The Barbie hate cracks me up. I went saw the movie and did not find it to be the equivalent of a of a pink-covered, man-hating, graduate seminar on third-wave feminism and intersectionality. I found it delightful and poignant and it never took itself too seriously.
What it did to is spend two hours treating the interests and aspirations a…
The Barbie hate cracks me up. I went saw the movie and did not find it to be the equivalent of a of a pink-covered, man-hating, graduate seminar on third-wave feminism and intersectionality. I found it delightful and poignant and it never took itself too seriously.
What it did to is spend two hours treating the interests and aspirations and fears and concerns of women and girls as deserving as respect.
The Republicans' inability to do the same for two minutes is probably going to cost them the 2024 election.
I read an interview with Greta Gerwig and to be frank the movie sounds like a fabulous idea. Gerwig is a genuine creator, so writes and acts. And I was surprised to see a furor over Barbie. For myself, I dont usually go to the movies much - I wait for it to come to cable. But it looks like the furor means nothing.
Right wing media is not at all the equivalent of real media. Real media encompasses genuine movie criticism, human interest, sports and even news. The right seems only interested in a peculiar take on American life.
What’s fascinating to me looking at the success of Barbie and Taylor Swift’s tour is the market for entertainment targeted towards women is underserved. Barbie is going to end up making a couple of BILLION dollars. The Swift tour will do the same. Maybe the lesson to be learned in our capitalist system is that there is money to be made here if we center women. Just a thought for all of the free market conservatives that are decrying this movie.
I didn’t see the movie, but read about Ben Shapiro having a complete meltdown over the movie. Burning Barbie Dolls. What’s his problem, does the color Fuschia stand for wokeness?
I mean he equates to movie to socialism. I saw the trailer. If driving around in expensive cars and living in Malibu is socialism, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you...:)
If you really want to get your atomic bomb thirst satisfied without the preachy, I highly recommend "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie." It was made by a special effects professional from real footage of atomic weapons testing (no CGI). It's been around for awhile and has been released in multiple VHS versions, DVD and Blu Ray versions.
The movie is narrated by William Shatner and (non-ironically) the accompanying music is by Moscow Symphony Orchestra. It does have snippets of interviews with people like Edward Teller and others associated with the US atomic weapons program.
Full disclosure: I contributed to one of the later versions that used improved digital restoration methods to improve the weapons testing videos. For that I got "Executive Producer" credit.
I knew "red diaper babies" when I was a kid, and in there would be serious discussions of why the US should have given the secrets to the A-bomb to Stalin. Also lots of angst over the Rosenbergs. Oppenheimer was definitely preachy from all I have read.
I am seeing Oppenheimer this weekend with my son. We are driving several hours to see it on one of the 30 screens world wide that can show it in 70mm IMAX.
A friend said "Barbie was originally made in Japan and delivered to the US, while Oppenheimer's invention was made in the US and delivered to Japan, so the proper viewing order is Oppenheimer, then Grave of the Fireflies."
Oof. I watched "Grave of the Fireflies" once, years ago, and still have a visceral reaction whenever I encounter the title. Don't think I'd make it through a second viewing without needing intravenous hydration.
Wait, what? You went to a movie to ENJOY IT and not to bask in 2023 culture wars? You are probably also a person who saw Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning and didn't spend every moment weeping, thinking about the implications of AI destroying the world and just enjoyed the AMAZING stunts.
In response to Ben Shapiro taking Barbie dolls and setting them on fire, someone photoshoped a picture of him at the Barbie movie with him as a ken doll from the waist down. Probably still on X ( ex-Twitter)
I enjoyed the hell out of it! I laughed, I cried, the costumes where great, the sets were great, the actors gave some of the best performances of their careers, and I walked out of the theater with a new perspective on the world.
And then I went and saw Oppenheimer. I enjoyed the hell out of it. I laughed, I cried, the costumes where great, the sets were great, the actors gave some of the best performances of their careers, and I walked out of the theater with a new perspective on the world.
I think Rush Limbaugh started this trend. Any new, big movie that came out, he'd spend an hour talking about how it served the liberal agenda. The "everything is political" flex, for me anyway, has gotten really old. Just watch the movie and enjoy it. Take a break.
Gotta say, when I first heard Rush, I was very much taken with him. I'm guessing it was around 1990 and he was still broadcasting out of New York. He was funny. He was dead-on right about a lot of the things the Democrats were doing back then. I mean, you had donors buying pallets of Jim Wright's books to get around campaign finance laws and just all kinds of crazy stuff. Rush called them all out and it was entertaining. I listened every day. I bought his books. I watched his videos.
