Movie Notes: Barbie

Well, naming the post “movie notes” is a tad too optimistic. As my sister said, it’s not a movie. It’s a two-hour-long infomercial that you pay to watch. As an infomercial, it’s genius. Budweiser should learn from Mattel how to rebrand. Barbie hits exactly the age group it wants in the very spot it needs.

I never played with Barbies. The USSR ended when I was 15. It was way too late for Barbies. This is why the current Mattel infomercial awakened nothing in me. But I can see how it would in women my age who did play and who have lived their whole lives in a culture of lip-trembling, self-righteous grievance.

So as an infomercial Barbie is an astounding, sensational success.

As a movie, it’s… simply not one. There’s no plot, no ideas, and no acting aside from the talented Ryan Gosling. The writing is weak, garbled, and impotent. The movie was either written by the AI or by somebody doing an excellent imitation of the chatbot. Barbie looks too old. The ending is directionless, rambling and boring. The tween acts like a daughter of a trailer park junkie and an abusive stepdad when in reality she’s from a nice middle-class family. There’s no consistency in anything and no internal logic.

People have been projecting their ideology onto this very long commercial. Some think it’s feminist, others say it’s conservative. What makes this confusion possible is that the movie has no ideology. There is no consistent message beyond “buy this toy and its cute outfits”.

Barbie lets people feel vaguely aggrieved and they are grateful for it. Why they enjoy that I can’t say, so to me the movie was very boring.

Ryan Gosling was very good, though. I kept wishing that everybody else would go away and he’d act whatever he feels like. It’s a huge casting mistake to put a serious actor against a large cast of nothing-specials because this creates a gaping imbalance at the heart of the show. But it’s all like that. Everything that’s not pure, hardcore, severe marketing in this movie is vague, confused, and unnecessary.

On the positive side, I saw a preview for the prequel to Hunger Games, and I’m psyched. I don’t like Hunger Games (books or movies) but I dug the prequel (snakes and songbirds, or whatever), and I’m very excited about the movie.