Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie

Me until now: "Okay, interesting casting, those stills of people in costume kinda cool, whatever happens happens."

Me upon seeing this: "Wait, a half year wait still? WANT NOW."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zIf0XvoL9Y

HELL YES IN GRETA WE TRUST GIVE IT TO ME

Between this and Mario 2023 is going to be the year of me being embarrassingly enthusiastic about brand cash in flicks

in Greta we trust = absolute truth

I laughed harder at this trailer than I have at any other trailer

I can't wait

Great trailer.

I’m sold.

I am worried by the involvement of Baumbach.

Baumbach is often pretty full of himself, but he did co-write "Life Aquatic" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" with Wes Anderson, and those were good. So ... fingers crossed!

that trailer is amazing lmao

Trailer's very funny. No interest in the actual movie, but it's a really good one-off gag.

the gag is funny but also the clips of the DANCING and the COLORS and the JACKETS

i'm also a big fan of the comedy acting of Margot Robbie so i'm v optimistic for this

The trailer was a clever and cute teaser. The few flashes of (mostly dance) footage at the end itself seemed less than compelling. That cotton candy color scheme, if it pervades the entire film, would be extremely painful to sit through.

Baumbach/Gerwig movies are probably better than Baumbach movies, I have no objection to a Gerwig/Baumbach movie

yeah i don't thing Greta has written or directed a bad movie

frances ha and mistress america are def a cut above in the baumbach filmography

he did co-write "Life Aquatic" … good.

LIES

i love Life Aquatic!

Gerwig has made two perfect films. I trust her.

I'm hyped for this.

meanwhile Baumbach just made...White Noise.

oh shit the Delillo book? i didn't know about that

it seems like a thoroughly bad idea if so

that's about right

ok one to avoid

Miyazaki, Mario, and Barbie - 2023 is looking pretty fun

Ain’t it fun?

Also impressed that they did something funny with the ten-millionth reference to the Dawn of Man scene

not to be a jerk but is there some non-fandom reason to anticipate the Mario movie?

Idk it’ll probably be gently funny and the music sounds great, probably won’t have any piss jokes like all the other kids’ movies seem to these days

I'm with Milo Z on Life Aquatic, which singlehandedly killed my vague Anderson interest. This on the other hand looks perfectly entertaining.

Honestly, I didn't like it, either. But the fact that the Baumbach co-write "Mr. Fox" is one of my fave Wes Andersons, and was what brought me back as a fan after "Darjeeling," leads me to believe Baumbach wasn't necessarily the problem with "Life Aquatic."

"Mr. Fox" is, well, fantastic.

Miyazaki, Mario, and Barbie - 2023 is looking pretty fun

Had not heard that How Do You Live? is coming out!

Mr. Fox and His Friends?

maybe this will be the trigger we need to get a Josie & The Pussycats Criterion blu ray

Had not heard that How Do You Live? is coming out!

Yeah, I can't wait. Just got the book from the library.

Idk it’ll probably be gently funny and the music sounds great, probably won’t have any piss jokes like all the other kids’ movies seem to these days

Lolling that the movie about the plumber running around in sewers probably won’t have any piss jokes

Oh no

Just had a weird flashback to Ice Cube drinking piss in the kids movie "Are We There Yet", glad to see piss jokes still a thing two decades on

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/mario-too/

Oh my

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRyt3Ov4zz0

my hot take is when the target of your satire is vacuity, the zings are going to cluster in a very small range

Trailer I saw before (haven't clicked yet on this one) was interesting, but yeah.

Something of a pivot for Ari Aster, then

Okay, now I see

That cast!

just going by that newest trailer wow this thing (visually) looks like total digital shit and not in a cool hyperpop 100gecs way

ugh yeah

This and the new Wes Anderson would be an overwhelming double feature on the eyes.

Klaus Kinough

I think Herr Herzog was speaking more in keeping with a certain theological concept, where Hell is an eternal exclusion from a knowledge of God and consequently condemned to meaningless vacuity for all time. Under the broad umbrella of this concept there can be be a nearly infinite number of visions of pure Hell.

