I got coerced by several members of my family into seeing the Barbie movie. This is not my kind of movie. I prefer documentary movies that are at least based on a true story. You know the kind with Nazis, machine guns and naked women. It was unlikely that a movie based on an 11 ½ inch doll with no genitals is going to meet any of those critical criteria. However, my youngest son, who is a lifer in the Navy, highly recommended it. This is a man who has served two tours in the middle east and one in Afghanistan. He’s been on submarines, destroyers, and minesweepers. He was shot at in a spy plane over Taliban occupied territory. He has treated victims of IED blasts. He said the movie made him laugh and cry at the same time. I had to go to honor his service. Okey, he also highly recommended Cocaine Bear, but that is another story.
Reluctantly I agreed to go as long as it was a weekday matinee, and we sat in the back after sneaking in after the lights went dim. The sunglasses and hoodie might have been overkill, but there is no way I was giving up my man card if I was recognized.
For those of you who have not seen the movie, you might want to skip the next part.
SPOILER ALERT!!
The movie is about a parallel world to the real world which is populated by multiple Barbies and Kens with a few other single dolls thrown in for token name diversity. This Barbie Land is a matriarchy ruled by President Barbie, a nine -member Supreme Court of Barbies. Numerous other Barbies are doctors, astronauts, postal carriers, and construction workers. The Kens on the other hand seem to just hang out on the beach working on their tans and having confrontational “beach offs”???
Barbie starts having dark thoughts of death, and her feet out of her stilettos go from tippy toe to flat which in the real world this is the normal way feet are supposed to work. These flat feet results great gnashing of teeth by all the other Barbies which results in a visit to the weird ass Barbie, where we find out that Barbies in Barbie Land are connected to their owners in the real world. The only way for Barbie to get back to “normal” is to visit her owner in the real world and fix the problem. At weird ass Barbie’s abode, we also meet a group of discontinued Barbies. These included Tanner, a dog that you can feed treats to and watch him poop. Even came with a magnetized pooper scooper. The dog was discontinued as the magnet tended to fall out and became a choaking hazard. But my real concern is how did they reload the poop? Did they have to shove it up the dog’s ass? Or worse yet, were they also the treats???? So disgusting and that also violates a law of physics. As Einstein so eloquently stated “If you are what you eat, and you eat what you exude, you would be ecologically perfect but thermodynamically screwed”. There was also pregnant Midge who had a removable baby. There is no proof that Matel offered a coat hanger accessory. More important is how did she get pregnant with no genitalia? Logically Barbie dolls had to have had wieners and tacos, but you never see these naughty bits when you undressed the dolls, ergo, they were very cleverly disguised or possibly the dolls were subjected to gender affirming care. There was also a video Barbie with a camera in necklace that could be used to record 30 min videos which then could be displayed on a computer monitor. Matel thought it might encourage girls to explore the artistry of Tic Toc, before there was even such a thing. The FBI thought it could be used to film child pornography. There was also a Sugar Daddy Ken and a Growing Up Skipper who if you rotated one of her arms, she grew an inch taller and developed hooters. She Growing Up Skipper was not in the movie as she may have had a restraining order on Sugar Daddy Ken.
After visiting weird ass Barbie, Barbie visits the real world with Ken. They both discover that the real world is vastly different from Barbie Land as men are the presidents, judges, Nobel prize winners, construction workers etc. This comes as a shock to Barbie but energizes Ken who quickly went back to Barbie Land.
Barbie and her owner eventually return to Babie Land as well to find that it was now a Ken Kingdom where men rule and brainwashed Barbies are removed from the positions of power and influence, being reduced to opening beer bottles for all the Kens. In other words, utopia. But that bitch Barbie and her owner manage to unbrainwash the other Barbies restoring the former order. They literally “woke” them up.
That it. Stupid plot that is not based on a true story. No guns, no Nazis, and no naked women, and even if they were naked, they wouldn’t have genitals or even nipples. This is a movie that made my war hero son cry?? I did laugh occasionally and even cried a bit. But that was because Judy elbowed me in the solar plexus for being “an ass”. I have no clue as to what I did, but over the years, I have learned not to question her statements.
All in all, it’s not a bad movie If you are into dolls and are not allergic to pink, you probably will like it. I would rank it as better than Cocaine Bear, but slightly below Snakes on Plane. Unsurprizingly, righty tighties hated the movie starting with the opening scene. In a cleaver ohmage to 2001 A Space Odyssey darling little girls wearing prim and proper little girl dresses were living out in the open, sleeping on rocks with nothing but their baby dolls. They seemed happy with this simplistic existence till a giant monolithic Barbie appeared. They soon were smashing their dolls with gusto to an inspiring sound tract. MAGA clan members claim that the entire movie demeans men, marriage, and is a feminist plot to instill these ideas into impressionable young girls. It is also demeaned by these Trumplodytes as pro red China due to a crudely drawn real world map that weird ass Barbie has on the wall in her Barbie Land abode. This is the map.
These people need antipsychotics and strong ones.
As far as the feminist plot. Have you ever had a Barbie addicted girl in your house? Barbie dolls are about clothing and shoes and endlessly dressing and undressing. I specifically remember a Commodore 64 Barbie game that my 5-year-old was enthralled with. The premise of the game was that Ken would call Barbie to set up a date to go to the movies or the beach or the prom. Barbie would then drop everything in her poorly pixilated life to go to the beauty parlor and dress shop to get ready for her date. After getting all dolled up she would arrive home to a call from Ken saying shit like “plans have changed we are now going to the NRA convention”. This meant that Barbie had to go through the whole shopping process again, then again, and again as that bastard boyfriend kept changing plans. If she did not make it home in time there was note on her door saying, “sorry I missed you” or worse yet she had to go to prom in a bikini! When this happened, my sweet, darling little girl would cry. That, my friend, is not feminism. Okey, I made up the NRA convention crap, but all the rest is the God’s truth.
To the consternation of the “woke and go broke” crowd, the Barbie movie has made of a billion. Barbie did not fall in love with Ken, get married and have babies with him. This is not due to feminism but due to the obvious fact that Ken was and still is habitually unfaithful to her. You see, Ken always comes in a different box.