Barbie

Year of release: 2023.     Directed by Greta Gerwig.             Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, and Helen Mirren.

If you saw the first teaser for Barbie, you may have thought the 2001: A Space Odyssey tribute was a one-off gag filmed just to promote the movie. You would have been wrong. Not to spoil the best surprises of the film, but the prologue telling the history of the world from the perspective of the Barbies is both hilarious and an ingenious homage to Kubrick’s masterpiece.

The homage is also thoroughly appropriate given the film’s epilogue where stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) enters a new chapter of her life not at all dissimilar from man’s rebirth as the space child at the end of 2001. To drive the new life idea home, the final line is a funny zinger about the ability to do just that.

What if I also said there’s a “beach off” among the Kens that plays extremely similarly to the pie fight that initially ended Dr. Strangelove? Or a proud proclamation of the same dolls’ identities reminiscent of the most famous line from Spartacus? And what if in fighting the villain of patriarchy, two women communicate mentally, and one of their daughters refers to it as “shining?”

I am convinced there must be more Kubrick references in Barbie, and I’d happily see it again just to catch more of them, but the film delivers on so many other levels as well.

Gerwig and Baumbach’s story does almost nothing that I expected, and while the trailers hinted at similarities with The LEGO Movie, it is very much something different. When stereotypical Barbie discovers her perfect pink world with arched feet and hot, waterless showers falling apart with thoughts of *gasp* death, weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) informs her she has to travel to the real world and find the child playing with her who has clearly become troubled by something, thus repairing the rift between their two worlds. Stereotypical Barbie just has to choose the Birkenstock over the pink heel, which to be fair, is a choice that not many Barbies would want to make.

If stereotypical Barbie is apprehensive about going to the real world, she is reassured when the other Barbies remind her that the invention of Barbie empowered young girls, letting them know they could be anything they want and not just mothers, and now as a result women hold all positions of power in the real world. And women everywhere will probably want to run up to her and hug her for initiating feminism and fixing all women’s problems.

“At least,” Helen Mirren’s narrator tells us, “That’s what the Barbies believe.” Helen Mirren also delivers my favorite joke in the film, turning an expected breakdown from Robbie’s Barbie into something hilarious, but I’m not spoiling that here.

The slap of cold water that is the real world shocks and appalls stereotypical Barbie while making Ken (Ryan Gosling) feel empowered and respected. A crash course on patriarchy thrills Ken, which he eagerly takes back to Barbieland to inform the other Kens on how they’re supposed to be subjugating the Barbies, riding horses, drinking beer, and watching The Godfather.

As an inverse of the real world’s patriarchal structure, Barbieland is a world where the Kens cannot be president, cannot have Supreme Court appointments, cannot hold high paying jobs, and exist purely for the edification of the Barbies. Since the Ken dolls were created by Mattel to be a companion for Barbie, it’s a very clever twist that demonstrates the toxicity of patriarchy that has plagued the real world for centuries. It reminds me of Aamer Rahman’s comedy bit about reverse racism only being possible with a time machine that would enable Africa to colonize Europe and inflict the abuses on white people that they inflicted on Black people for centuries.

I suppose it needs to be said given the absurd hatred Barbie is generating from right-wing incels for its wokeness, but a film that says we should build a society where women and men are treated equally with equal opportunities is hardly what I’d call woke. Although in a post-MAGA world, general human decency often is woke, so I suppose the label is not wrong, but the film’s basic feminist message is a beautiful thing that would have widely been accepted had not the alt-right gained so much traction in recent years. Nonetheless, the film’s box office success and glowing reviews are reason for hope.

Like Gerwig’s two previous films, Barbie is another example of Graham Greene’s maxim that movies should depict the world as it is and as it should be. While the subject matter here may seem far removed from Lady Bird and Little Women, there is a common thread of hope and decency that celebrates the beauty of love for what is true, noble, and good in the midst of an imperfect world.