Or maybe he was just improvising. Hard to say.

this is pretty much how he describes everything lol

People's interest in Werner Herzog's opinions is baffling to me. The guy directed, like, three movies I like, all more than 40 years old at this point. I'd be much more interested in Greta Gerwig's opinion of Nosferatu than Herzog's opinion of Barbie.

he's hilarious but you would have to be extremely, um, credulous to take his opinions literally

Herzog likes to clown. He wants to be entertaining more than he wants to be 'correct'. Give him an audience and he'll happily adapt his opinions to gratify this inclination. You're just asking him for something he doesn't care to give. Not a problem when you think about it.

Yeah, I don't get why anyone's getting bent out of shape over his comment. He makes hyperbolic comments like this all the time partly as a joke - it's never meant to be taken that literally.

I've got reservations about his work, but his documentaries are usually better than his narrative films - he's been less prolific of late, but the burst of activity he's had in the 21st century has been consistently excellent with nearly all of it is documentary work. Above all though, Aguirre is a towering masterpiece, and I think the consensus has been spot-on in crowning it as his greatest film. Fitzcarraldo is pretty good, but I actually prefer Les Blank's Burden of Dreams where you see how Herzog is the real megalomaniac.

FWIW, Errol Morris did a great Q&A for Gates of Heaven (screened at a Tom Buddy tribute last year), and they asked him why he wasn't at the shoe-eating that was memorably captured on film. Herzog famously claimed he would eat his shoe if Morris finished that film, and Morris said he never remembered Herzog ever making that promise, adding, "you know it's one of Werner's tales...or as I'd like to call them, LIES."

Luddy not Buddy - AUTOCORRECT, argh

Herzog's comment in context does not seem at all disparaging of the movie tbh

Herzog was on Conan's podcast recently describing how (roughly) "therapy can be extremely dangerous, transforming one's mind into a house that's unbearable to live in". Conan has a glowing BetterHelp ad read in almost every episode.

My mind is a condemned building already

Heh

Herzog has been greatly enjoying making fun of his role as Serious Documentary Maker - he's doing so in Orion and the Dark, the new animated movie written by Charlie Kaufman, and of course:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWxy9C5svFU

The world of Barbie was hellish. That is why Barbie chose to live in the real world instead, even though it is filled with suffering and injustice.

Just saw this, finally. Fun but too hetero.

Someone has to say, "Well, when he's in hell he'll think he's just in the Barbie movie," and I suppose it may as well be me.

Its funny bc I can totally imagine Herzog tossing off a cheeky joke about making a Barbie movie that matches the plot of the Barbie movie that we actually got. Like “Hollywood would NEVER allow me to make a Barbie movie because my version would be about Barbie slowly deteriorating and going insane as she realizes that she is only the plaything of a hopeless and death-obsessed mortal woman.”

the german word for house is already mojodojocasahaus

I'll see it two years from now and revive this thread so I can give all of you my fresh insights. ;-)

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, August 12, 2023 11:28 AM (seven months ago)

I'm well ahead of schedule here, but we watched this at home last night from a public library DVD on our smallish low-resolution television. I knew going in that we were too old to fit the intended audience, but this was a movie that grew into a phenomenon and that always interests me.

We laughed here and there, the production design was cartoony & clever & original, the music and dancing helped keep the pace bouncing along. Gerwig knew what it wanted to do and did it well, but as I said far upthread, when the object of your satire is vacuity your jokes are bound to cluster in a very limited range. As for the 'message', it was fine, though very basic and avoided any deep waters.

My overall opinion is that it was absolutely spot on for an audience of mothers with daughters in the range of about 12 to 16, and would be generally entertaining for more general audiences, with diminishing returns as the age of the viewer climbed above 40. These observations are not a criticism of how well conceived and executed it was. I can't imagine a Barbie movie could have been better done than this one and it clearly found a responsive chord in millions of people. So, we enjoyed it, but we just happened to be a bit too old to extract the maximum enjoyment. Not a problem, just a fact.

(also not a fact)

how do you come by this knowledge?

