Barbie It’s one of the worst films in history. A creepy, inconclusive, ridiculous pink molasses trickled out of Hollywood’s high culture department and was thrown haphazardly and cobbled together into the cauldron of the craziest mainstream. Not only is Barbie the paradise of second-hand glitter instead of the creative exertion of an imagination (little houses with no walls and Willy Wonka-esque plastic models, eh?), but she’s tainted from start to finish by an infamous sin, a memorable blemish from the annals of the SAG writers who have been on strike for the past three months: There is no believable and/or compelling story. In Barbieland, everything follows Mattel’s script. Dozens of colorful Barbies rule the little pink village and take on special and professional roles in the artificial mini-world, in which the many Kens act as never-treacherous extras: Barbie as President, Barbie as Judge, Barbie as Nobel Prize in Literature, Barbie as Well Worker (oh, sorry, such a humble job isn’t provided). Then there’s the stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), the matrix of all the dolls in the company: blond, smiling, with the heels of her little feet pulled up because she’s used to heels. Except that the stereotypical Barbie wakes up one morning in a bad mood because she dreams of death, her breath stinks, cellulite has appeared and, most importantly, her heels aren’t straight anymore, which makes her keep her feet flat.
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Will be Strange barbie (because there are also pregnant Barbie, obese Barbie, Barbie in a wheelchair) to explain this kind of double world where people decide and determine the fate of Barbieland dolls. At this point, the stereotypical Barbie and the Nazi blonde Ken (our credit for the incomparable presence of Ryan Gosling) embark on a journey into the human world where she will find the woman, the secretary in the Mattel offices, who thought badly about her and designed her badly, leading to negative thoughts; while Ken will discover the concept of patriarchy in books and will immediately rush to Barbieland to found Kendom, a kingdom where Barbies are lovingly submissive. A few hours later, both the stereotypical Barbie and the secretary return to Barbieland with their daughter, pursued alternately by the President of Mattel (Will Farrell here in the Elf version, but even dumber) and the company’s board of directors, who want to restore order (male?) in Barbieland. Even here, despite all efforts to decipher US pop culture metaphors, symbolism, parallels and subtexts, a normal person would have trouble staying afloat without running to the movie theater parking lot. But the director Greta GerwigScreenwriter with her husband (Sacrilege!) Noah BaumbachHe takes care of another trio full of clichés and stereotypes of a sterile, sluggish gender war. Since the Kens are fools who think only of their own dominant narcissism, Barbie stereotypes play the trick with the other Barbies and the two female guests of the human world, bewitching them by pretending to be in love with each of them, and then dethroning them of whatever leadership roles they had assumed. Before the Barbies triumphantly return to command, there is room for some scary musical numbers with all the Kens dancing (by the law of turnaround) and for a scenario of a fake plastic gun confrontation on the beach between two factions of the Ken model Saving Private Ryan meets Troy.
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Here, Barbie is that blob of banality, subterfuge, and cliché glued together with the spit of editing and the patience of fans who, at the mass level, are drawn more to a brand’s (nonexistent) cinematographic representation than to its anti-human feminist message (the high culture prevalent among the villagers). Aside from the wanderings of Ferrell’s character losing the sense and trail (why did they put it there? corporate duty?) of Barbie, the futile and blind effort to sustain two exhausting hours of storytelling is perceived more than the linearity of a perspective (ethical?) on the socioanthropological question of female vs. male. Furthermore, seeing Barbie raises some isolated considerations: Gerwig and Baumbach’s real-life relationship must be hell (not just for him, mind you); In the age of gender fluid, castrating asexualization is supplanting (ideologically) the natural flow of libido; Continuing to tell girls that there is a kind of magical horizontal sisterhood between women by erasing socioeconomic conflicts between high and low values from the horizon of thought is criminal. but that above all cinema, ieThe good old cinema purveyor of dreams and stories has become an insignificant and indistinguishable tinsel from all the extroverted and fashionable means of communication of our time. the fAmended trailer who shamelessly quoted Kubrick’s 2001 (that’s the first few minutes of the film) versus the entire Barbie operation becomes an essay on postmodern cinematography.