Barbie - A More Successful Movie than You'd Think

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OttoWest said:
On my end, I think Gerwig was trying to juggle too many themes and ideas. The tonal swings between the absurd and earnestness didn’t really work for me and at times I felt she had her thumb on the scale, particularly during America Ferrera’s speech which just sort of stopped the movie for me.
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Well, through most of the movie, America Ferrera’s character is going through pretty much a depressive episode, so I interpreted it as just needing to get things off her chest, and like a vent, it was all over the place. The deprogramming she did later was arguably more sane in comparison, at least to me. Things like, “Don’t you want people to take you seriously?” or, “You don’t need to live your life only seeking validation from men.” In the end, she even proposed an Ordinary Barbie to the CEO, because being ordinary isn’t a bad thing, and you really don’t have to be everything, like what she implied in the rant. I viewed the rant as merely a stepping stone for her to realize being what you are is better than trying to essentially “have it all.”
 
Overly Serious said:
How exactly does Ken take over Barbieland and Barbie take it back?
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The former is never explained. Ken heads back to BarbieLand while Barbie is in the real world. When she returns, suddenly all of the other Barbies are brainwashed bimbos and the Kens have taken over. Barbie takes it back by reminding the other Barbies of their true selves.

My impression is that some of these story turns are meant to function as “play”; the way a kid would play, especially in BarbieLand since they make it pretty explicit that the dolls are being manipulated by the hands of an unseen child. So sometimes the logic is kid logic, aka nonsensical and whimsical. If you can go with that premise, then the movie works.
 
MrJokerRager said:
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Okay. Not much scares me particularly but there's something deeply unsettling about people who just don't understand things past the superficial level. I saw Starship Troopers when it came out with a friend from another European country. We both laughed our arses off at the satire. The gestapo-like uniform that the intelligence officer wore, the fact that it was pretty clear that the humans were the aggressors on bug space when all the propaganda was about the bugs threatening innocent people, the list just goes on and on. I was shocked - and I fully mean this - when I heard lots of people in America objected to it for "glorifying fascism".

It's not the first time. I heard that the common viewpoint amongst many Americans (and I think Wikipedia followed this mindset) that Kipling's The White Man's Burden is a pro-colonial poem. PRO-colonial! :o

It's genuinely freaky to me when people don't understand satire or nuance and wholly miss subtext. Like finding out that people around you are robots or something. It makes me believe in the idea that some people don't really have soles / self-awareness and are just p-zombies.

I mean it - it's freakishly unsettling to me.
 
OttoWest said:
My impression is that some of these story turns are meant to function as “play”; the way a kid would play, especially in BarbieLand since they make it pretty explicit that the dolls are being manipulated by the hands of an unseen child. So sometimes the logic is kid logic, aka nonsensical and whimsical. If you can go with that premise, then the movie works.
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... should we send a tip to social services to do a wellness check on that child?
 
I saw this in the Consoomers thread


Funny how they don’t do this kind of thing for Oppenheimer, though. I guess it’s not cool enough.
 
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