Between Barbieland and the real world, there is so much good, and to the extent that the film has any villain at all, it is patriarchy. Patriarchy claims victims of the Kens, the Barbies, America Ferrera’s mother and secretary for Mattel, and Will Ferrell’s CEO of Mattel, who is not a villain copied from The LEGO Movie as the trailers suggested, but a well-meaning executive who wants to help girls and women while not realizing the ways he’s accepted patriarchal norms.

Ferrera’s third act speech that sets up the climax of the movie may be on-the-nose, but it exhibits the same passion a five-year-old girl has for her make-believe land with Barbies, and as a mom reconnecting with that same childhood passion, I thought the speech worked brilliantly.

Several reviews have commented on how Gosling steals the movie, but honestly, Robbie is just as good and gives him an equally clueless character to play off of. The two of them make for a great duo for a road trip movie that takes hundreds of unexpected turns.

Returning to Kubrick, Gerwig and Baumbach wrote a movie about human progress and relationships where our own inventions (patriarchy instead of HAL) plague us and hinder that progress until we can overcome them. It makes the 2001 framing story all the more fitting, and it shows how we can appreciate that journey through an obelisk and light show or a polarizing doll.

Personal recommendation: A-

Yes, God, Yes

Year of Release: 2020      Directed by Karen Maine.  Staring Natalia Dyer, Francesca Reale, Parker Wierling, Timothy Simons, and Donna Lynne Champlin.

When the theology of a gay bar is sounder than the theology of a Catholic youth retreat, it’s one example of the deficiency of the Church’s ministry in recent years. In the case of Yes, God, Yes, a new coming of age comedy from writer/director Karen Maine, such a scene forms not only a pivotal moment in teenage Alice’s (Natalia Dyer) journey but also a welcome reprieve from the holier-than-thou competition from her fellow high schoolers.

After a sexist rumor starts circulating about Alice, she’s essentially knocked out of any holiness competition before one even starts. Making matters worse, she has no idea what the term her classmates are tossing around about her means. Worse still, the two school authority figures, Mrs. Veda (Donna Lynne Champlin) and Fr. Murphy, (Timothy Simons) seemingly accept the rumors at face value.

It goes without saying that the rumors are false, but as an insecure teenagers wrestling with sexual feelings for the first time in her life, Alice doesn’t know who to turn to for advice. Once again, to make matters worse, the sex-ed class taught by Fr. Murphy at her Catholic high school has a severely overly simplistic explanation of arousal that’s insulting to both sexes, but the obviously misogynistic qualities make Alice understandably reluctant to seek advice there.

What follows are Alice’s hilariously misguided attempts to learn about the type of sex act she was falsely accused of committing and her worry that she’s irreversibly hell-bound for having hormones. Most of this happens over a weekend retreat that her best friend (Francesca Reale) convinces her to go on so they can score holiness points.

If this sounds like a cruel over-exaggeration of Catholicism and youth group mentality, it isn’t. From the sexist bullying moments before a photo is taken in which everyone smiles and says, “Jesus Christ!” to the assumption that any sexual misconduct, if true, is all Alice’s fault and not the male classmate with whom she did (not do) it, it all conveys the dangers of a purity culture that treats women as commodities whose only worth is their sexual innocence.

The critique of Catholicism is unquestionably harsh, and while the sex-ed class grossly oversimplifies Church teaching on sexuality for the purpose of critiquing purity culture, the other details are spot on. The off-key singing of “City of God” is painful and hilarious. The use of a retreat to be in close proximity to one’s crush is too accurate. And most importantly, the worrying about eternal damnation from a legalistic and overly literal understanding of mortal sin, which despairs of God’s mercy, comes across perfectly.

When I was younger, I spent quite a bit of time at Catholic youth groups, and the details of Karen Maine’s script, loosely based on some of her own experiences, make it feel so familiar. For instance, there is a moment of sharing personal stories about feeling God’s presence during a difficult time. Alice makes something up, because she can’t think of something applicable to share. As an introvert, I hated those moments not only having to talk about something potentially highly personal, but also for the way so many of the stories reduced prayer to a magic spell that when said fervently enough caused God to wave his magic wand and fix all of one’s problems. When I tried to talk about Two Days, One Night being a reminder of God’s presence through the way everything turns out and how most of the characters are doing their best, it was not well received.

