I saw Barbie at the cinema. Agenda and poisonous advertising of capitalism

“Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.”

Sometimes you will.

Yesterday I made the expected choice: between “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” I went to the premiere of the second one.

Nolan is more or less clear. With each new film, he moves further and further away from thinking about a suspicious natural in the direction of a high-quality execution of a one-level plot.

But with Barbie you can already see what awaits. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are seen in projects bordering on arthouse, where form and idea perfectly balance each other.

But this time something went wrong.

Gosling of everyone in the interview did not get out of the image of Ken digested in testosterone, either supporting the image, or hinting to note: “he goes to a two-hour advertising session for the Dolls, and I run around shooting because of the contract.”

After the session, the conclusion about the work of Greta Gerwig is already unambiguous.

Barbie director Greta Gerwig (without glasses)

Oppenheimer exemplifies the classic film approach behind Nolan’s production.

The movie about the doll, in turn, dug deeper. This is a great example of how to properly film the classic fairy tale scenario, which is an old race of people. And how to spoil this story on the globe of consumption and brand PR.

In the end, there was a feeling that the director was sitting on three chairs according to the load.

Below I’ll tell you why this is a talented story, a stupid political manifesto and a smart, but brazen attempt to clean up branded dolls at the same time.

Technically, decoratively and actingly, this is the pinnacle

Here I will say little, because it is not necessary to discuss important things for a long time.

Actors recaptured the game for ten.

Stylists, make-up artists, set artists kept the tone of each scene.

The choreographers, sound engineers, and lighting engineers put on poignant numbers, although I usually hate musicals.

The strongest number in the movie

And finally, the cinematographer skilfully revisited the public lens as the reality in the plot changed.

Of the nuances, there was only a bad editing jump between shots (for interesting ones, this is after the scene with Gosling and two dots).

The work of the director showed her great erudition, and here I want to stop in more detail. Thanks to the vision of Greta Gerwig, the film turned out to be simultaneously interesting, predictable and annoying. Yes, all three senses at once.

The perfect (rustic) tale from the Harry Potter recipe

If you watch the film as an exciting attraction, the scenario will find fault with the impossibility. It works because it uses the best of classic encounters and even fairy tales. According to director Greta, Barbie is inspired by Hero’s proposed challenge to classic American film and television projects. There’s The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather, A Space Odyssey, All That Jazz, Splash, The Truman Show, and many more.

In the usual motley set, the general one-shot – everywhere the script is sustained in the spirit of the epic, where the characters organically listen to the new student life through deadly trials, lately leading to the observation of catharsis.

The only disadvantage of such a History of History is predictability.

Almost at the very beginning, the plot technique of the red and blue pills is used. And to do it seriously is already a script bad manners.

let the context of the film, everyone already knows the choice of the right script. It is very difficult to beat a well-known story so that it looks fresh.

Greta Gerwig almost made it, juggling her lines as best she could. But it didn’t work, because the payer’s plot is based on the choice of the “red pill” (in our case, a brown sandal).

Barbie is forced to choose reality, otherwise the film would fall apart. That is why the appearance from the first running time, where the archetypal freaky fairy godmother imposes such a choice on the heroine, it becomes clear which way the film will go.

Without clinging to the context in which the film is made (“the game maker is promoting the American popular game”), it is easy to enjoy the successful execution of all fairy-tale elements.

But for me personally, the problem was just that it was not possible to discard the context. This is an all-too-obvious attempt by Mattel to humanize the doll brand.

Mattel boldly showed corporate greed, but irony did not save

Of course, behind the release of the film is the manufacturer Barbie, the company Mattel.

Her CEO Inon Craze acted as executive producer of the film. The proportion of shares owned by Disney has experience, so there is.

And then an interesting experiment took place.

It’s funny to see that in reality, Mattel’s CEO went to a bold self-ironywhen he disguised the council as stupid penguins in costumes, showed the cubes inside the main office as a gray prison with ghost workers and laughed at the callousness with which he himself made decisions.

But at the same time, the attempt to turn Barbie’s commercial product into a cultural icon leaked too much into the experience.

The plot raises all those statements about the unattainable image of beauty that were copied over 60 years of the doll’s history and were kept from washing them.

The most obvious step is to create a brand story, a myth that viewers will recognize. About who invented the doll, what kind of ideas a person puts in. It turns out such a canonization of the founding mother. It even got to the point that in the film the quality of that was inserted by a woman, in connection with which the doll was named.

