KWIF: Barbie (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts. 

This Week:
Barbie (2023, d. Greta Gerwig - In Theatre)
They Cloned Tyrone (2023, d. Juel Taylor - Netflix)
Demons (1985, d. Lamberto Bava - Blu-ray)
Demons 2 (1986, d Lamberto Bava - Blu-ray)

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It's more than mildly amusing that one of the most hotly anticipated movies among both cinephiles and little girls under the age of 10 was a movie about Barbie, of all things.  It's not really a surprise that Barbie is a box office success, but it is a triumph for many other reasons.

The fervour around Barbie prior to its debut is a testament to just how big an impact Greta Gerwig's arrival in the director's chair -- first with Lady Bird and then with Little Women -- has had on the industry.  Critics, who by and large are a tremendously cynical bunch when it comes to big budget, IP-driven films, have been exceptionally excited for the film's arrival.  As much of the hype of Barbie comes from film nerds and professionals as it does from the Warner/Mattel marketing machine, if not moreso. 

That Barbie, in one week, grossed over a half-billion dollars and has for Warner Bros. filled up the deficit gulf created by The Flash marks a monolitic shift in perception of Gerwig as a director and writer.  Partnered with her significant other, noted indie darling Noah Baumbach, Gerwig has delivered pretty much the exact payoff that the cinephiles were hoping for: a wildly entertaining, socially intelligent, visually spectacular, culturally explosive and, above all, thoughtful film whose success may finally crack the shell of cinematic universe making that has had a stranglehold over the film industry for over a decade and push it into new territory.  Maybe.  We'll see. (Hollywood has long learned the wrong lesson about successful films, so we'll wait to see if IPs wind up the hands of creators who have a strong vision for the material, or if the studios just start making more toys-come-to-life films and wonder why they all bomb).

Barbie is not perfect, not as a film and especially not as a feminine ideal.  There are a host of criticisms that can be laid upon the high-heel crippled feet of Barbie and her manufacturers for decades worth of subliminally traumatizing and dispiriting the little girls who played with her, all in the name of commerce, and Gerwig does poke at some of them, but it's also aware of the potential Barbie, in her role as the earliest of influencers to wee lassies, can do to inspire.  It's still a film in service of an IP that needs to generate a profit for its corporate owners, so there is a limit to how damning the film can be, but what it does manage to say, it says boldly, and clearly.

The film starts (with narration from Helen Mirren) in the pinkest realm of them all, Barbieland, where 50% of the population is named "Barbie", 40% is named "Ken", and the rest are one-offs (Pregnant Midge was discontinued).  Barbies hold all the most esteemed jobs (president, astronauts, supreme court justices, doctors) as well as the important ones (construction workers, trash collectors).  Kens may have a minor function, but for the most part are there to be (hopefully) noticed by Barbie.  They want nothing more than Barbie's attention.

Our main Barbie is "Stereotypical Barbie" (Margot Robbie), who exists to have the best day ever every day. She has the best dream house, the best wardrobe, the best cars, the best life. But when Stereotypical Barbie begins to have feelings of self-consciousness and fear of death, the sheen of her plastic world begins to mar. Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), the one who got played with too hard, advises her that she needs to head out into the real world and find her child, and help cheer them up.  So to the real world it is, then, (it's a filmic conceit, don't think too hard about it) with stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling) stowing away.

Barbie is immediately affronted by the real world of Los Angeles. She's immediately assailed by the leers of salacious men, whose every ogling carry an undertone of violence.  It's a hazy, busy world, that is thoroughly upsetting to Barbie, but Ken cottons on immediately that it's a man's world and that he finally feels liberated. Scratch that. Ken, upon picking up the nature of the world, feels entitled. The world belongs to good looking, talentless men like him.

As Barbie seeks out on her journey to try and improve someone else's life, Ken starts fixating on improving his own. He ascribes immediately to the concept of the patriarchy and heads back alone to Barbie land to bestow his newfound "knowledge" upon the other Kens.