I share that anecdote to explain why Yes, God, Yes resonated so deeply with me. Ultimately, this is a film about saying yes to God and saying no to the ways that religion is perverted. Does it get every detail right? No, and I would have liked to have seen Alice take a little more responsibility for some of her actions. However, it makes it perfectly understandable why she would feel unsafe doing so given the sexist authority figures. The film also provides an authentic example of teenage insecurities and struggling toward the right path. And whatever path Alice chooses, God will be walking it with her.

 

Personal recommendation: A

Frozen II

Year of Release: 2019      Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee.  Voices of Idina Menzel, Kristen Bell, Jonathan Groff, Josh Gad, Sterling K. Brown, Martha Plimpton, and Evan Rachel Wood.

The relationship with a sister is something to be cherished. That was the driving force behind Frozen, and it continues to be so for this originally unplanned sequel. The relationship between Anna and Elsa (Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel reprising their roles) receives more attention here, as the bond between them is once again tested in a journey into an enchanted forest, as fears of change, isolation, and issues of trust threaten to ruin their relationship once again.

If you’re saying, “didn’t they resolve those issues at the end of the first film,” yes, they did. However, since when has anyone just stopped a destructive habit after doing it for a lifetime? The unconditional love between the two sisters remains, and how they navigate threats with that as their foundation is where the sequel places its focus.

I loved Frozen when it came out. I saw it back to back days in the theater. At the time, I admitted that the secret villain twist was obviously an afterthought that didn’t work at all, but I thought everything else was fantastic, except for a couple clunker songs such as “Fixer Upper” and “Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People.” It was frustrating when Disney put all their promotions toward “Let It Go” as the best song, when it clearly was (and is) “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”—a song about one sister begging the other for a relationship, which is the heart of the film. I can’t even hear the first notes of it without tearing up.

Some of the weaknesses have become more noticeable over time. I still enjoy Frozen immensely, although not quite as much as I originally did.

I love and appreciate this sequel more than I ever cared for the first one. The score is more uniformly excellent with fewer standout numbers, but a higher caliber of songs overall. None of them are as good as “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” But almost all are on par with “For the First Time in Forever” and “Let It Go.” I really appreciated the way the songs set up one another and connect to the main themes of isolation and trust in the midst of life’s changes.

“All is Found” is a lullaby that sets the mood for the film that follows, promising a story of mystery and fantasy that also has a sense of tenderness in the midst of fear. “Some Things Never Change” functions similarly to “For the First Time in Forever,” but it introduces several subplots and grounds the characters in what’s most important to get them through the subsequent journey in which things will obviously change.

Elsa’s big “I want” song this time is “Into the Unknown,” which seems to be where Disney is (correctly) placing its Oscar hopes. For my money, it’s a stronger song than “Let It Go,” not only musically, but also for being the instigation of the plot and for having a satisfying dramatic answer in “Show Yourself,” which occurs in the second act of the film. Idina Menzel once again belts the demanding range with authority, transitioning from the insecurity of the verse to the confidence of the chorus.

“When I Am Older” continues the carefree shuffle from “In Summer” into another Olaf solo about learning to make sense of the world, while searching for Samantha, even if you don’t know anyone named Samantha. Josh Gad is every bit as funny as he was in the first film, and his new song here is at least as good. Olaf’s philosophical crisis is not only great comic relief, but ties into the plot nicely as well.

Kristoff (Jonathan Groff, returning) gets a longer solo than “Reindeers Are Better Than People” with “Lost in the Woods,” which is the power ballad ending the first act of the film instead of “Let It Go.” This is a brilliant idea on several levels. For most of the film the characters are literally lost in the woods and struggling to prevent themselves from becoming lost emotionally from one another. Taking the focus briefly away from the sisters appropriately heightens the conflict at the narrative center of the movie.

