Barbie (2023)

Well if there's ever a good reason not to bring your kids to this film...

I brought my 8 year old daughter. I thought she'd enjoy it, and the adult jokes would go over her head, like Shrek and other films that cater to both age groups.

A. This was too serious for her. She understood the plot and everything, but couldn't understand why the audience was laughing at certain bits. Or there was an intake of breath at certain bits.

B. She ate too much popcorn, felt sick, and we had to leave 10 minutes before the end. So this is one I am definitely going to go see by myself.

What I did see, I very much enjoyed. I wasn't a big fan of the original Barbieland - I realise that was meant to be a mirror image of the real world gender wise, but there seemed to be no ark where Barbie realises that the ideal is both genders being given equal opportunity to thrive. But perhaps this is resolved in the 10 minutes I missed at the end.

By the way, 12A means that under 12's can go and see it as long as its with an adult.

Sadly, that's exactly where the film fails so spectacularly: it portrays the ideal Barbieland as a "feminarchy" (not a matriarchy: Midge the only mother in Barbieland is presented as a freak due to the short-lived shelf life of the doll in real life).

Unless there's a post-credit scene I missed where it was realised that Allen and the Kens should have an equal role in the governing of Barbieland rather than the idea that one of them could be a token figure in a District Court, no, I didn't have to leave the cinema early.

Look, I don't want to get drawn into another argument about why modern feminism is a scourge on society. My opinion on that has been posted frequently on other forums here where it's a more on-topic subject.

Let's just leave it at the fact it wasn't a film I'd have chosen to go off my own bat anyway but the marketing (which portrayed it as a more straight-up comedy than a feminist polemic) appealed to my 14 year old daughter (as I'm sure it was intended to). Had I known in advance that it was female-supremacist nonsense, I wouldn't have taken her.

Leaving the cinema after the film the other night, ma and my friend both said that there will be many men putting it down.

Ah, yes, because I disagree with the film's message I clearly don't have the "basic comprehension skills" to understand it.

Clearly being a man I needed a feminist to explain it to me. 🙄

Anna Boden would like a word - Captain Marvel made over $1.1bn

That is correct but not what the poster claimed.

I really enjoyed it, and I only really went to see if because of the social media hype and I love Margot and Ryan. A great laugh from start to finish. I was a little disappointed at the end because after a period of male dominance, I was hoping the barbies would learn a lesson and be nicer to the kens, let them have more autonomy etc. Maybe that'll be in Barbie 2, a commercial success like this will always get a sequel or a Ken/Allen spin off.

The horse thing had me stumped :-) like why are horses masculine, but I guess that's more of an Americanism, cowboy culture and all that, where as here horses just mean wealth or poverty in certain settings. I get the big car thing but also on this side of the Atlantic the laughably too large for purpose vehicles are the preserve of moms on missions. Interesting how the ideas of gender stereotypes vary between countries, even within western culture and actually I'd say we probably have fewer of them this side of the Atlantic.

I found out through social media that the guy who plays Asian Ken is an awful human being, shocked they cast him even and you can see from the Ryan Gosling's body language on the red carpet he's really not keen on the guy at all. Glad I know now.

I'm more than a little disturbed by somethings I'm seeing on social media, grown men being so offended that Ken was so hard done by that they're burning and shooting barbie dolls on tik tok. There's some deeply disturbed people out there, if they become violent because of a doll movie, and get a billion likes for it, I'm worried about the trajectory of the world. Some of these people even have a following of 'incels'. Truly bizzar and I hope that carry on doesn't reach these shores.

I think she enjoyed it more as a day out to the cinema and a chance to eat rubbish tbh. She got a laugh out of a lot of it (as did I, I'm not being disingenuous when I said there were some funny lines, it's well-written, I just disagree with it's politics) but it was very much an "in one ear, out the other" experience for her. She's more into rock biopics at the moment (Elvis, Rocket Man and Bohemian Rhapsody have all been watched a dozen times each at this stage).