Barbie faces an existential crisis -- really

 

     Imagine a world in which Barbie (yes, that Barbie) suddenly begins thinking about death. What if dark thoughts intrude on Barbie’s otherwise bright and shining life?

     But wait. You don't have to imagine such a scenario. Director Greta Gerwig has done it for you.

     Part satire, part pop-cultural celebration, and part cheering session for feminist assertion, Gerwig's Barbie tries to accomplish a neat trick -- at least as far as its audience is concerned. 

    The movie attempts to please the adoring legions of girls who grew up playing with Barbies while also taking a bite (a soft one to be sure) from a satirical apple.

      Whatever it's about, Barbie derives much of its comic kick from the pink-hued work of production designer Sarah Greenwood and costume designer Jacqueline Durran. They create Barbieland, an aggressively happy place that might be the best thing the movie has to offer.

      Two star turns help keep the movie spinning. Margot Robbie makes a smiling Barbie whose perfect life unravels when she begins having unwanted thoughts and (oh, the horror!) her beautifully arched feet turn flat.

      Working a high-beam smile and allowing an occasional lonely teardrop to roll down her face, Robbie slips into full Barbie mode. 

    Ryan Gosling plays Ken, the male doll who, at the outset, lives only to bask in the warmth of Barbie's gaze, a role that’s bound to breed discontent.

    Written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, the story eventually takes Barbie to the real world of Los Angeles where she tries to find the girl whose thoughts plunged her into existential crisis. There’s evidently an emotional link between the Barbies and the girls who play with them.

    Ken tags along with Barbie but eventually returns to Barbieland, where he tries to establish his stilted idea of patriarchal government, ousting Barbie president Isa Rae and engaging in parodic muscle flexing. He becomes the ultimate poseur. 

      Barbie remains in LA for a while, eventually meeting and fleeing from Mattel executives -- led by Will Ferrell -- who want to put her back into a box -- literally.

       Hey, if you’re looking for subtlety, you’re in the wrong place.

       When a fleeing Barbie finally returns to Barbieland, she's accompanied by humans. America Ferrera plays a former Barbie enthusiast, a Mattel employee who travels to Barbieland with her skeptical teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt). 

      Robie's Barbie describes herself as Stereotypical Barbie, which suggests she's not alone. Barbieland is home to all manner of Barbies, some representing various stages of the doll's evolution.

         Ken isn't alone either. A multitude of Kens inhabit Barbieland.

         Kate McKinnon plays Weird Barbie, an exile in Barbieland who fell out of favor when someone played too hard with her. 

         Gerwig works overtime to incorporate meaning into this pink bauble of a movie. Does Barbie inspire girls to be more than smiling dolls?  Is she a product of the male quest for dominance, an unattainable role model to which no girl can measure up? Can the human world coexist with heavily marketed merchandise? 

         In some ways, Barbie is nothing more than a dressed-up sketch that wants to have it both ways, treating Barbie as a pop-cultural heroine and as a satirical object in a story that argues that young women must create identities free of commercial and social influences. 

         Another way to pose the question: To be plastic or not to be plastic?

         Gerwig finds enough laughs to keep anyone from trying to plumb any depths or wonder whether the plot makes any sense at all. 

       Enough. You've probably read that Barbie ends with a one-liner that gives the film its sharpest kick. It does.

       

       

         

        

 

‘Babylon’: a lurid look at movies in the 1920s

  Director Damien Chazelle takes three hours and nine minutes to bring Babylon to its predictably ironic conclusion. As I watched the film, I wondered exactly what Chazelle had in mind with this indulgent, lurid look at the early days of the movie business.

   Chazelle takes a sensationalized bold-faced approach to his material. Not only are the characters and events Chazelle depicts notably lewd but the movie serves them up so breathlessly we're probably meant to take them as revelations about the way things really were.

   Chazelle immerses his story in the nothing-succeeds-like-excess school of filmmaking, which, at least for me, meant that watching Babylon was like being elbowed in the ribs by someone who winks as he says, "Can you believe this?"

     Babylon begins with a party that brims with over-the-top debauchery. Silent film stars and wannabes gather for a bacchanal at which anything goes. The movie's major characters are introduced as they step around throbbing piles of partygoers.

     How lascivious is Chazelle's portrayal of early Hollywood? At the opening party, an immense actor -- presumably suggestive of Fatty Arbuckle -- enjoys a golden shower. A drug overdose death? Yes, that, too.

     About those major characters: 

     Margot Robbie plays an aspiring star who crashes the party in hopes of meeting the folks that will launch the big-screen career she believes she's destined to have. 

    Brad Pitt portrays a matinee idol with a devil-may-care approach to work, a hard-drinking life and his many marriages. 

