The highest form of art is unedited, self-indulgent horny fiction by freaks and weirdos with little to no education in proper writing skills, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.
brought scolipede to a party with me because i need to bring him with me when i get anxious and i thought people might think it was weird but no they think hes cool as fuck
something ive learned is when you become an adult most of your peers dont give a shit about your more peculiar traits and sometimes they actually like these traits. like yeah i was bullied as a kid for bringing a plushie to school but in my 20s everyone thinks its fine in fact people love my epic scolipede
But one is a stranger, a woman she notices while she sits on a bench, gathering herself. It’s a type of woman she has never seen before, because there are no old women in Barbieland. When Barbie looks at her, she finds her beautiful and tells her so. The woman already knows. Suddenly Barbie, the fraught aspirational figure, has beheld someone she might aspire to be, and it is a radiantly content nonagenarian, reading a newspaper on a Los Angeles bench, who knows what she’s worth.
“The idea of a loving God who’s a mother, a grandmother — who looks at you and says, ‘Honey, you’re doing OK’ — is something I feel like I need and I wanted to give to other people,” Gerwig says. When it was suggested that this scene, which Gerwig calls a “transaction of grace,” might be cut for time, she remembers thinking: “If I cut that scene, I don’t know why I’m making this movie.If I don’t have that scene, I don’t know what it is or what I’ve done.”
As someone who works at a movie theater I feel the need to remind people to please please please be courteous to movie theater staffs this weekend. There’s hasn’t been a double release of this nature since 2008 and theater staff are Going to be overwhelmed. Just show basic human decency please. Clean out your cup holders, throw your trash away, be patient at the box office and concessions, don’t be disruptive during the movie. We are trying our best but also most of us are working much longer shifts than usual with a lot less employees than usual and it’s a very thankless job even on the deadest of days. Just be nice please
I can’t stop thinking about how beautifully the Barbie movie portrays that often times when men (speaking in very binary terms, apologies) are hurt and feel wronged they’ll act out in ways that hurt people, may that be purposefully or inadvertently. And society enforces this. Meanwhile women, who are used to living in a hostile world, will often express and process their pains in ways that don’t harm others.
But Ken never wanted to hurt anyone. He just was hurt and didn’t know how to deal with it. He found the first thing that gave him an outlet and some inkling of comfort and latched onto it. And after Ken has had his supposed “villain arc”, Barbie isn’t mad at him. She lets him know it’s okay to cry.
The villain was never Ken himself, it was the fact that society is built in a way that prevents men from having ways to safely process and regulate their emotions. A society that punishes men for crying and confiding in friends and wanting to be comforted.
The Barbie movie isn’t anti men. It’s a big fuck you to our society that is hellbent on keeping everyone in an eternal cycle of hurt.
While we’re all talking about both the WGA/SAG strikes and Barbenheimer, I hope everyone realises that the entire reason this exists is because Christopher Nolan stood up to Warner Bros against pushing their entire cinematic slate onto streaming in 2021, by taking his next film to another studio.
Then, as an act of petty revenge, they decided to deliberately move their single biggest movie of 2023 (and arguably WB’s biggest non-Batman/Harry Potter movie in DECADES) directly onto his release date.
So no, the Barbie Marketing isn’t “so good it helped another movie”. The Barbie Marketing Machine was specifically designed to get back at someone who dared to stand up against WB executives.
It was a calculated move of malice by soulless corporate fuckeroonies.
Barbie (2023) is a giant product placement that profits off nostalgia.
The writing is profound and life-changing and understands why we seek nostalgia in a way most nostalgia-driven entertainment doesn’t.
The film is self-aware about how even now, Barbie dolls set incredibly unrealistic beauty standards. Their “body diversity” does not even scratch the surface of what that phrase really means. I don’t expect this to change.
The film still made a beautiful statement with the scene on the bench about how societal beauty standards are narrow and restrictive! And that beauty comes from experiencing life and the marks it leaves on you!
Its feminist statements are validating. Many of us see our reality onscreen, and the great thing is that it includes how cishet men fall down a pipeline of toxic hypermasculinity. It also shows the solution, and allows men to express themselves despite what society expects them to be.
The film is a capitalist venture.
The cast (aside from the leads) and crew were probably overworked and severely underpaid during filmmaking.
We can still appreciate that something fun was made, and we all made another wonderful memory where we and our loved ones went to the movies color-matching in pink.
We should not feel guilty about seeing ourselves in this film.
