Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
Barbie movie, it just didn’t have any interesting message or pov that isn’t already repeated on a weekly basis in the NYT articles
Edit lol don’t read my comment if you’re too sensitive and easily butt hurt, but it answers the question in the title 🤷♀️
I think the interesting thing about the Barbie movie was its “IP” holder basically acknowledging that a lot of the current generation thinks its product is toxic.
There’s no such thing as bad PR.
I’m giving you an upvote for the unpopular opinion I disagree with - which is what this comment section should be all about.
People are unable to use up and downvotes in any other way than to express their immediate emotion, unfortunately.
I’ll disagree having come in as a complete outsider to the demographic for that movie who only watched it because of the love it had. I was pretty damn impressed with the movie as an overall. The story, yea, you’re not wrong, it’s not absolutely worldbreaking of a message. But it’s one of those movies the work put in to it impressed me, in a time where CGI allows for cookie cutter movies to be made rapidly with green screens knowing the work behind it was fucking impressive to me. Also knowing how much they worked on the history of the IP, and getting the company to try to make a movie that called out its own product as problematic while celebrating it in an era where everyone is too timid and wants to make every movie palatable for everyone, or “family friendly” was ballsy as fuck and I’ll respect it.
But hey, I’m a cinema nerd who loves the weird lol, I respect your thoughts and you’re right, the baseline message didn’t say anything new to me.
I have a different exposure to feminist movies, so I guess I use that as a barometer. I think older movies with the same themes as Barbie were already highly successful in providing a nuanced commentary on gender power and equality in society, and the role of women, sometimes chosen and otherwise. So that’s Legally Blonde, Persepolis, Wild (w/ Reese Witherspoon), Mystic Pizza, Bridget Jones Diary, and Waitress and some others I am definitely forgetting.
Okay, I have a soft spot for Legally Blonde thanks to a civics teacher who said it did a better job in talking law than many procedural law movies. Now I wanna go watch it again, thanks for reminding me it’s out there!
I think frankly the thing that Barbie did that’s worldbreaking in the territory of these movies was not in the movie itself which is fascinating to me. I don’t have cable so dunno advertising there, but Oppenheimer coming out at the same time, no ads, just a few movie previews, the biggest ads were all the interviews with the cast. Barbie… could not get away from it, the ads were everywhere. So my thoughts were “okay, Mattel is definitely backing this.” Then I started hearing people talk about it and it was honestly surprising that Mattel was backing as well as it did, but okay, then when watching the movie that was the part that ended up shocking me.
I’m so used to executive meddling in movies, studios being cautious and companies being overprotective of their IPs that has ruined so many movies, that here was Mattel allowing themselves to be portrayed as definitely the bad guys, still their logo plastered all over VERY up front. I realize they got good advertising with the movie but I’m trying to remember another movie that the parent company backed while being made fun of this strong and the only one I can think of is Deadpool 3 and honestly that was easy because trying to tone it back would have lost fans, this had all the opportunity to not go over well.
Yeah social media is great at sneak advertising, that’s not an accomplishment for the Barbie movie though. If someone enjoyed it, that’s all that matters. Is it the best movie of its kind? Not by a long shot, but that’s neither here nor there.
It was an advertisement that people paid lots of money to watch. I don’t think you can expect more from it than that.
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Yeah that was trash TV at its finest.
Most people are incapable of admitting they like comfort food, but they shouldn’t get to pretend that that’s exactly what it is, doing so just degrades the quality of the arts.