Skip to main content

Barbie


In the creaky old westerns and war movies which used to pad out the TV schedules when I was a nipper, there would sometimes come a moment when the music swelled, the chisel-jawed hero gazed into the middle distance and started to declaim a rousing speech about Democracy, or Justice, or the indomitable spirit of a little ol’ place we just happen to call the US of A, and I would zone out until the story started again.

Something similar keeps happening in Barbie, except the chisel-jawed hero has been replaced by Margot Robbie and America Ferrara, and the speech about Democracy and Justice is now a twee fridge-magnet homily about Being Yourself, or a bullet-pointed Tumblr post about how exhausting it is to be a woman living under ‘the Patriarchy’.  (And I’m sure it is - but I don’t want to listen to somebody preaching about it, and certainly not at that sort of length, in a lightweight movie.) 

Elsewhere, Barbie has plenty of nice moments, and I really wanted to like it. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are as charming as everyone says, there are some decent jokes, and the Mattel Corporation turn out to be good sports, or at least more interested in the bottom line than in their own corporate dignity, letting writer/director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach portray them as a comic-sinister outfit staffed by drones and oddballs.

But the script is oddly under-powered and scattergun: there’s no internal logic to the setting, the plot wobbles all over the place, and subplots and minor characters are abandoned as soon as they’re introduced. None of that would matter if it was full-on goofball comedy, but there aren’t enough gags for that, and what gags there are often don’t land. (And it’s a very minor point, but the 2001 parody which opens the film, with Barbie appearing in place of the Black Monolith, would work SO much better if she was in her box.)

It reminded me at times of another recent film, Kristen Wiig’s Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar. That too feels like a children’s film for adults (despite a couple of off-colour jokes) and like Barbie it features a kitsch beach setting, female empowerment, and a loveable doofus hero who gets to do a show-stopping musical number. It’s joyously silly, and superior to Barbie in every way.


But I gather it didn’t do much business, while Barbie is leveraging star power and the allure of familiar IP to hoover up billions. And maybe that (music swells, eyes gaze into the middle distance), is the true, indomitable spirit of a little ol’ place we just happen to call the US of A…


 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after...
6 comments
Read more

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...
5 comments
Read more

Merlin (1998)

I remember Merlin being shown on TV as a two-part mini-series over a bank holiday weekend. The version I found on YouTube is a single three hour movie, but I think it might work better in two chunks, as originally broadcast. It still works pretty well, though. Director Steve Barron is completely infatuated with video editing tricks and slightly primitive CGI effects that I’m sure were state-of-the-art when it was made, but he uses them quite inventively, and there are some very enjoyable performances. Since First Knight was such a washout, I guess this is the definitive ‘90s Arthurian film. Like Excalibur , the definitive ‘80s Arthurian film, it tries to tell the entirety of the Arthur story, but since it’s main focus is Merlin it covers a lot more too, and Arthur himself ends up being a bit of a side-character, with the rise and fall of Camelot packed into the second half. At first glance, Merlin seems to be aligning itself with what I’m coming to think of as the Low Arthurian tradi...
Post a Comment
Read more