When he moved to Florida, I think he got lazy. It wasn't anywhere near as creative or engaging. It was just angry and ill-informed and sometimes just stupid. All he was doing was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page to his listeners and vamping on it. I stopped listening then.
And then, in his later years, he was like Trump in a lot of ways. He had a collection of stock phrases -- harmless little fuzzball, half my brain tied behind my back, America's Truth Detector, etc. -- that he would click together to make a broadcast out of. Three hours a day of that, ever day. You always knew exactly where he was going to go before he even came on the air. At the end, he was just chasing the audience. It was all nuts.
Now he's been replaced by even worse people: Hannity (who used to talk about how proud he was to be #2 behind Rush), Levin, Beck, Hewitt, and all the rest. There's such a huge market out there for that stuff that it just keeps going and getting bigger and weirder and more conspiratorial.
This actually happened when I heard Rush on WABC in NY. This would have been within the first couple of years after the station stopped playing Top 40.
A listener was going on and on about "the blacks". Rush actually cut the guy short, and told him that he had no idea what life was like for a black man in the US. He even called the guy "sir" in that typically Rush way where "sir" can actually mean "you're an idiot".
What I resent the most about Rush Limbaugh, apart from everything he ever said, was that he ruined my favorite band's name. People would ask me if I liked Rush and I would explode with enthusiasm about their virtuoso playing and lyrics and the whole zeitgeist until they corrected me about which Rush they meant.
It's laughable and astonishing at the same that these are elected officials who think they have the right to decide serious issues regarding women's lives. I'm pink all day, and I'll celebrate the joy of the Barbie movie!
The movie made Bill Clinton the face of "the patriarchy" and the Republican complaint is "hey, you should have made the even more sexually-predatory president the face of the patriarchy!"
Ugh. This. This. This.
Just for having to type this sentence, I think women deserve more Greta Gerwig movies, a Wonder Woman sequel on par with the quality of the 2017 movie, and a Josephine Baker biopic.
I'm not embarrassed to say: I thought it was a better WWI movie than the latest adaptation of All Quiet on The Western Front. Chris Pine's final moment's immediately made me think back to the book: "his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come." Absolutely Brutal.
Watching Diana's opinion of her fellow travelers change when she saw them helping the Belgian villagers was so good. A lesser movie would have skipped that sort of character development.
I thought the recent version of Alls Quiet was a great Great War movie. (Sorry, couldn't resist that phrasing. :)) However, it wasn't Alls Quiet. Too many key scenes from the book (or the amazing 1930 version) were missing. I liked it movie, but it wasn't Alls Quiet.
I think Heinlein would have been disappointed that the movie portrayed the government he envisioned as fascist. Seemed to me that he took great pains in the book to make sure it wasn't a fascist government, or even a military government.
Ludendorff at an early stage played footsie with the Nazis and paralleled them in some ways, although as a Nationalist. He was abhorrently antisemitic, and Gadot taking him down has some important figurative justice. But, his leadership during war was historically more significant than what he did afterwards. Politically, he was needed to appease Hindenburg while the old man lived, and even though a rival, he wasn't offed by the Nazis for "reasons" (mostly to not alienate Nationalist veterans). He's an optional lecture slide on how that Nazis came to power.
It was great, and I hope Gerwig gets more big movies because in addition to being a great director she obviously knows how to manage the massive budgets that come with them.
It's very funny to me that all the usual conservative cosplayers of masculinity - Shapiro, Walsh, etc., are melting down about a movie that is basically a giant masculinity cosplay.
The funniest thing to me what Matt Gaetz's wife (cursed phrase) Ginger complaining that Ken is a "low T" man. No, Ginger, he's no T man, as in he's a plastic doll, he has no testosterone whatsoever. The highest T main character is probably Will Ferrell's character, who is north of 50.
I love how the movie called people out for sexualizing girls' playthings. And the response for the Gaetz household is... to further sexualize children's playthings. From the party that loves to call everyone and everything "groomers".
One thing I realize as I get older is that sexually deviant behavior is much less adults consuming pornography or having too many sex partners and more "I need to find sexuality in places they are clearly not intended."
Like kid's dolls. It's fitting that Gaetz's wife is creepy in a complimentary way to him. We'll all enjoy reading the divorce stories in a decade I'm sure.
One of the other things I've learned getting older is that often there's no hero or villain in a lot of dysfunctional relationships. Both sides are offenders, though often not equal.
Distinguishing that from abusive relationships, of course.
Gaetz was engaged to be married when the story about Onlyfans, underage prostitutes, etc. broke. She saw no problem going ahead and marrying the sleezeball.