    Newcomer Diego Calva appears as a worker at the party who slides into movies, a sideways entrance. He quickly falls for Robbie's Nellie LaRoy, a love that persists throughout the film but adds little to the proceedings.

     Chazelle plunges into the wild atmosphere generated by an industry that was only beginning to find its cultural footing. The doors swung open for hollow ambition to mingle with genuine talent and the two sometimes became indistinguishable. 

     Fueled by energy, sexiness, and bravado, Robbie's performance proves a stand-out, although not always in a good way. She's working so hard, you wonder whether OSHA should have looked into it.

     Pitt can play this kind of role without much apparent effort. His Conrad is a star for whom everything comes easily. He's conquered the world of silent movies. 

     Jean Smart plays Elinor St. John, a powerful gossip columnist who chronicles the Hollywood scene. She's a star builder and a star destroyer.

     Li Jun Li evokes images of Anna May Wong as a mysterious cabaret singer.

     Perhaps because of his encompassing approach, Chazelle also makes room for racial issues. Jovan Adepo plays a Black trumpet player who finds a niche in the movies but eventually must confront his conscience about Hollywood's blatant racism.

    And, alas, poor Tobey Maguire. He turns up as a leering gangster who travels through a degraded underground, happily enjoying the sleaze. 

   It might be said that Babylon has it all: death, sex, tragedy, shiny dreams that curdle into dashed hopes, and a large cast that's been tossed into Chazelle's sometimes frenzied narrative.

    Of course, Babylon does have it all — but in quantities that amount to wanton overload. Elephant defecation and rattlesnake wrestling appear as if plucked from a crazy highlight reel, sideshows to the main event.

    Of course, all that rises must fall. The arrival of the talkies brings a need for nuanced vocal talent many of the movie's silent stars don't possess. When the wheel of time turns, the hands of the clock point to sad endings for many of these characters.

    In Babylon,  Chazelle (La La Land) seems to be striving for something big, bold, and culturally meaningful. He's not holding back. But what he gets is something less than epic, a movie that's weird, long and, finally, tiresome.

      For a movie with so much uninhibited energy, Babylon proves a drag.

     

    

'Suicide Squad' is better than you'd expect

     I'm late to The Suicide Squad party, which means that I already know the movie, after receiving generally good reviews, failed to overwhelm at the box office. The Hollywood Reporter wondered whether moviegoers stayed home because of the spread of the delta variant.

    But staying home didn't mean missing the movie because it's streaming on HBO Max, which is how I caught up with it.

    Director James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) has created what looks like a nihilistic free-for-all built around a group of outcasts recruited by the head (Viola Davis) of a black ops outfit called Task Force X.

    The selected team is supposed to destroy a creature called Starfish, an alien that might vanquish the entire Earth and which has fallen into the hands of an evil dictator (Peter Capaldi) of the small island nation of Corto Maltese (fictional) off the coast of South America. 

   In addition to Margo Robbie’s Harley Quinn, there's John Cena's Peacemaker, Daniela Melchior's Ratcatcher 2, Idris Elba's Bloodsport, and Sylvester Stallone's Nanaue/King Shark. Stallone provides the voice for a shorts-wearing shark-like creature with arms and legs.

   If the site of legions of rats doesn't appeal, you might want to think twice about joining The Suicide Squad. Ratcatcher 2 turns out to be a perverse Pied Piper who can muster up armies of rats.

    And while we're on the subject of strange creatures, consider David Dastmalchian's Polka-Dot Man, a human covered with polka dots which he can removed be removed and hurled at a foe. Did I mention that Polka-Dot only strikes when he sees his mother’s face in an opponent.  

   My advice: Don't give this too much thought.

   I wasn't counting but Idris seems to get the most attention as a sharpshooter who joins group leader Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) in an adventure that begins strong, can't always sustain excitement but recovers for a finale that's cleverly mounted and funny in the way of such movies.

    I supposed it's fair to say that Gunn has provided a worthy redo (sort of) of the much-scorned 2016 Suicide Squad which was directed by David Ayer.

    Robbie seems to enjoy indulging Harley's crazy ways and the rest of the cast is up to snuff as a group that, unlike other superheroes, doesn't seem to stand for anything as lofty as truth, justice, and the American way. 

     They just wanna be part of the abundant action set pieces that Gunn serves up with abandon.

      Now, having said all that, a cautionary note:

      The Suicide Squad may be the cinematic equivalent of someone who proudly claims to care about nothing — but you know it’s a pose.

      Still, the movie's saving grace lies in its willingness to embrace the ridiculous and, in the process,  poke fun at the kind of movie it easily could have been; i.e., one that took itself more more seriously.

      One look at the starfish monster -- Starro by name -- tells you Gunn has made goofiness a virtue.