It all, obviously culminates in a battle of the sexes, but it's not a film that sets out to demonize men. It's a film that is explicitly damning of the patriarchy and exemplifies quite effectively its harm on both women and men. 

It carries pretty potent messages for the world little girls are entering into and the one grown women have to contend with. It's not deep feminist theory, but it's a powerful starting point for the uninitiated, wrapped in the form of a comedic summer blockbuster.

It's a film that, very cautiously, does not deign to think it can change the world, but at the same time, it doesn't deny that change is possible, even if it is slow in coming. 

The film is a vibrant spectacle, with a killer bespoke soundtrack that is part of its own meta ambience. It owes a debt to Toy Story and The Lego Movie but finds its own path with "toys come to life" with its own absurd brilliance. 

Barbie should be a landshift in terms of where cinema goes next, in terms of studios and IP owners understanding the power that women - as both creators and consumers - can have when the product that is made for them is made by them as well. What's more, Barbie isn't a film made for little girls alone, or for women, it's a film that anyone but the most toxic of personalities could enjoy.  

It's not critic-proof (I've read many good critical assessments about the film's feminism-lite approach, its bifurcated scripting, its inability to fully escape commercial interests, or how the humour didn't resonate) but the wonderful thing about what Gerwig has created with this film is the expected backlash from the chest-thumping Alpha-Chads will only serve to prove the film's point and further its message about the toxicity of the patriarchy and the harm it does to everyone. 

I loved it.

The Flash Scale: dug a hole and buried it, pronounced it dead and proceeds in forgetting it ever existed.

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With a rhyming title that evokes a sense of both whimsy and alarm, They Cloned Tyrone is the debut film from director Juel Taylor (co-writer of Creed II and Space Jam: A New Legacy) that is boldly confident in its style and message, while also providing space for its three leads (John Boyega, Teyonah Parris, and Jamie Foxx) to deliver amazing performances that remind you what movie stars are.  It's a science-fiction satire that finds small time boss Fontaine (Boyega) getting gunned down by his local nemesis, only to wake up fresh and fit the next day, none the wiser.  Except pimp Slick Charles (Foxx) knows he was deader than dead, and with sex worker/Nancy Drew enthusiast Yo-yo accompanying them they begin to suss out something funky is going on in The Glen.

The most immediate effect of the movie is the grainy texture it adopts as part of its style. It hearkens back to blacksploitation and grindhouse movies of the 70's but also direct-to-video genre productions of the 80's. It's partly a nostalgia throw-back, but it also establishes a layer of dirtiness overtop of the proceedings, that is at once a lack of crispness or cleanliness, but also acts as sort of a membrane between the real world and what's on screen.  

It's a little less blacksploitation, a lot less grindhouse, and much more into 80's lower-budget scifi, and that is totally my sweet spot. It delivers a very fun romp that settles somewhere between Attack the Block (another great Boyega-starrer) and Black Dynamite, in that it's not being meta about its genre send-ups but its still sending up genre in its own way. It's taking styles of filmmaking from the past and remolding it into something both familiar and new.  This is what I wish Demon 79 from the latest season Black Mirror was more like.

 It's thoroughly engaging, really fun, very satisfying, and, like Barbie, has it's own delightfully bespoke, somewhat meta soundtrack.  For all its entertainment, though, it still has something important to say about the spaces carved out for Black and underprivileged people in America's major centers. "Projects" and "ghettos", home territories that are intentionally kept down, allowed to fester and rot by a government and taxpaying public conditioned not to care. It's the film's conceit that suddenly make these areas spaces for big sci-fi experiments, but the metaphor of how these areas are frequently subject to experiments (in planning, funding, education, zoning, or by other means) by parties both wishing to help and hold them back in equal measure.