Anna has her own solo this time as well. Strongly emphasizing the heart of both this film and its predecessor is the relationship of the two sisters, it follows both of Elsa’s solos, indicating she cannot complete her journey without the aid of her sister. “The Next Right Thing” is also a powerful testament to finding your way out of depression and helplessness even when it doesn’t seem possible. Kristen Bell certainly does not have the voice Menzel does, but the intimacy and tenderness of her performance is a haunting complement to the virtuosity of Elsa’s songs.

As I said, “Into the Unknown” is the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. After Elsa hears a voice reminding her of her mother, she accidentally wakes up the four spirits of enchanted forest (earth, wind, fire, and water), endangering the lives of the people of Arendelle. She, Anna, Kristoff, Sven, and Olaf set off to the forest to find out what has upset the spirits and appease them before it’s too late. The main plot points are fairly obvious well in advance, but that plot is primarily a backdrop for the relationship between Anna and Elsa, which takes forefront here more powerfully than the first film.

Similar to Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the sins of the proper, civilized court are exposed and atoned for in the wild fantasy of the woods. Anyone who has seen any recent family films will probably be able to guess who committed the unatoned for sin, but once again, that’s not the main focus of this movie. The bond between sisters and friends forms the film’s center, and when people we trust betray us, monsters chase us, or any unknown confronts us, it’s those bonds that hopefully remain constant, and they form the roots from which we grow.

In the midst of his philosophical musings, Olaf asks if the enchanted forest will transform them. He then wonders what a transformation is. There’s a small one just after that when Elsa confronts the fire spirit with calmness and acceptance, making what was first seen as a monster into a cute harmless lizard. It’s a small act of kindness, which in turn foreshadows greater acts of compassion and love that allow the fears of the unknown to be a source of transformation and not destruction.

 

Personal recommendation: A-

Cats

Year of Release: 2019      Directed by Tom Hooper.  Starring Jennifer Hudson, Judi Dench, Francesca Hayward, Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, Ian McKellen, Jason Derulo, James Corden, and Rebel Wilson.

To answer the most important question regarding Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Cats: does Jennifer Hudson have the vocal chops to pull off “Memory,” yes, she most emphatically does. Is it enough to save a train wreck of a movie that, with few exceptions, is a series of mind-bogglingly bad decisions? For that matter is “Memory” enough to save the show itself which is likewise a series of (less) bad decisions?

Before I brand myself as a hater of Cats the stage show, which is a more or less enjoyable two-plus-hour dance recital if you can accept it for that, let me sincerely say that it has several decent songs and the choreography is fun to watch. The songs I particularly enjoy from the show are “Memory,” “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat,” and “Macavity the Mystery Cat.” The song (yes, singular) that I enjoyed in this presentation was “Memory,” in spite of Hooper’s attempts to sabotage it.

Hudson lands the one big showstopper that’s far more difficult to sing well than most people give it credit for. Hooper then follows it with a reaction shot of two humans imitating cats that elicited deserved howls of laughter in my theater. If following the one earned moment of pathos in the movie with that wasn’t bad enough, Victoria (Francesca Hayward) then sings the desperate Oscar attempt for best original song, cowritten by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Taylor Swift: “Beautiful Ghosts.” It’s the equivalent of a figure skater nailing the triple axel and then twice falling flat on her face while trying to turn around at the end of the rink.

I understand that the truncated act I version of “Memory” is followed with the full version of “Beautiful Ghosts,” so following the full version of “Memory” with a shorter reprise of “Beautiful Ghosts” could make structural sense. This ignores several important points. First, “Beautiful Ghosts” is lyrically a watered-down version of “Memory.” No musical needs to a new song to repeat the emotions of the song immediately preceding it. Second, “Beautiful Ghosts” stands out structurally and musically like a sore thumb from the rest of the score. Finally, it’s an okay song at best, so placing it next to the most famous song in the show is a particularly bad idea.

