Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie

Me until now: "Okay, interesting casting, those stills of people in costume kinda cool, whatever happens happens."

Me upon seeing this: "Wait, a half year wait still? WANT NOW."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zIf0XvoL9Y

HELL YES IN GRETA WE TRUST GIVE IT TO ME

Between this and Mario 2023 is going to be the year of me being embarrassingly enthusiastic about brand cash in flicks

in Greta we trust = absolute truth

I laughed harder at this trailer than I have at any other trailer

I can't wait

Great trailer.

I’m sold.

I am worried by the involvement of Baumbach.

Baumbach is often pretty full of himself, but he did co-write "Life Aquatic" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" with Wes Anderson, and those were good. So ... fingers crossed!

that trailer is amazing lmao

Trailer's very funny. No interest in the actual movie, but it's a really good one-off gag.

the gag is funny but also the clips of the DANCING and the COLORS and the JACKETS

i'm also a big fan of the comedy acting of Margot Robbie so i'm v optimistic for this

The trailer was a clever and cute teaser. The few flashes of (mostly dance) footage at the end itself seemed less than compelling. That cotton candy color scheme, if it pervades the entire film, would be extremely painful to sit through.

Baumbach/Gerwig movies are probably better than Baumbach movies, I have no objection to a Gerwig/Baumbach movie

yeah i don't thing Greta has written or directed a bad movie

frances ha and mistress america are def a cut above in the baumbach filmography

he did co-write "Life Aquatic" … good.

LIES

i love Life Aquatic!

Gerwig has made two perfect films. I trust her.

I'm hyped for this.

meanwhile Baumbach just made...White Noise.

oh shit the Delillo book? i didn't know about that

it seems like a thoroughly bad idea if so

that's about right

ok one to avoid

Miyazaki, Mario, and Barbie - 2023 is looking pretty fun

Ain’t it fun?

Also impressed that they did something funny with the ten-millionth reference to the Dawn of Man scene

not to be a jerk but is there some non-fandom reason to anticipate the Mario movie?

Idk it’ll probably be gently funny and the music sounds great, probably won’t have any piss jokes like all the other kids’ movies seem to these days

I'm with Milo Z on Life Aquatic, which singlehandedly killed my vague Anderson interest. This on the other hand looks perfectly entertaining.

Honestly, I didn't like it, either. But the fact that the Baumbach co-write "Mr. Fox" is one of my fave Wes Andersons, and was what brought me back as a fan after "Darjeeling," leads me to believe Baumbach wasn't necessarily the problem with "Life Aquatic."

"Mr. Fox" is, well, fantastic.

Miyazaki, Mario, and Barbie - 2023 is looking pretty fun

Had not heard that How Do You Live? is coming out!

Mr. Fox and His Friends?

maybe this will be the trigger we need to get a Josie & The Pussycats Criterion blu ray

Had not heard that How Do You Live? is coming out!

Yeah, I can't wait. Just got the book from the library.

Idk it’ll probably be gently funny and the music sounds great, probably won’t have any piss jokes like all the other kids’ movies seem to these days

Lolling that the movie about the plumber running around in sewers probably won’t have any piss jokes

Oh no

Just had a weird flashback to Ice Cube drinking piss in the kids movie "Are We There Yet", glad to see piss jokes still a thing two decades on

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/mario-too/

Oh my

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRyt3Ov4zz0

my hot take is when the target of your satire is vacuity, the zings are going to cluster in a very small range

Trailer I saw before (haven't clicked yet on this one) was interesting, but yeah.

Something of a pivot for Ari Aster, then

Okay, now I see

That cast!

just going by that newest trailer wow this thing (visually) looks like total digital shit and not in a cool hyperpop 100gecs way

ugh yeah

This and the new Wes Anderson would be an overwhelming double feature on the eyes.

John Grisham's Ler Firm

xps - Both of you are welcome to your opinions, but I think my saying "we enjoyed it, but we just happened to be a bit too old to extract the maximum enjoyment" is hardly the stuff of harsh criticism you seem to think.

We are 69 and 75 years old. That means we grew up in a somewhat different era of pop culture than someone who is at present 50 or 60. That fact won't change no matter how much more time passes. I made zero claims that this fact had any relevance other than it affected our frame of reference. My other generalization about diminishing returns above the age of 40 was based on the observation that the creators of the movie mainly wanted to speak to a life experience relevant to their imagined target audience and they chose their pop cultural frames of reference to match their audience. That PG-13 rating was not an accident. It's not like older people can't understand the frame, but its emotional meaning drifts further away as it becomes less an integral part of one's youth.

