I saw Barbenheimer the weekend it came out. Oppie is overrated as shit. I liked it but Barbie was 3x better. It’s apparent in the way women are written and the fact that Greta, Margot and Barbie are being snubbed for Nolan is a disgrace.
Oppie isn’t even his best work and it sure as shit doesn’t deserve a dozen fucking Oscar noms.
Whatever criticisms you have of Barbie being white/pop feminism are absolutely tossed aside when fucking OPPENHEIMER is the one winning shit. Cmon.
They’re giving noms to Poor Things instead of it as the “feminist” film cuz they’re cowards scared of women succeeding behind the camera in addition to in front of it and in the box office, and they’re horny teens horned up by Emma Stone and enraged Margot didn’t do that.
Edit- And before you come at me, I saw Oppie on proper film. Don’t tell me I didn’t get it or didn’t have a good experience or whatever. I liked it. But Barbie was better.
ah yes i love the barbie movie where one himbo is able to singlehandedly convince an entire matriarchy into giving up power to men. the most libbed up second-wave feminist slop i’ve ever seen
edit: also what really bugs me about this movie is that it sets up the plot arc of “Stereotype Barbie is malfunctioning because her real-world owner is depressed about capitalism/patriarchy” and does nothing to actually resolve that.
Of course they can’t resolve that, just like the plot line involving the CEO falls by the wayside. You can feel the warmth of the sun but you can never look at it
yup… “oh isn’t it funny how all the people in charge of mattel are white men (hey just like real life!) but also the people in charge of mattel are good actually? anyways lets just leave it there no criticism just vibes”
And like the worst that comes their way is that they’re made to seem a tad bumbling and foolish at times. Which, no, it’s all their fault, all of it. The better ending would’ve been for the little girl to realize that Barbie herself isn’t a fascist, she’s just an unwilling arbiter of evil capitalists who sell a constrained, hobbling, heteronormative vision of femininity to women in order to make big bucks
Finally, I see someone comment on this! The messaging on that was so weird. The Barie’s love patriarchy actually? What is even the problem then? They love patriarchy because all they know is matriarchy? wtf?
If you want to get down to the nitty gritty of it, Barbieland doe not exist independently as everything that happens in Barbieland is a reflection of what happens to the dolls the real world, so there is no real “immune system” there to stop the misogynistic ideas from spreading like an infection once it was brought back by Ken from the real world.
This is the justification given by the film in a single line, but I find the analogy highly unsatisfying. Sure, Ken accepts patriarchy when exposed, it benefits him. The Barbies accept it because… it was a strange new idea?
Surely lack of exposure to the idea of a large societal shift increases resistance to it, rather than causes uncritical acceptance?
Are we to expect that men who live in patriarchy, unexposed to feminist matriarchy just instantly accept the idea when exposed to it by feminists? Surely not.
Here is the key point of the movie that I think you are missing: the Barbies and Kens (and Alan) are NOT human beings, but IDEAS made into shapes of human beings that funhouse mirrors the thoughts and conditions of the real world. People can choose to accept ideas, but ideas can’t choose, which is why when the patriarchal ideas was brought back by Beach Ken from the real world, the entirety of Barbieland physically twisted itself to match these ideas.
You could say that the whole movie was about Stereotypical Barbie’s transition from an ideal as a “Barbie” to a real independent human being, capable of making choices on her own.