What a cash grab. Retelling the end of the season for an hour long and then there’s like 40 mins of new material and about 5 of it that merits being on the big screen.
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@ryezoo They have doing these since the series began. It's meant to be for the fans eager to see the new season. If anything it's your own fault for not knowing that and still going for it
The meanest thing I could say about this movie is ‘Has extreme Don’t Worry Darling energy’.
I have never seen a movie more desperate to justify itself. It’s trapped in this endless neurosis over what it is- a blockbuster Barbie movie in 2023 by an acclaimed art house director that is fun but also deep but also earnest but also self aware but also but also but also. Every point it raises it brings up a counterpoint to before the audience can, every frame is trying to prove it’s not just product but art. It’s never just Barbie. It’s never confident or even comfortable in its skin. You cannot for a second be immersed in Barbie because it’s not a story so much as a visual dissertation without a central thesis, it’s a student film riffing on the big dogs hoping it’s underdog audacity will carry it but given a budget in the millions. It so desperately wants you to like it, to know it’s in on the joke too.
Everythng is an ouroboros here: an endless loop of argument and counterarguement feeding itself. Isn’t it shitty how the Mattel boardroom is full of men? Ah, but isn’t it cool how Mattel’s acknowledged it with this niche? And it’ll mythologize Barbie’s creator but uh don’t worry she did tax evasion we know that, now let her impart into Barbie the experience of all women. Barbie helps women, Barbie hurts women, Barbie is told to be everything so isn’t she just like women, but it is better to be a creator than the idea, and in the end, hasn’t Barbie helped all these women? Oh uh why is this blonde white Barbie the centerpiece of it all and helping not only her diverse Barbie friends but a Hispanic woman and her daughter? Don’t worry we’ll have the daughter call her a white savior! But don’t worry we’ll have the mom say she’s not! It’s fascinating to watch, honestly. It’s a film that wants to prove to you so so bad that it works but it doesn’t and it knows it doesn’t and it knows you knows. It’s Gerta Gerwig wrestling with taking this job for an hour and a half.
The cast is more than game and able. Margot Robbie is doing her damndest to find the heart and soul in this role, and there’s one scene with an old lady near the end of the first act/beginning of the second that actually works, for just a moment, more than any of the big third act soliloquies or montages with emotional ballads. And as someone who’s seen Blade Runner 2049 and Drive, this is the best Ryan Gosling performance I’ve seen. The man commits and delivers a surprisingly compelling and entertaining antagonist. The movie can’t quite reconcile what he’s done with his ending, or tie it into the themes- is Ken letting go of Barbie and the need to define himself for or against her symbolizing the need for men to do the same, and if so, why play it so lightly and sympathetically?- but that’s not his fault. And the supporting cast are entertaining, but you just can’t have big laughs with a movie that feels like it’s constantly checking in the corner of its eye after every joke to see if you’re laughing, grin stuck in place. It’s not as funny or as smart as it wants to be, and the sad thing is, it feels like it knows that too.
There is some great set design, cinematography, dazzling choreography, popping colors, and some fun high points. But I can’t imagine many kids liking it. And we’ve seen how conservatives have taken this movie. And anyone’s who’s progressed beyond the politics of. Well. A feminist blockbuster Barbie movie will find it cloying or condescending or just incredibly basic. It’s aimed at a very specific crowd who will buy what it’s saying, the liberals who see corporate feminism as progress, who agree that it’s just about a little change sometimes, who are ready for something just a little more complex than a SNL sketch. I don’t regret seeing it, because I was deeply engaged the whole time seeing it struggle at war with itself, in pain for its whole existence. It’s not a boring movie by any means. It wants to say everything before the audience can say it first. It’s the endpoint of The Lego Movie and Enchanted- the corporations interrogating and justifying themselves, and the cracks in this formula are too large to ignore. It wants to be so much, and the attempt is as darkly mesmerizing as a fly thinking it can somehow and someway metamorphize into a butterfly and suffocating and struggling in its makeshift cocoon, but this is one Barbie that fundamentally just cannot break out of its box.
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Damn, it must’ve took you longer to write this text than watching the movie itself. I think you went to see the movie with a hammer just to make sure you had a good reason to knock it down. It flatters you that you still gave it a 4, but let’s not forget that cinema is by all means just a form of art. All other statements are just extra layers that makes it hard these days to do something ‘right’. Sometimes things can be just ‘cool’ and ‘entertaining’. :wink:
The real question is why the hell did the guy charge money for snacks at the white house?
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@sagar_uchiha i think its a metaphor...the powerful (war mongering general) taking more money from the less well off that the less well off have already paid for in their taxes :) taxes paid for the snacksies right LOL
Aladdin much? Not a hint of originality, nor songs.
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@zoloft It's very much an intentional adaptation of Aladdin. I should however point out based on your comment about "songs" that Disney did not create the story of Aladdin. It comes from a collection of middle-eastern stories called "One Thousand and One Nights" which had its first print in the year 1775.
Disney's Aladdin has major cultural significance in modern day, but people should be free to put a new spin on the original story should they choose to.
Shout by PorterUk
VIP5I feel like I don't want to be too harsh on this film but I have to be sadly....
Boring. Slow. Uninvested. Unoriginal.A very slow and predictable plot. Uninspiring turn from Tommy Lee Jones, who phones in his performance with all the class of a 1980s Motorola cell phone! I couldn't have cared less about whether this father/son relationship had any development. Why? Because Brad Pitt's character is also boring. He's a machine - we get that spelled out to us several times.
Now... Brad Pitt acts well. The visuals are good - but in a world of Interstellar and Gravity, they're underwhelming.
I liked the view of Moon travel. That's the only positive.
For a 2 hour film though, it felt like 3. That's a bad sign for any film. I'll be avoiding this one when I see it advertised on TV.
I'm settling on 5/10 because of Brad Pitt's performance and some of the visuals (particularly the Moon). But I could have gone as low as 3/10 or 4/10 based on my mood leaving the cinema!
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@porteruk oh... I don't know about that. Some great nods to several space movies including 2001 a Space Odyssey and even Tommy Lee Jones' end in Space Cowboys. Works good as just an action picture. The real magic I though was just how deeply the metaphors are stacked. I mean... the pulse and its cause, the active war zones on the moon, the baboon primal rage, not reporting the acting captain, leaving his spacecraft behind... all essential to the deeper meaning of the film.
I thought it was a very good examination of human, particularly male patterns of behaviour. Pitt's character is far from a machine. He represents every male I've known from a particular era compartmentalizing his emotions and faking his way through the psych evaluations of life. Note his treatment of every individual he encounters. Holds their gaze, smiles appropriately, emanates warmth... all the while feeling nothing.
For a premise as solid as this I really expected a much more fleshed out movie. The momentum of action is not sustainable throughout. Sure its a tad bit better than many other popcorn movies (6 Underground) but it does not even come close to Extraction which was also released earlier this year by Netflix.
The entire thing seems like a set-up for future movies. I don't know if I wanna watch sequels to a movie which is so pre-occupied with sequels that it fails to deliver on the movie at hand.
Charlize Theron is obviously great. She gives everything to this run of the mill expository script.
This is not a bad action flick per se but is sure as hell disappointing. Also, playing generic pop electronica at odd places throughout the movie does not help the cause.
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@cinebong you pretty much summed up my thoughts on this. I really liked the characters, but I wish we’d have gotten to know them better. Should have been like a 10 episode season instead of a movie. The plot premise was really interesting but I just wanted more from it than they could give in movie format time limit
