One of many hilarious moments in the new Barbie movie shows the iconic plastic doll and her doll boyfriend, Ken, turning into real humans as they cross over from “Barbie Land” and into the “Real World.”
There, they are confronted by male construction workers and their sexist taunts. But the confident doll-woman puts the hard hats in their place.
“I do not have a vagina,” Barbie announces. “And he does not have a penis.”
Inside the MJR digital theater at Partridge Creek in suburban Detroit last week, part of the audience behind me reacted with sudden cackles and extended giggles.
I had noticed them entering the afternoon matinee, a group of girls, ages probably from 8 through 14, many of them dressed at least in part in pink, as were some of their chaperones, who may have been their mothers, their grandmothers, or their aunts.
Perhaps some of the laughing kids weren’t even aware of all the functions of the genitalia mentioned by Barbie, played by Margo Robbie. That didn’t matter. Even at the potty-joke level, some humor crosses multiple demographics.
And the comedy in Barbie works on several levels for many audience subsets.
Because of that, viewing of this controversial PG-13 film should be limited only to people who are men, women, boys, girls, gay, straight, liberals, conservatives, white, Black, brown, red, and yellow, and also to those who really like the color pink.
Along with Oppenheimer — an over-hyped film that is interesting but not as good — Barbie marks the Summer of 2023 as a “Barbenheimer” moment coinciding with a confluence of cultural undercurrents.
For one thing, these two movies arrived during the first summer since 2019 in which it feels reasonably safe from the COVID-19 pandemic for people of all ages to return to indoor movie theaters among unmasked strangers. This helps build buzz.
Secondly, these movies came during a summer of show-business labor unrest, with two Hollywood unions (actors and writers) striking simultaneously for the first time in 60 years. At the London premier of Oppenheimer, its actors walked out in support of the strikers.
Third, both Barbie and Oppenheimer challenge their audiences to think seriously and critically about important issues like toxic masculinity and weapons that might destroy life on Earth. Barbie is a serious comedy, a satire. Oppenheimer is just deadly serious.
Hey, whatever happened to the traditional summer popcorn movies? Where is Batman when you need him?
The humor in Barbie is wry, sly, sometimes over-the-top, gender-bending and hit-or-miss. If you don’t like one gag, stick around, another is on the way.
Bits of Barbie are animated like a kids’ cartoon. Some scenes suggest The Truman Show, The Wizard of Oz, and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. It opens with a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a Stanley Kubrick film from 1968.
Some of the in-jokes, double-entendres, and glib references fly by so fast it will take several viewings to comprehend them all. That alone could make Barbie a cult classic.
Furthermore, right-wing politicians and preachers are condemning Barbie for its ironic support of feminism and its LGBTQ+ attitude toward sexual stereotypes. In that these folks can’t take a joke, you know there is something good here.
While Barbie’s politics appear on its screen and soundtrack, the politics surrounding Oppenheimer surfaced in public at the premier when its actors walked out in support of the strikes. Christopher Nolan, director of Oppenheimer, said on NBC’s Today show, “It was a bittersweet moment.”
Like the United Auto Workers and other unions, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America hope to catch up to the economic disruptions from the pandemic, when people sat at home and paid for streaming entertainment on big, clear, screens.
Among the issues are higher pay, better residual payments, and limits on the use of artificial intelligence to create films.
“The business models have been rewritten by the companies we work for,” Nolan said. “And it’s time to rewrite the deals.”
His Oppenheimer is an important historical biography with many memorable moments about J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist who helped create the atomic bomb in 1945 in World War II. He is portrayed, well, by Cillian Murphy.
However, at three hours, Oppenheimer as a whole falls short of the sum of its pleasing parts. Perhaps the best scene is of the first bomb test, “Trinity.”
There is a countdown. There is a big, red button. Gradually, sight and sound gimmicks build the tension and enhance the dramatic impact. From the theater chair next to me, I heard a woman stifle a sob.
But after this climax comes another hour of story about how poorly Oppenheimer was treated by politicians not convinced of his loyalty. After the pinnacle moment of the Big Bang, it’s an awfully long epilogue.
His demise is presented more effectively in the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, upon which this film is based. It fleshes out Oppenheimer’s youth and family background to try to explain his peculiar intelligence.
Some of Oppenheimer is filmed in black-and-white, adding another layer of gray to the picture’s mood. Among a stellar cast, Matt Damon steals a couple scenes as a gruff general ostensibly supervising Oppenheimer.
But their witty banter sometimes descends into snappy patter, as if Ben Hecht polished the script.
Other characters issue ominous proclamations like, “Genius is no guarantee of wisdom”; and “A prophet can’t be wrong. Not once”; and “Nobody knows what you believe. Do you?”; and “Only history will judge us”; and “Is there a chance that when we push that button, we destroy the world?”
The screen frequently shows Oppenheimer smoking, his lit cigarette burning like a fuse on a bomb — or on his career. Or, perhaps, he’s just blowing smoke. In addition, we see a jumbled timeline of flashback sequences that worked much better long ago in Citizen Kane.
There is also an IMAX version of Oppenheimer, which might further overdo the already overdone special effects. Unintentionally funny are three scenes in which the physicist Albert Einstein suddenly appears as if he is Shoeless Joe strolling out from the cornfields.
As for the Senior Citizen experience of returning to a crowded movie theater in the “Barbenheimer” summer of ’23, I saw both films on weekdays in a building with 14 screens. Large, leather reclining chairs offered lots of legroom.
At the theater bar (new to me) in the early afternoon, I could have purchased a “Long Island Ice Tea Premium” for $16.25 or a Bloody Mary for only $12.25. Instead, I paid just $6.25 for a large Diet Pepsi at the popcorn stand.
I put it in the generous cup holder on my comfy chair and elevated the electronic leg rest. (I’d used such things before the pandemic.) But I also accidentally touched the switch that turned on the three-level seat heater (who knew?) in the middle of summer.
It took a minute to turn it off. No jokes here, please, about a critic on the hot seat or any tasteless wisecracks about how one movie is “da bomb” while the other is “a bomb.” Or about how some Boomers just don’t know which button to push.
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