I don't think this anything I said was bogus. I was careful to use qualifiers and gradations to say what I consider some pretty innocuous things. But now I've said my say. Respond if you wish. It's not worth a prolonged argument.

It didn’t work for me either (I’m close to fifty, love Gerwig’s work) but I’m still trying to puzzle out why. My four year old’s quite into Barbie and I guess I slightly resented the impenetrable adultness of everything (for a very young person, not a teen or tween). I also struggled to stay interested once Perlman and Roth and Ferrera (so boring!) fell into the mix. I wasn’t sure how the “mothers stand still” line was meant to be interpreted but I’m not sure I like either possible interpretation. No bitterness - just curious why it didn’t work for me.

Stil

Aimless, we still love you. No need for that response!

Nor that response, Alfred.

It's okay if you don't respond to a movie in the expected ways. See: The Zone of Interest thread.

It's okay if you don't respond to a movie in the expected ways.

Why do I get this feeling of being patronized? Maybe it's because you are not responding to what I said, but rather to some vague need to soothe me, as if I were a child acting over emotionally, rather than simply providing my reasoning behind an opinion that was called "bogus", but with no specifics of what was bogus supplied.

What was implied by Andrew in his post was that I'd said something that contradicted his experience of enjoyment "the hell out of" the movie although he was over age 40. That reading of my post was incorrect and I wished to address that. So I did.

I'm using this ultra-formal tone for a simple reason. Since the presumption has now been forwarded that I was over-reacting and therefore implies was some lack of legitimacy, I'm scrubbing my prose. But I won't be gently chided for enlarging on an opinion that was questioned as "bogus". This is supposed to be a conversation, an exchange, not just zings dropped serially, and I will not be patronized for simply pursuing the conversation.

It's not worth a prolonged argument.

two hours pass...

zing!

now do you have anything of value to say?

Why do I get this feeling of being patronized? Maybe it's because you are not responding to what I said.

I've no idea. It's not my intention. Your first post was fine. Chuck's too.

now do you have anything of value to say?

It's not worth a prolonged argument.

I'm just dubious about age being a barrier to extracting maximum enjoyment from anything.

exactly, it's actually a pretty offensive thing to say and then triple down on

In fairness to Aimless, I do appreciate the clarification that he's talking about being too old _right now_, that it's the specific extra years he has on me that make the difference, not the years that I have to make up to get to him. I don't think he's right, but I'm now aware that he's not talking about me, which is always what causes the reflex.

My take on Barbie is that it was very funny

agreed (age 57 here)

My take on Barbie is that people who were children in 1961 (when Barbie was introduced) would like it well enough.

fwiw I think "I'm not the target audience for this" - which is more or less what I took Aimless's post to be saying - is a reasonable thing to say, which doesn't mean you can't enjoy things that aren't targeted at you ofc. at any rate preferable to assuming everything in the world was made for your specific sensibilities and getting angry when something doesn't fit into that.

or someone else doesnt like it

Finally watching this

Still haven't seen but I did pass someone in a Kenough t-shirt the other day.

This was fun as hell

it really is

this movie probably belongs in the "great facial expressions" hall of fame

the Pavement joke felt a little too on the nose, it was like a Colin Robinson line

btw funniest part of the movie for me was when all the Kens take over and every TV just has The Horse Channel on 24/7

overall I thought it was really good, imo it did stumble in the end though, it's kind of hard for this movie to make any real world point when it doesn't take the real world seriously either. kind of felt like a South Park episode in that sense. that said idk if you can really 'stick the landing' in a movie like this anyway.

i think gerwig is a lot more cynical than people were willing to admit when this movie was a big talking point

I actually did a "barbenheimer" when this came out - I saw Oppenheimer on the IMAX screen at the Science Museum at 14:15 on 23 July 2023, and Barbie at the BFI Southbank at 18:00 the same day. If you have a calculator and some graph paper you could probably use those data points to determine my average speed and energy consumption on that day. A lot higher than most days.

It was a really tight race. I remember that the Science Museum's screening broke almost at the very end, so to this day I have no idea if Cillian Murphy's character got to keep his ID badge or not. It was the second time I have seen Cillian Murphy naked at the cinema.

