Yesterday afternoon (7.20) Variety‘s Matt Donnellyreported that under the cloud of a possibly enduring SAG/AFTRA strike, Warner Bros. is “strongly considering” bumping Dune: Part Two out of its 11.3.23 release date and opening it sometime in ’24.
The apparent concern is that Joe and Jane Popcorn will either be unaware of these films or wont be motivated to see them unless the actors promote them via the usual media outlets.
Forgive me for sounding ignorant or for living on my own cloud or desert island, but if I want to see a film it’s NEVER because this or that actor has visited the Jimmy Kimmel Show or done the usual round of junket interviews. It’s because of good reviews or advance screenings or general online buzz.
I realize there’s a whole community of none-too-brights out there who will never see a given film UNLESS the star has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel or done junket interviews, but it seems strange nonetheless.
Before last night’s AMC Lincoln Square Oppenheimer screening the Dune: Part Two trailer played on the big IMAX screen, and it was obvious that the crowd is excited about seeing it. Timothee Chalamet interviews won’t matter one way or the other.
An “industry player” has told Donnelly that the success of The Color Purple “would hinge on a robust awards campaign.” Those who want to see The Color Purple because of its own merits are already convinced, just as I’m convinced that The Color Purple will never ring my bell and that I would’t see it with a gun jammed against my rib cage,
I just don’t want to see Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon (Sony, 11.22) bumped into ’24…please.
…as I’m waiting for the big-ass, 15/70 IMAX screening of Oppenheimer to begin at 7 pm…this is the best I can do on the fly…please forgive the repetitions.
Barbie is cheerful, ironic, smart…it’s colorful, pop-pop-pop feminist and male-despising propaganda in a fleet and funny way…it’s clever and snappy enough to make you say to yourself “okay, fine…men are the foolish morons in this thing and there will be no oxygen for steady, fair-minded viewpoints…just give into it, man…whatever. Because it’s zippy and fizzy and a fair amount of fun.”
Barbie really is fun and juiced for the most part…it’s sharp and clever and peppy as fuck and production designed to a fare-thee-well.
Red-staters will have problems with the basic Barbie attitude. This movie definitely tries to nudge the little girls and boys that will see it into the man-hating, male-pitying side of the discussion. Megyn Kelly, take note!
If you want to start your little girl (or your little boy) on a path to despising foolish and idiotic straight men, this is the film to take them to — trust me.
In a very good-natured and heavily ironic and often comedic way (except for the final 25 to 30 minutes, when it turns into one soul-baring speech after another about the burdens of being a woman and the necessity of men accepting their fundamental immaturity and subservient role, and the task of crafting and molding your own identity)…what was I saying?
In a very good-natured and heavily ironic and often comedic way Greta Gerwig‘s movie absolutely DESPISES men. It really does — it’s total propaganda to this effect.
But at the same time it’s giggly and brisk and breezy and funny and, I have to admit, a very well assembled satire of sorts. A woman-celebrating, man-pitying satire. Wheeee!
Never has a major studio film ever conveyed such uttercontemptforstraightguys…in its peppy and good natured way Barbie constantly belittles men and regards them as delusional little boys with selfish and thoughtless agendas.
But it does so with such brisk and perky energy & with such a persistent sense of nerve and extra-ness…a certain punching-through-the-fourth-wall self-awareness.
And it does have a great final line that is just about equal to the final line in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot so you just have to roll with it and accept the male humiliation and the dominant species of Barbie-women.
This afternoon’s audience was like a midnight crowd at the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the early ’80s, or like the young-girl audience that first showed up to see the first Twilight on opening weekend…a lot of women (and a couple of trans guys!) dressed in pink and giggling and delighted with how the film made them feel. And a fair number of gay gays laughing and giggling and feeling the euphoria.
This is a cultural event, this film…it’s a celebration of the feminine wonderfulness of Barbieland and straight-male mocking and belittling, and a concurrent celebration of feminized gay males.
All The Kens are allegedly straight, you see, except they all look and dress gay. Go figure.
There are phony moments here and there. During her initial visit to the real world, Barbie sits next to an 80something woman and, despite having no frame of reference about older people or age or anything about real-world biology, she says to the 80something woman, “You’re so beautiful.” And the old woman chuckles and says, “I know.” Bullshit, doesn’t work.
My screening was crammed with Millennials and Zoomers…mostly women and a decent smattering of gay men. There was a guy sitting behind me who was giggling like a deballed falsetto Chihuahua…”hee-hee-hee-hee….ooh-hoo-hoo-hoo…hee-hee-hee-ee!”
At the very beginning a hot-pink Warner Bros. logo appears, and this same idiot was DEE-LIGHTED by this…”ooh-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo…tee-hee-hee-hee-hee!!” I almost turned around and said to him, “Do you know what the term ‘easy lay’ means?”
First thing I wrote after Barbie ended: “I have to give Gerwig and NoahBaumbach credit for having created a fleet, zippy, self-acknowledging, hall-of-mirrors Barbie universe that mostly works.
“If you don’t mind the relentless humiliation that is heaped upon the stupid, self-deluding Ken men, the film holds together. It’s fully realized and precisely thought through and is quite the pink creation, quite the work of imagination…
“Even though it regards men as pathetic and immature and basically seven- and eight-year-olds…the Barbie women are the wise and the strong and way, WAY more commanding and visionary and competent….the Ken men are foolish, emotionally stunted infants, and woman know SO much more and are SO much wiser and more mature and they, henceforth, will lead the way. And are destined, it is fully implied, to run the real world once the men are fully deballed and schooled and feminized…”
No Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin types allowed! And no Cary Grants or Jack Lemmons either! Only buff-bod gay guys who are pretending to be straight, or at least aren’t identified as queer.
