Barbie, 2013 movie by Greta Gerwig –

All right, the hype has died down, pink is no longer ‘in’, the movie is but a fleeting memory – so it was about time I watched Barbie. Quibble if you like, but who can argue with box office sales of $1.5 billion?  This bright pink movie got more hype than a Trump trial and manufactured more excitement than Godzilla’s last visit to Tokyo.  Mattel, the company that’s already sold a billion Barbie dolls, is now cashing in on the biggest toy come-back in history, all thanks to the wild popularity of the Barbie movie they bankrolled.  

Now, am I the only one that lasted this long before succumbing to the lure of a peek at Barbie Land? And for those that watched it in the theatre – was it worth the admission? Were they charmed when the movie opened with a spoof based on the opening scene of the classic 1968  Sci-Fi film ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’ by Stanley Kubrick?  You might remember the apes clustered around the alien obelisk and then figuring out how to use bones as weapons.  Insert a Barbie doll for the obelisk and some little girls instead of apes and you get the idea… It was a cute starting point, but didn’t win high marks for originality – especially from anyone that remembers the 1974 film satire about watching a day’s worth of television programming – it was called ‘The Groove Tube’ and it spoofed the ‘Space Odyssey’ opening long before Barbie (it used a old television set for the obelisk and had the apes start a rock band).   

As could be expected, Barbie’s production values are pretty high, the dance numbers are wonderfully energetic and the plot is pretty thin.  Margo Robbie was suitably Barbieish and Ryan Gosling was having fun as Ken, despite the lame sexist interlude he’s given to waffle about with.  I didn’t see much point in Will Ferrel as Mattel’s CEO, or his bevy of male underlings.  I may have a soft spot for Rhea Perlman (remember ‘Cheers’ or the original Dahl movie ‘Matilda’?) but the first time she appeared left me scratching my head as to what her scene was all about.  Her reappearance later in the movie helped give it a little context, although by that time the movie had really bogged down into predictable tedium.  Simu Liu as the alternative Ken brought some real ‘Colgate White’ teeth and energy to his role.

This is the kind of movie that, If you go expecting nothing, you’ll be pleasantly surprised – there are some fun bits, especially in the first half.  If you go looking for why it made 1.5 billion dollars at the box office, you might curl up in a ball looking perplexed.  If you go expecting the atomic bomb – you’re in the wrong theater – Oppenheimer was playing next door.

 TL:DR – If you grew up loving Barbies, this film will make you think you’ve died and gone to… well, Barbie Land in this case.