Three hundred years, and I’m the first Viking who wouldn’t kill a dragon. First to ride one, though.

THIRTEEN YEARS OF HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (MARCH 26 2010)

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Remember… when Karla hits the mark, Karla hits the mark.

i hope they do actually come out with an ordinary barbie. girls can be anything they want to be, and if that’s ordinary, that’s okay too :)

Barbieland, Victory, and the Freedom That Comes With Women's Intuition

“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. . . always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. . . It’s too hard! It’s too…

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Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s BARBIE (2023, Max) is an anomaly. It’s a film created to help market a toy, but it also has a solid basis in feminism and performance theory. Gerwig’s approach flirts with subversion, and if it never quite goes all the way, it’s an enjoyable ride with some lovely buoyant moments. It opens with a funny send-up of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) featuring little girls in a desert landscape destroying their baby dolls after the appearance of a giant Barbie in their midst. We then move to Barbieland, where the Barbies and Kens live along with some discontinued models like Midge, Allen and Magic Earring Ken. Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) starts worrying about death and develops cellulite, which suggests a negative influence from someone playing with her in the real world. So she travels there with her boyfriend, Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling, who’s very funny). There each starts a journey of discovery.

Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach throw in a lot of good, silly stuff and envision the collision of toy and real world very thoroughly. As a director, Gerwig works well with a large ensemble cast including Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Simu Liu, Ncuti Gatwa, Michael Cera, Will Ferrell and a surprisingly beatific Rhea Pearlman. But there are also places where it feels like we have to pay for the silliness. When Barbie and Ken return to Barbieland, the action drags a bit, and there’s a scene in which the two discuss identity that borders on the preachy. There’s also a chase scene with some evil executives that could be better staged. It feels almost perfunctory and lacks the balletic wonder of Chaplin, Keaton or Preston Sturges. And after setting the film up as a musical, Gerwig and Baumbach make us wait an awfully long time between numbers. But things perk up a lot when America Ferrera, who’s quite wonderful, delivers “the monologue,” which, for all its political points she wisely plays spontaneously. It���s less a lecture than her own moment of discovery. And the staging and performance of “I’m Just Ken” and the montage under “What Was I Made For” are spot on.

I don’t know whether it was somebody’s comment on the invisibility of women or a rebellion against the film’s feminist message, but whoever did the closed captions for Max refers to Ferrara throughout not by her character’s name, Gloria, but as “Sasha’s mother.”

How About It, Men?

Every man who denigrates the Barbie movie should be required to watch this powerful soliloquy as many times as necessary to get it through their thick, manscaped heads that we (men, that is) need to be supportive of women’s equality (and, I might add, bodily autonomy). Women DO hold up (more than) half the sky. Why TF wouldn’t we want them by our side, not behind us? With us, as equals. Let’s…

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anyways barbie oscars sweep

Barbie Review- An Existential Excercise In Human Values

For years, movie companies have been trying to come up with ideas for new and different films. So it makes sense they would try and mine the toy market. Transformers, GI Joe, and many others have been made into big-budget films. It’s an obvious decision to turn one of the biggest girls’ toys in history into a movie. That’s why Barbie was made, but it isn’t what little girls and their moms think…

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i heard there’s a barbie sequel in the works and i literally just want it to cut between a huge barbie sleepover and barbie gloria and sasha’s sleepover. not a single man in the movie.

America Ferrera | Kate Spade New York gown | CFDA Fashion Awards | 2016

two days out from seeing barbie and i'm still so baffled by that reference to the indigenous smallpox epidemic

this is like the first time in forever I've had like an inkling of an opinion about even a quarter of the Oscar noms, it's almost like I watched movies or something