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In the early turn-of-the-millennium, I happened upon Dario Argento. I cannot immediately recall what got me there, whether it was Phenomena or Suspiria or Deep Red but whatever it was, my affection for his work was immediate. I had many of his 70's and 80's films on DVD (I want to say they were Anchor Bay releases) but I had to cease with the acquisitions to get my finances in order.  As well, I loaned out the collection to the friend of my then fiancee, who a short while later was no longer my fiancee, and I never got the collection back.  It was (and remains) the biggest (and only) regret of that break-up.

Smash cut to 18 years later and I've just started getting my Argento collection back. It's going to be a slow process, as I endeavour to build a collection of physical media for films and directors that I've been ignoring during the heyday of streaming.  

In my impetuousness (and lack of research) I placed the Demons duology high on my acquire list, not realizing that Demons, nor Demons 2 were Argento films...or at least ones in which he was in the director's chair.  He produced them and definitely had a hand in writing them, but the style is all wrong.  In his place is Lamberto Bava, son of the great Mario Bava (another director whose repertoire I'm slowly collecting).

 Lamberto clearly learned from both his father and Argento, but doesn't show the same artistic aptitude as these two great Italian genre directors. Demons and Demons 2 aren't artless, but they don't have anything approximating Bava senior's bold colour palette, and he doesn't share Argento's flair for challenging camera movement.  He can strike a bold visual scene in these films, just not consistently.

Seeing as I didn't even know who the director was, it wouldn't surprise you to learn I also had no idea what these films were. I know Demons had a reputation for being pretty gory, but that's about the extent of it.  There's not really a plot to these films... demons possess people, and the more the scratch and maim and kill, the more demons are created. I learned from the special features on this Synapse Films release, that Demons started out as a piece of an anthology, and it would make much more sense as a 40-60 minute production than as a 90-minute feature.

There are not really main characters to either of these films of any concern or note. Cheryl, the character we first meet in Demons has zero development or defining characteristics, and after meeting George at the movies, he becomes the de-facto heroic figure, not her.  Even then, it doesn't really care about him beyond his bravado and machismo.  The first film takes place almost entirely in the movie theatre, and insinuates there's some ties between the possessions and media but never actually explores this idea.  There's no mythology presented really in either film, and the characters, in between shrieking or relaying verbally the events happening on screen, don't really seem to want to explore the whys or hows of it all.  It runs off zombie logic (becoming a "demon" seems to be an infection, and the demons don't seem terribly sentient).

Demons feels like The Evil Dead without personality. It has a lot of gross-out gags (there's an immense amount of goopy goo splattering and oozing all over the place) and some above average creature effects (the growing nails and teeth are particularly fun), and as vapid a piece as it is, it's still pretty fun.

Demons 2 borrows liberally from the apartment complex terror of Cronenberg's Shivers and full on cops the acid blood and chestbursting of Alien, but it's all to lesser effect than those films and to its predecessor. Demons 2 hits the reset button from the nihilistic ending of the first film, and then starts all over again as the demons emerge from the TV this time, rather than the cinema (and it doesn't make a lick of sense).  Again, if there's a metaphor, the film is decidedly not interested in exploring it. It's out for cheap shocks, and that's about it. Demons 2 has the added prestige of being in a post-Gremlins world, and creates and ludicrous and ugly sequence where a really silly looking puppet monster attacks a woman that seems like a knock-off-of-a-knock-off in the puppet-horror genre.  It's "hero" character is a square jawed charisma-less lunk who the film seems as disinterested in spending time with as the audience. His wife is pregnant and, had they learned anything from Cronenberg, there was some real body horror to get into with demon possession there, but, again, they take the least interesting path with it.  Even the goopy-goo is toned down, so the silly violence is that much more toothless.

They're both kind of bad movies, but in differing ways. Demons has a bad-meaning-good verve to it that Demons 2 is lacking. There's a particular heavy metal attitude in the first that seems watered down into synth pop popcorn fun for the sequel.  Neither film is particularly scary and the gross-out funnel is really on effective for so long in the first.

The Flash Scale - equal to or less than.