Friendo: “My wife and I thought Barbie’s opening riff on 2001‘s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence was hilarious. We guffawed all through it, and yet we might have been the only ones in the audience who seemed to get it. Everyone else was stone-faced, no chuckling or tittering of any kind.

“I’ve since spoken to two well-educated women in their early 40s (one is a cardiologist) who’ve both seen Barbie, and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned that scene.

“One has seen 2001 but has forgotten all about the opening scene (apes in the desert, animal bones, the black monolith); the other had never even heard of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 groundbreaker.

“What does this say about the average person’s film literacy?”

HE to friendo: Anyone who’s been educated at a good college or university should know at least a little something about everything, and hopefully everything about something.

I would say that your second well-educated woman (not the cardiologist) was either (a) cutting a lot of classes or (b) decided to stop educating herself after she graduated. I’m guessing it’s probably the latter.

And how the cardiologist could have possibly seen 2001 and not remembered the “Dawn of Man” sequence…she’s either lying about having seen it or was in the bathroom for the first ten minutes.