Sadly neither film was very good. I've written at length about Oppenheimer because it was at least an interesting failure. A couple of scenes worked. The problem is that I'd just finished reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun, both of which have an underlying stark horror that the film didn't capture. Besides which Edward Teller is a much more dramatic figure than Robert Oppenheimer. Edward Teller had passion. For nuclear weapons. He was driven by love. Of nuclear bombs. Huge nuclear bombs, lots of them.

I admire passion. I admire love. Imagine using a nuclear bomb to widen the Panama Canal - for peace! Just imagine. And Teller lived until 2003, so a film about Teller could have had a sick Miami Vice-style montage about SDI and then a scene where he plays Sonic the Hedgehog. It angers me that Hollywood refuses to even steal my ideas.

I'm wary of writing about Barbie. I haven't written about the 2016 Ghostbusters for the same reason. The fact is that it failed on every level except for the cinematography, which was mostly decent but very flat in the real-world sequences. The two stars - Ryan Gosling and America Ferrara - were pretty good. But the comedy relied on hammering unfunny quips into the ground. It reminded me a lot of Help, the old Beatles film. It had lots of mumbled quips hammered into the ground and elements that resembled comedy but weren't funny. And no Eleanor Bron.

I'm thinking specifically of the "mojo dojo casa house" gag, which worked as a throwaway but stopping being funny after the first half-dozen times it was repeated. Is that an SNL thing? A cultural thing? It reminded me of those SNL sketches where the actors. Pause. After every joke. And then they repeat the joke. And pause. Again. I want a syringe of cocaine jabbed into my eyes. I don't want pauses. I can make pauses myself. Life is already full of pauses.

As a message flick it was on a par with Guest House Paradiso. As a fun little adventure film it was a non-starter. Ultimately it came across as a weak imitation of The LEGO Movie, which was itself pretty thin, but with awful pacing and the kind of passive progressive political wash that has the form of profundity without any actual pro... profund. In the future it'll be more interesting as an example of the awful state of modern media rather than as a film.

But it was a sunny day. It was June. I don't regret subjecting my body to a high-speed dash across London. 2023 feels a lot longer ago. I was young then. We were young. The world was young. Many years from now the expansion of the universe will cause all the nearby stars to become invisible. Why is atomic theory horrifying? Because it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the physical laws of the universe are universal - the furthest stars we can observe obey the same laws as our own star - and everything in the universe is winding down into nothingness.

“The two stars - Ryan Gosling and America Ferrara - were pretty good”

Lol

great post but america ferrara didnt have enough good lines to qualify as being good in it, i think

It was the second time I have seen Cillian Murphy naked at the cinema.

Where else have you seen him naked?

odeon, brixton

maybe it's just the onset of a fascist dictatorship in my country, but I am super over AP's sock account and will now FP on sight

mods plz add “thoroughly enjoyed post” button for me personally to click on most AP contribs I see, until or unless I learn for whom AP is a sock, or that sleeve is in a different country from me and that their perspective does not need to be countered

I braved a cinema at the height of Barbeheimer to see TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, as I am not like other girls.

^^ first sentence of your memoir

Guest House Paradiso is underrated

recently got the boutique blu ray treatment I believe

mods plz add “thoroughly enjoyed post” button

Surely here on I Love Everything this goes without saying. Our posts are an endless succession of mutual enjoyment. Even the FP button is a source of personal delight when used creatively.

Finally watched this in Netflix, and...that's it? That's all there is to a Barbie? It was the lightest and most superficial treatment of the concept, on fast-forward to compress into the run time. I still found parts of it moving but I'm a sap. That's what all the fuss was about??

did you want the Antonioni treatment or

I don't know! I don't even know who that is! I'm pretty dumb about films and I usually like simple things and I'm just saying if *I* was underwhelmed that's pretty underwhelming.

"That's All There is To a Barbie?"

We've only scratched the surface here...

Maybe a film where Barbie becomes a pop star in a band with her brother and then dies of anorexia.

Barbie Does Narnia

I want a cut without all the Will Ferrell running around BS. Given how clever much of the rest of the movie is I'm surprised they went with any of that boilerplate garbage, or couldn't come up with anything better.

I thought it was going to be about Klaus Barbie

"Malibu" Klaus Barbie

the rest of the movie isnt that clever

tbh the parts id drop are america and daughterbrat

We have our Jadis: Emma Mackey.

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/emma-mackey-greta-gewig-narnia-white-witch-1236378761/

Ha, wrong Greta thread. But she was in this too!