Every person reading this post needs to sit down, take a breath and ask themselves this question: Deep down, am I a CODA bro? Do I place a higher value upon movies that deliver strong emotional goods (i.e., that warm feeling of empathy that spreads throughout your system) than films that feel more intellectually-focused...more brainy-ish?
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...I would seek out a brilliant acting-and-vocal coach, part Evanna Lynch and part Henry Higgins, and beg him or her to please help me get rid of my white-trash, Deliverance hillbilly shitkicker accent. Because if I could sound more like Sigourney Weaver, I could become more acceptable as a national political figure.
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Following a special screening of Salk at Manhattan's Whitby Hotel last weekend, director Christopher Nolan explained why he chose not to show the human-scale benefits of the Salk polio vaccine, which began to be distributed in 1955 and eventually eliminated polio in the United States.
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It’s funny how these Oscar Poker chats go. Sometimes the discussion will feel relaxed and confident, and sound that way. At other times a relaxed chat (like this one) will bore your pants off. Still other times a discussion that feels awkward and inarticulate during recording will result in a good listen.
Having seen Oppenheimer in Burbank on Tuesday evening (7.18), Sasha shared her euphoric impressions, calling it a 10. She also described a grotesque encounter with a pair of selfish 20something women who were texting all through it. Jeff won’t see Oppie until this evening (Thursday, 7.20, 7:30 pm), and so he asked questions about this and that aspect while quoting from other reviewers. Plus a little Barbie action.
Director-screenwriter friendo to HE: ‘I know you appreciate old-school class, etc. Mister O’s is a retro-designed supper club a la Mad Men and ’60s Rat Pack style in the Valley. Since Universal and other neighboring studios are making it additionally difficult for picketing writers and actors by doing things like cutting down shade trees and blocking sidewalks, this upscale restaurant is offering itself as a cooling station…and it’s a very cool place to hang and cool down.”
Many three-hours-or-longer films reside on my all-time greatest roster -- The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, Lawrence of Arabia, The Wolf of Wall Street, Scarface, The Irishman, Barry Lyndon, Ben-Hur, Titanic, The Seven Samurai, Gone With The Wind, Spartacus, etc.
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Three months ago I posted a Fred Astaire + Rita Hayworth dance sequence from You’ll Never Get Rich. Yesterday I happened upon a colorized version, and I’m sorry but my eyes liked it better.
“Jeff — I totally agree with Paul Schrader on Oppenheimer — it’s the best film I’ve seen come out of a major Hollywood studio in eons. Really fantastic for the entire three hours. Tremendous.” — gmail message, arrived at 11:21 am eastern.
“Barbie and Ken are a version of Eve and Adam, if Eve were God’s favorite and Adam acknowledged as the liability he was.
“After an unplanned detour separates her from Ken, Barbie makes her way back home [from the real world]. ready to restore perfection to her routine. But her homecoming is a dour one; Barbie returns to see that Ken, armed with his newfound knowledge of the patriarchy, has transformed Barbieland.”
Wait…a JOE POPCORN-ISH REACTION from a 30something guy who saw Barbie earlier this afternoon:
“You have absolutely no idea how anti-male Barbie is. Wait until you see it — it’s a landmine of outrage waiting to happen. There will be heated debate…some people are going to HATE it. I mean, there’s a trans Barbie…”
HE to 30something Guy: “Is Ryan Gosling’s Ken a kind of villain figure or…?”
30something Guy: “He turns into a villain, yes. An alpha male who realizes he doesn’t need Barbie in his life and that he can control women.”
HE to 30something guy: “Are you telling me he’s not gay in the film?”
30something Guy: “He loves Barbie.”
HE to 30something Guy: “WHAT? All the guys in the film obviously look and dress gay, but they’re straight? Every single trailer and photo of Ken says ‘this guy obviously isn’t straight.’ The Ken doll with the cock ring….obviously not straight….c’mon!”
From Peter Debruge‘s Variety review: “In the year 2023, it would be a shock (and box-office suicide) if Barbie arrived without some kind of female-empowerment message baked in.
“This one checks all the right boxes, while making Ryan Gosling’s dumb-dumb Ken the butt of most of its gender-equity jokes. Boasting fresh tracks from Billie Eilish and Lizzo, the result is a very funny kids’ movie with a freshman liberal arts student’s vocabulary that tosses around terms like ‘patriarchy’ and ‘appropriation’ — pretty much everything but ‘problematic,’ which the movie implies without actually calling Barbie’s legacy.”
Letterbox’d, A.A. Dowd: “Barbie is practically the textbook definition of corporate feminism, but it knows that too, of course, and is earnest in using the platform of a big-budget toy commercial to speak to the audience about the patriarchy; there’s a big speech that recalls the one Laura Dern delivers in Marriage Story, which makes me wonder if Baumbach counterintuitively wrote this one or if Gerwig helped him write that one.
“Even its lionization of the woman behind Barbie comes with an asterisk. The whole thing is animated by neurosis more than joy, which is what I found most interesting about it: Is there a little of Gerwig’s offscreen wrestling with the assignment in Barbie’s onscreen existential crisis? Wish it was a little funnier.”