Well, I'm considerably older than 40, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I'm not saying you have to! But the bogus generalisations are... bogus

I think I came pretty close to maximum enjoyment. I wonder what's going to happen to me in the next 7-8 years to make that impossible to achieve.

xp otm

As long as we're here let's immortalize this too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhWqpvGq6b4

All-time, that lerfirm

Performance

John Grisham's Ler Firm

xps - Both of you are welcome to your opinions, but I think my saying "we enjoyed it, but we just happened to be a bit too old to extract the maximum enjoyment" is hardly the stuff of harsh criticism you seem to think.

We are 69 and 75 years old. That means we grew up in a somewhat different era of pop culture than someone who is at present 50 or 60. That fact won't change no matter how much more time passes. I made zero claims that this fact had any relevance other than it affected our frame of reference. My other generalization about diminishing returns above the age of 40 was based on the observation that the creators of the movie mainly wanted to speak to a life experience relevant to their imagined target audience and they chose their pop cultural frames of reference to match their audience. That PG-13 rating was not an accident. It's not like older people can't understand the frame, but its emotional meaning drifts further away as it becomes less an integral part of one's youth.

I don't think this anything I said was bogus. I was careful to use qualifiers and gradations to say what I consider some pretty innocuous things. But now I've said my say. Respond if you wish. It's not worth a prolonged argument.

It didn’t work for me either (I’m close to fifty, love Gerwig’s work) but I’m still trying to puzzle out why. My four year old’s quite into Barbie and I guess I slightly resented the impenetrable adultness of everything (for a very young person, not a teen or tween). I also struggled to stay interested once Perlman and Roth and Ferrera (so boring!) fell into the mix. I wasn’t sure how the “mothers stand still” line was meant to be interpreted but I’m not sure I like either possible interpretation. No bitterness - just curious why it didn’t work for me.

Stil

Aimless, we still love you. No need for that response!

Nor that response, Alfred.

It's okay if you don't respond to a movie in the expected ways. See: The Zone of Interest thread.

It's okay if you don't respond to a movie in the expected ways.

Why do I get this feeling of being patronized? Maybe it's because you are not responding to what I said, but rather to some vague need to soothe me, as if I were a child acting over emotionally, rather than simply providing my reasoning behind an opinion that was called "bogus", but with no specifics of what was bogus supplied.

What was implied by Andrew in his post was that I'd said something that contradicted his experience of enjoyment "the hell out of" the movie although he was over age 40. That reading of my post was incorrect and I wished to address that. So I did.

I'm using this ultra-formal tone for a simple reason. Since the presumption has now been forwarded that I was over-reacting and therefore implies was some lack of legitimacy, I'm scrubbing my prose. But I won't be gently chided for enlarging on an opinion that was questioned as "bogus". This is supposed to be a conversation, an exchange, not just zings dropped serially, and I will not be patronized for simply pursuing the conversation.

It's not worth a prolonged argument.

two hours pass...

zing!

now do you have anything of value to say?

Why do I get this feeling of being patronized? Maybe it's because you are not responding to what I said.

I've no idea. It's not my intention. Your first post was fine. Chuck's too.

now do you have anything of value to say?

It's not worth a prolonged argument.

I'm just dubious about age being a barrier to extracting maximum enjoyment from anything.

exactly, it's actually a pretty offensive thing to say and then triple down on

In fairness to Aimless, I do appreciate the clarification that he's talking about being too old _right now_, that it's the specific extra years he has on me that make the difference, not the years that I have to make up to get to him. I don't think he's right, but I'm now aware that he's not talking about me, which is always what causes the reflex.

My take on Barbie is that it was very funny

agreed (age 57 here)

My take on Barbie is that people who were children in 1961 (when Barbie was introduced) would like it well enough.

fwiw I think "I'm not the target audience for this" - which is more or less what I took Aimless's post to be saying - is a reasonable thing to say, which doesn't mean you can't enjoy things that aren't targeted at you ofc. at any rate preferable to assuming everything in the world was made for your specific sensibilities and getting angry when something doesn't fit into that.

or someone else doesnt like it

Finally watching this

Still haven't seen but I did pass someone in a Kenough t-shirt the other day.

This was fun as hell

it really is