I liked the movie but I loved the movie experience more.
Everyone entering the movie hall was wearing some variation of pink. People accessorized! Entire groups came wearing the same barbie t-shirt. People cheered through the entire movie (I have only seen people do that during marvel movies). I had a blast.
At my theater, I literally saw a group of 9 women all dressed like fairy princesses, and they sat behind me and they laughed and giggled the loudest and held hands and when the movie ended, they screamed and shouted and applauded.
And it was beautiful.
I felt like every adult woman in my theater was 10 years old again, bashing their Barbies together with their friends and wearing glitter on their cheeks.
barbie movie: is marketed as “haha barbie has to go to the real world with ken and mattel wants them to go back to barbieland haha funny adventure movie!”
me after watching it: is sobbing hysterically and undergoing an existential crisis, a breakdown, and a metamorphosis into a more confident and secure individual with the knowledge that under the patriarchy it is next to impossible to appease others and that you just have to go “fuck it” and be your genuine self while doing what makes you happy
The end joke of Barbie was absolutely perfect. Going to the gynecologist is something all AFAB people have to do as they mature, and pretty often, it's the first step into adulthood. Barbie (Barbara Handler I'm sobbing) going right into the gynecologist shows that her arc is complete; she's finally grown up, she's a woman and she can embrace what that means. She is no longer an idea or an object, but a grown-up human. It was a funny moment, but also so meaningful.
barbie was insane. there was a snyder cut justice league joke, greta gerwig acknowledged her white feminism during the narrative i choked on my drink when they said let ken play guitar At you (for four hours), as is traditional during cishetro relationships allan was nonbinary. Ken Discovered Patriarchy and Recreated it in Barbieland. i was briefly sexually attracted to ryan gosling and there was a homoerotic fight scene accompanied by a musical number
The Barbie marketing team has done their job so well that they ended up also doing most of the promotion of an entirely different film
the thing that gets me about the barbie movie being framed as an "anti-men" movie is that it's fundamentally untrue to the message it's sending out. the movie is an empowering feminist piece as much as it is a cautionary tale about men letting their insecurities and doubts about their place in the world lead them to falling into the alt-right/incel/mra pipeline. it's looking out for men just as much as it's looking out for women, and the only reason you might find this as an "anti-men" message is because you somehow deeply believe that this is the wrong message to send
sorry ur boyfriend got brainwashed by the patriarchy. yeah he thought that it meant horses run everything. sorry.
the hollywood studios are the dumbest people alive bc now every american city with a large film/TV industry (LA, NYC, Atlanta, etc) are going to be overrun by grown up theatre kids (professional writers and actors) hanging out together in public for months on end with nothing to do but emulate newsies. whole american cities are about to look like the inside of a suburban dennys at 11 pm on a saturday after a high school musical closes. they have trapped millions of people in a hell of unimaginable proportions.
my absolutely favorite thing about the barbie movie is that at no point whatsoever it explains how the mattel employes know about barbieland like imagine starting your new job on mattel and the first thing they tell you on orientation is
"yeah barbieland is real and we've had incidents in the past with a doll coming into the real world please see page 7 of your employee handbook for reference also if you wander into a random room on the 17th floor and meet a nice old lady don't mind her it is just the ghost of our founder"
barbie movie my beloved. incl barbie step-mom, drew a few of these before i saw the movie
barbie is for the girls who grew up playing with barbies. it's for the girls who didn't. it's for the girls who aren't girls anymore. it's for girls who feel trapped by how rigged society is against them. it's for girls who grew up hating the colour pink because it was girly. it's for the girls - the people who were taught that any show of femininity, anything even associated with it made you weak. it's for the boys who don't realise the system is rigged against them as well. it's for the mothers who pushed down and locked up the weird and dark and crazy parts of themselves. it's for the people who love barbie, and hate her.
it's a love letter.
I want to thank the Barbie movie, because not only it's going to be a masterpiece that will change my life, but it also made me realise that Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds are in fact two different actors
how i thought i would feel walking out of the theater:
how i actually felt:
this was the only thing i thought about during his conversation with barbie