Me too. She was a cabaret singer and spent WWII spying on the goddamn Nazi for the resistance. The fact that no one has made a movie about her boggles the mind.
"The fact that no one has made a movie about her boggles the mind."
If anyone makes a movie about her, I hope it's the French. They just gave her a hero's burial in the Pantheon in Paris. Americans hardly know who she is -- and she was American, for heaven's sake. (As if helping defeat the Nazis wasn't enough, if memory serves correctly, she also adopted and raised 10 or 12 orphaned kids while she was at it.)
I actually thought of you while reading an interview with the Greta Gerwig.
She was asked to cut a pivotal emotional scene from the movie because it didn't "move the plot forward" and she pointed out that if she removed the scene from the movie, then the movie wasn't "about anything" anymore. I can't imagine having conversations that maddening.
The Barbie hate cracks me up. I went saw the movie and did not find it to be the equivalent of a of a pink-covered, man-hating, graduate seminar on third-wave feminism and intersectionality. I found it delightful and poignant and it never took itself too seriously.
What it did to is spend two hours treating the interests and aspirations and fears and concerns of women and girls as deserving as respect.
The Republicans' inability to do the same for two minutes is probably going to cost them the 2024 election.
One can hope!
I read an interview with Greta Gerwig and to be frank the movie sounds like a fabulous idea. Gerwig is a genuine creator, so writes and acts. And I was surprised to see a furor over Barbie. For myself, I dont usually go to the movies much - I wait for it to come to cable. But it looks like the furor means nothing.
Right wing media is not at all the equivalent of real media. Real media encompasses genuine movie criticism, human interest, sports and even news. The right seems only interested in a peculiar take on American life.
Yes, if the country is to be saved, it is women who will have to save it for we men!
Reminds me of this adorable post that Mona retweeted on Twitter or X or whatever the thing is:
https://twitter.com/saadmohseni/status/1679525552535789570?s=46&t=KehNWkGQOEebpzRITvLqvQ
Wish they'd hurry up about it! (ducks) ;)
What’s fascinating to me looking at the success of Barbie and Taylor Swift’s tour is the market for entertainment targeted towards women is underserved. Barbie is going to end up making a couple of BILLION dollars. The Swift tour will do the same. Maybe the lesson to be learned in our capitalist system is that there is money to be made here if we center women. Just a thought for all of the free market conservatives that are decrying this movie.
I didn’t see the movie, but read about Ben Shapiro having a complete meltdown over the movie. Burning Barbie Dolls. What’s his problem, does the color Fuschia stand for wokeness?
I mean he equates to movie to socialism. I saw the trailer. If driving around in expensive cars and living in Malibu is socialism, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you...:)
So since pubs don’t like it will DeSantis sue the producers for not being responsible with investment even though it’s making money?
I am become Barbie, destroyer of girls.
The correct order viewing order is Barbie, Oppenheimer, then Oppenheimer again, and then Babrie. Both movies deserve a repeat viewing.
Will do, I'm glad good movies are back!!
Oppenheimer is too long and too preachy. Barbie is a great movie, which is really fun, with an underlying message. More of what a movie should be.
If you really want to get your atomic bomb thirst satisfied without the preachy, I highly recommend "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie." It was made by a special effects professional from real footage of atomic weapons testing (no CGI). It's been around for awhile and has been released in multiple VHS versions, DVD and Blu Ray versions.
The movie is narrated by William Shatner and (non-ironically) the accompanying music is by Moscow Symphony Orchestra. It does have snippets of interviews with people like Edward Teller and others associated with the US atomic weapons program.
You can buy it just about anywhere but here's the link to the blu-ray version sold by the marketing arm of the producer: https://atomcentralstore.mybigcommerce.com/trinity-and-beyond-70th-anniversary-edition-dvd/
Full disclosure: I contributed to one of the later versions that used improved digital restoration methods to improve the weapons testing videos. For that I got "Executive Producer" credit.
Oppenheimer the man was annoying and preachy, and it is a biopic.
I knew "red diaper babies" when I was a kid, and in there would be serious discussions of why the US should have given the secrets to the A-bomb to Stalin. Also lots of angst over the Rosenbergs. Oppenheimer was definitely preachy from all I have read.
My arch-Republican father helped elude the draft: His reason? If we have the bomb and don't use it, it's not really a war.
He had some things to be worried about.
But we didn't have to watch and listen for three hours.
I am seeing Oppenheimer this weekend with my son. We are driving several hours to see it on one of the 30 screens world wide that can show it in 70mm IMAX.
It's very worth experiencing in IMAX...the Los Alamos scenes in particular look incredible.