Strongly, yes. But at this moment you feel that the film was made for the entropy of Barbie around the world.

And it would be possible to endure one such shortcoming, if not another. There is something completely superfluous in this beautiful fairy tale. The film schizophrenially concocts for the characters – and the audience – dehumanizing cases of attacks on people infected with steroids.

Agenda stifled creativity

The “big thoughts” that fly all over the screen are annoying because they don’t bring anything new, and like a broken record they repeat everything that should be dissatisfied with American society, and at the same time with the whole planet.

Many conflicts are experienced not with a friend, but with oneself. Almost all of them have a personal existential claim to the world, because of which every hero, sooner or later, convulses.

A film about a doll of an extremely large assembly… no, not by saying. political complaint.

After the session, my guests are tantrums of appearance. I remember their especially strongly dramatized problems, which were loudly declared and modestly resolved.

In no story, except for the story of Barbie Margot Robbie, is there a break in the paradigms that arrived, which could be presented as an example of a successful solution to the problem.

Perhaps the sound is too abstract, I will give examples.

Alpha Ken got a favorite game

Ken Gosling is desperately trying to find the ground under his feet and creates his own cult. the idea is based on “I am a man, and a man is respected”, the cult, of course, quickly falls apart, because people do not hold on to one charisma for a long time: someone with brains will come to replace it.

Ken Gosliga has a breakdown, but he does not solve the problem himself, he is chewed on by Margot Robbie’s Barbie, and his “branch” ends not with how he has changed, with the line in the script “I have changed.” Weak.

Raging in aggressive feminism has nothing to do with the protection of women’s rights. According to the plot, the world of Barbie is the opposite of the reality of the world, there is an absolute matriarchy.

Nothing changes towards the end in Barbieland, the men are helpless, but the transference is taught as a victory for the women. And in the world of men, the same stupid ones are found, they obey animal instincts, they just sit in power.

Yes, unfortunately, in some parts of the world this is close to the truth, but there this film will not be seen. But where they see, such a flat mockery of the male half of the planet polarizes fragile people and threatens to give birth to even more misogynybecause the director is a woman.

A character of matter from the real world in the middle of the film gives out a cumbersome monologue about the problems of modern women, which, in fact, everyone tries on, including men.

The text is strictly spelled out, and only those who really “boiled” could create it. But there are so many convulsive claims to life that complaints about “you must not say yes in order not to be available, but you must not say no in order not to get too rough results” make me want to switch the channel.

The mother of a real-world girl plays a key role in the story, but it’s difficult to script

Collecting dozens of contradictory testimonies in one set, revealing fatigue from a simple person – this is another cheap trick, you need to be able to work with species. We all face situations where we need to behave differently, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Yes, be inaccessible. Be sure to be a parent of any difficult sex.

The film offers a mass complaint, but does not provide a single healthy answer, as between what is important and what is up to you, focus on overcoming this world and emerge victorious.

Here, the tired parent simply “crazes” and hopes that the sick person will jump into the pink cabriolet of despair with him.

that is, characters complain about the duty of a person to be flexible and thus evoke the most sensitive responses of the psyche. Unfortunately, the film presents this as a problem, which means that with its release it aggressively spreads infantilism in society.

Watch for the install, don’t watch for the idea

The movie turned out, in my opinion, poisonous.

Under the hood of magical technical and creative work is a hive of truly screaming ideas that consume hundreds of thousands of capricious food souls.

Barbie could be an exceptional experiment in spirit. It should be soft through creativity that showed the good things that happen in people.

But the film’s team chose to draw the aggressive manifestations lying on the surface to raw human emotions, put them on a pedestal, twist the story around them, thereby reinforcing their life in society. And sometimes advertising of dolls interfered with the nail and, out of depression, disguised all this as a light movie that condemns cruel ideas.

Almost the entire runtime of the brilliant production alternates with incel tantrums from helplessness in matriarchy, the objectification of women and men, toxic masculinity and the blinded fury of feminism, the indestructible polarity of power and the dominance of capitalism.

You can say as much as you like in the frame that all this is bad, but the directors painted this reality with their own hands and did not save room for anything else.

If the appearance is only the appearance of a flurry of dirt and you can see it, even though the characters say how dirty it is, then the film, unfortunately, remains just about that.

So my conclusion about Barbie is this. Beautiful, masterful, but dangerous.