know the order of shooting or what they know at the time but I had to relisten to this line.
Just in case, spoiler for The Gray Man.
Lloyd (Chris Evans) is talking about Six (Ryan Gosling) when he says, “Extra ten million to the first guy to put a bullet in this Ken doll’s brain.”
Ha!
Thanks for the conversation!
Barbie has now become the highest grossing domestic film of 2023, with over $575 million. (And Oppenheimer is #6, soon to be #5, which holy crap!) Every other film in the top 15 is either a big action spectacle, Marvel film or animated.
Just saw this, and man was I disappointed.
I loved Little Women and Lady Bird, and with all the strong reviews I was expecting another great flick from Greta Gerwig, but this was just a complete mess. For a movie supposedly about Barbie, way too much time, effort and noise was wasted on men.
I can’t stand Will Ferrell, and hated every minute he and his lookalike board members were onscreen. Not a single funny or impactful moment. And while Ken made an entertaining foil for a while, why the fuck was the big musical number – what should have been the emotional climax – about him? And why why why did it drag on so long?
If the script had stuck to the female trio of Robbie, Ferrara and Greenblat, it could have been amazing. But it felt like Gerwig and Baumbach ran out of ideas for that narrative and padded it out with all the Ken bullshit.
1.5 stars.
Uh, I’m not disagreeing with you about what you like or don’t like, but I don’t think it’s plausible to suggest that the filmmakers just reached for the men-and-Ken narratives because they were out of ideas. Pretty much all available knowledge about the movie makes it pretty clear that the filmmakers always intended one of its major themes to be gender relations and patriarchy.
Not disagreeing that a different Barbie movie could also have done a good fun job simply telling the story of Stereotypical Barbie and her friends suddenly confronting intimations of mortality because her real-world owner has started making sketches for “Thoughts of Death Barbie” and similar. Just saying that AFAICT, that story on its own was never the Barbie movie that Gerwig and Baumbach intended to make.
True, I have no insight into the origins of the script or the making of the movie. So I’ll amend my comments:
Gerwig and Baumbach did a lousy job addressing important themes such as gender relations and patriarchy by making Ken an extremely dense, one-dimensional character and then inexplicably making him the star of the movie’s second half. I never for a second believed that the Barbies would have instantly fallen under the sway of “patriarchy” as introduced by this lunkhead, and the only coherent thought on gender relations was that gals should be more thoughtful about their guys, even if they’re stupid, boring dudes who just took over your society.
My read of the film is that Kens were experiencing what women experienced in the 1950s. Kens existed solely for Barbie’s amusement. Kens struggled to find identity outside of Barbie. Kens are the women in this scenario and Barbies are the men freaking out about the women taking over, trying to undermine their advancement by pitting them against each other. So of course this movie has to be about Ken too.