Oppenbarbie Film Reviews Both highly Reccomended

Tweet

Saw these two major films today. I got a free ticket for a film of my choice as they messed up my booking for the Indiana Jones movie and I ended up missing out on a discount there. I used the free ticket for one film and paid to see the other. Two major films released back to back, seemingly with nothing in common, but with a few surprising thematic overlaps. No, Barbie never had a part in creating nuclear bombs. Oppenheimer - No spoilers required. The story of Robert Oppenheimer is well known so the film holds few surprises but it it is brilliantly constructed with incredible riveting performances throughout. Cillian Murphy is awesome in the lead though Matt Damon probably outshines him. The only flaw is the driving relentless score which is very good in itself, with lots of frenzied violin sawing, but it often deafens out the dialogue. Not a lot of action with much drama and the big bomb blasts kept low key - the horror comes strongest in a thunderous applause mutating into the screams of burning bomb victims as Oppenherimer senses the monstrosity of what he has unleashed before his own merciless takedown through largely false anti-communist allegations. The most chilling note was that Hitler’s push for the bomb was largely doomed through his anti-semitism. Hitler refused to give accreditation to Quantum physics, seeing it as a Jewish thing, but it was essential to unlocking the atomic secrets that made the atom (and later hydrogen) bomb possible. Barbie (Spoilers now) Barbieland is a fantastic pink-utopia for the Barbies, mostly just called Barbie, who spend most of the day just saying hi to each other. The Barbies present each other with endless achievement awards, have conquered space, win beauty contests, run every business, etc, ie, every role a real Barbie Doll has. The Kens are just beach-niks, only happy if the Barbies smile at them. Ryan Gosling is the main one, looking like a young Mike Pence. Another is played by soon to be Dr Who, Ncuti Gatwa, though he gets relatively little to do. When ‘Stereotypical Barbie’ (her actual character name) has an existential crisis, fearing death, finding her pointed feet (a feature of the doll) go flat, and globs of cellulite on her legs, she is talked into a quest in the real world (California) to find the unhappy child imprinting her own angst on her doll. Ken stows away for the ride and causes chaos in finding the real World is much more patriarchal, and takes his new male empowerment ideas back to Barbieland with him. Barbie dodges Will Ferrel’s Mattel agents (given their sponsorship of the film, Mattel get a lot of flack in it), and meets the grown woman behind her emotional distress (America - Ugly Betty - Ferrera) and her young cynical daughter who end up aiding her in staging a counter-revolution to restore Barbieland to its former balance. The deprogramming fight is funny and yet seems rather too neat and twee. After all, the struggle for women’s emancipation in the real world is still very much in progress and often gets dangerous. Barbie achieves it overnight, thanks to her human friends (Ferrera gets the most powerful speeches and dialogue, especially her call for a realistic ordinary Barbie as opposed to a set if absurd over-achieving perfect at everything dolls). In many ways the Kens and Allan are left rather empty and vacuous after Ken’s failed revolution, which has some neat dance numbers, including one parodying the Greased Lightning dancing in Grease. Other film and TV nods abound. The Kens try mansplaining the plot of The Godfather to the Barbies, the opening 2001 spoof, with young girls discovering Barbie as a living swim-suited monolith and smashing their baby toys apart. At one point Weird Barbie, (Kate McKinnen) a broken half crazed doll who acts as a kind of prophet, uses a gadget resembling Al’s Ziggy predictive machine. The shock is the main Barbie herself being excluded from the new utopia she ends up creating by her ongoing sense of alienation, and choosing to return to reality with a serious metamorphosis. Some 4th wall meta-commentary from an unseen Helen Mirren too, at one point spelling out to the director that it undermines Barbie calling herself ugly and unlovable when she is played by Margot Robbie. Bittersweet, existentially despairing and still bitingly satirical. It comes over as Barbie having done as much to damage humanity as Oppeneimer’s toys. Youtube Barbie trailer Arthur Chappell