A friend said "Barbie was originally made in Japan and delivered to the US, while Oppenheimer's invention was made in the US and delivered to Japan, so the proper viewing order is Oppenheimer, then Grave of the Fireflies."
Oof. I watched "Grave of the Fireflies" once, years ago, and still have a visceral reaction whenever I encounter the title. Don't think I'd make it through a second viewing without needing intravenous hydration.
Wait, what? You went to a movie to ENJOY IT and not to bask in 2023 culture wars? You are probably also a person who saw Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning and didn't spend every moment weeping, thinking about the implications of AI destroying the world and just enjoyed the AMAZING stunts.
In response to Ben Shapiro taking Barbie dolls and setting them on fire, someone photoshoped a picture of him at the Barbie movie with him as a ken doll from the waist down. Probably still on X ( ex-Twitter)
I enjoyed the hell out of it! I laughed, I cried, the costumes where great, the sets were great, the actors gave some of the best performances of their careers, and I walked out of the theater with a new perspective on the world.
And then I went and saw Oppenheimer. I enjoyed the hell out of it. I laughed, I cried, the costumes where great, the sets were great, the actors gave some of the best performances of their careers, and I walked out of the theater with a new perspective on the world.
I think Rush Limbaugh started this trend. Any new, big movie that came out, he'd spend an hour talking about how it served the liberal agenda. The "everything is political" flex, for me anyway, has gotten really old. Just watch the movie and enjoy it. Take a break.
Ah, Rush, the grandfather of the dis-information industry. Wherever he is resting, may it not be in peace.
Gotta say, when I first heard Rush, I was very much taken with him. I'm guessing it was around 1990 and he was still broadcasting out of New York. He was funny. He was dead-on right about a lot of the things the Democrats were doing back then. I mean, you had donors buying pallets of Jim Wright's books to get around campaign finance laws and just all kinds of crazy stuff. Rush called them all out and it was entertaining. I listened every day. I bought his books. I watched his videos.
When he moved to Florida, I think he got lazy. It wasn't anywhere near as creative or engaging. It was just angry and ill-informed and sometimes just stupid. All he was doing was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page to his listeners and vamping on it. I stopped listening then.
And then, in his later years, he was like Trump in a lot of ways. He had a collection of stock phrases -- harmless little fuzzball, half my brain tied behind my back, America's Truth Detector, etc. -- that he would click together to make a broadcast out of. Three hours a day of that, ever day. You always knew exactly where he was going to go before he even came on the air. At the end, he was just chasing the audience. It was all nuts.
Now he's been replaced by even worse people: Hannity (who used to talk about how proud he was to be #2 behind Rush), Levin, Beck, Hewitt, and all the rest. There's such a huge market out there for that stuff that it just keeps going and getting bigger and weirder and more conspiratorial.
This actually happened when I heard Rush on WABC in NY. This would have been within the first couple of years after the station stopped playing Top 40.
A listener was going on and on about "the blacks". Rush actually cut the guy short, and told him that he had no idea what life was like for a black man in the US. He even called the guy "sir" in that typically Rush way where "sir" can actually mean "you're an idiot".
What I resent the most about Rush Limbaugh, apart from everything he ever said, was that he ruined my favorite band's name. People would ask me if I liked Rush and I would explode with enthusiasm about their virtuoso playing and lyrics and the whole zeitgeist until they corrected me about which Rush they meant.
I'm still pissed off about that, tbh.
But he hasn't ruined Renaissance and Baroque music and jazz, so the musical world still contains enough treasures to see you off.
What he ruined was a good song by the Pretenders.
"Try to hold some faith in the goodness of humanity"
;)
It's laughable and astonishing at the same that these are elected officials who think they have the right to decide serious issues regarding women's lives. I'm pink all day, and I'll celebrate the joy of the Barbie movie!
The interests of women deserve respect? Crazy talk!!!! (Yes, sarcasm)
They're just mad that the American President featured in the movie is Bill Clinton, not Trump. Clear evidence of liberal bias!
The movie made Bill Clinton the face of "the patriarchy" and the Republican complaint is "hey, you should have made the even more sexually-predatory president the face of the patriarchy!"
Ugh. This. This. This.
Just for having to type this sentence, I think women deserve more Greta Gerwig movies, a Wonder Woman sequel on par with the quality of the 2017 movie, and a Josephine Baker biopic.
That first Wonder Wonder movie was one of the best superhero movies ever!
I'm not embarrassed to say: I thought it was a better WWI movie than the latest adaptation of All Quiet on The Western Front. Chris Pine's final moment's immediately made me think back to the book: "his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come." Absolutely Brutal.
Watching Diana's opinion of her fellow travelers change when she saw them helping the Belgian villagers was so good. A lesser movie would have skipped that sort of character development.
I thought the recent version of Alls Quiet was a great Great War movie. (Sorry, couldn't resist that phrasing. :)) However, it wasn't Alls Quiet. Too many key scenes from the book (or the amazing 1930 version) were missing. I liked it movie, but it wasn't Alls Quiet.
Yeah, my husband really liked it and I was just like "this isn't the book, this isn't what the book is about"
Which calls to mind Starship Troopers, which I think someone (you perhaps?) referenced yesterday.
Starship Troopers was SO far way from the book I would have been embarrassed to claim I based it on the book if I was the writer.
It had it's moments though, despite the cheesiness.
And I always thought that the Forever War (Joe Haldeman) was a better book.
I really enjoyed both of them.
I think Heinlein would have been disappointed that the movie portrayed the government he envisioned as fascist. Seemed to me that he took great pains in the book to make sure it wasn't a fascist government, or even a military government.
I both wish that it had been made and yet am somewhat afraid of it being made, lol.
Can you imagine the uproar today if you included the part about the changing sexual mores through the centuries?
Yes!
Agree, yes. Until Ludendorff turns into a monster. That didn't happen until the 20s, after the war.
Using such a prominent historical figure was risky. A loose analog with a similar name would have worked better.
Ludendorff at an early stage played footsie with the Nazis and paralleled them in some ways, although as a Nationalist. He was abhorrently antisemitic, and Gadot taking him down has some important figurative justice. But, his leadership during war was historically more significant than what he did afterwards. Politically, he was needed to appease Hindenburg while the old man lived, and even though a rival, he wasn't offed by the Nazis for "reasons" (mostly to not alienate Nationalist veterans). He's an optional lecture slide on how that Nazis came to power.
I appreciate the additional historical context, but it just strengthens my opinion that Ludendorf didn't belong in a superhero movie. :)
It was great, and I hope Gerwig gets more big movies because in addition to being a great director she obviously knows how to manage the massive budgets that come with them.
It's very funny to me that all the usual conservative cosplayers of masculinity - Shapiro, Walsh, etc., are melting down about a movie that is basically a giant masculinity cosplay.
The funniest thing to me what Matt Gaetz's wife (cursed phrase) Ginger complaining that Ken is a "low T" man. No, Ginger, he's no T man, as in he's a plastic doll, he has no testosterone whatsoever. The highest T main character is probably Will Ferrell's character, who is north of 50.
I love how the movie called people out for sexualizing girls' playthings. And the response for the Gaetz household is... to further sexualize children's playthings. From the party that loves to call everyone and everything "groomers".
Not to mention that we all know that neither Ken NOR Barbie ever had actual genitalia. That makes them both transgenders, right?
Eunichs for the cause.
Sorry eunuch
One thing I realize as I get older is that sexually deviant behavior is much less adults consuming pornography or having too many sex partners and more "I need to find sexuality in places they are clearly not intended."
Like kid's dolls. It's fitting that Gaetz's wife is creepy in a complimentary way to him. We'll all enjoy reading the divorce stories in a decade I'm sure.
Have you ever noticed that we never see Gaetz and Butthead in a room at the same time? The giant forehead is a giveaway.
I've never seen Trump and the Great Pumpkin in the same room at the same time either.
Nor Kevin McCarthy and the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz.
You are right!
One of the other things I've learned getting older is that often there's no hero or villain in a lot of dysfunctional relationships. Both sides are offenders, though often not equal.
Distinguishing that from abusive relationships, of course.
Gaetz was engaged to be married when the story about Onlyfans, underage prostitutes, etc. broke. She saw no problem going ahead and marrying the sleezeball.
I'd love to see a movie about Josephine Baker. Just for the style/costumes/dress alone!
HBO did a decent biopic in the early 90s I think.
Me too. She was a cabaret singer and spent WWII spying on the goddamn Nazi for the resistance. The fact that no one has made a movie about her boggles the mind.
"The fact that no one has made a movie about her boggles the mind."
If anyone makes a movie about her, I hope it's the French. They just gave her a hero's burial in the Pantheon in Paris. Americans hardly know who she is -- and she was American, for heaven's sake. (As if helping defeat the Nazis wasn't enough, if memory serves correctly, she also adopted and raised 10 or 12 orphaned kids while she was at it.)
I actually thought of you while reading an interview with the Greta Gerwig.
She was asked to cut a pivotal emotional scene from the movie because it didn't "move the plot forward" and she pointed out that if she removed the scene from the movie, then the movie wasn't "about anything" anymore. I can't imagine having conversations that maddening.
Excellent!