Speaking of bad ideas, possibly the worst one plaguing this movie is the decision that the paper-thin plot tacked onto the original needed more explanation. As a result, ridiculous and redundant expository dialogue has been introduced to the originally completely sung musical, explaining at the end of the Jellicle Ball, one cat, chosen by Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench), gets to go to the Heavyside Layer to be reborn. A seven-year old could have told you that from watching the stage show without it being explained to them, but apparently Hooper and screenwriter Lee Hall think the average movie goer in 2019 is less intelligent than the average seven-year-old. It doesn’t make the plot more sensical—that’s not possible—it just makes the stupidity of it more apparent.

Even more mind-numbingly, all of this is being explained to Victoria, the youngest and newest cat attending her first Jellicle ball. In the stage show, the performing cats break the fourth wall, addressing the non-feline audience to explain the “Naming of Cats” and who the various cats are. It makes no sense at all that this needs to be explained to a cat, an animal with one of the best instincts. Inconsistently, the movie also doesn’t entirely abandon the fourth-wall breaking. For the final number, “The Addressing of Cats,” Old Deuteronomy looks right at the camera, presumably forgetting about the audience-surrogate Victoria standing right next to her. Or maybe it’s because Victoria has now become a Jellice cat, which is the one unexplained aspect of the stage show that the movie insists on keeping a mystery.

I’ve been negative long enough. Francesca Hayward is a very good dancer and singer, and from the little bit she has to act, presumably a good actress too, knowing how to emote with her body and eyes. Ian McKellen’s 110% commitment to mimicking a cat is more enjoyable than almost anything else in the movie, and of course there’s Hudson. Taylor Swift is also in the movie, and she performs “Macavity the Mystery Cat” with surprising skill, even if her breathy singing style doesn’t quite have the aggressive edge the song needs.

As a groupie of Macavity (Idris Elba, playing a smaller version of Shere Khan), it’s weird that Swift’s Bombalurina is the only female feline to have a noticeably not-flat chest, which the camera creepily draws attention to. If I wanted to think about this movie more than I do, I might say it’s an example of slut-shaming by making the most sinister female cat the only sexual one, as contrasted with Jason Derulo’s flirtatious Rum Tum Tugger. But I really don’t want to think about it that much. I especially don’t want to think about Rebel Wilson in a CGI fat cat suit spreading her legs and scratching the inside of her upper thighs, but bad ideas plague this movie in truly incredible ways. However, writing those sentences back to back just made me realize that when this movie focuses on cat bodies, or human ones thanks to CGI cat fur, the focus is almost always female and always unflattering.

I haven’t even talked about Hooper’s bad camera choices here. He apparently learned the lesson from his dumb single-take song idea for Les Misérables, but he’s overcorrected, cutting so frequently that, for the most part, we barely get to see the dances. Steven McRae’s tap dancing as Skimbleshanks is one of the few nice exceptions, even though Andrew Lloyd Webber decided the song need to be updated, cutting the bridge and re-orchestrating it, as he does to the detriment of several songs, such as “The Old Gumby Cat” and “The Addressing of Cats,” although the latter may have been because Judi Dench doesn’t have the voice to sing its enormous range.

I also need to mention the human faces on the mice and cockroaches that Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson) keeps in line and occasionally swallows whole. Since the entire set was designed for human-sized cats, shouldn’t mice and cockroaches be proportionately larger than they are in real life, and not the same size? It’s a strange disconnect, much like the shots of human cats crawling on all fours and then randomly deciding to walk on two legs that plague most of “Jellicle Songs for Jellice Cats,” but clearly not something that mattered to anyone making Cats or anyone who will enjoy it, which can probably be said about most of this movie.

 

Personal recommendation: D+

Knives Out

Year of Release: 2019      Directed by Rian Johnson.  Starring Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, LaKeith Stanfield, and Christopher Plummer.

Between Looper and The Last Jedi, as talented as Rian Johnson clearly is, it was beginning to seem that he would overthink his film plots, writing himself into a corner with no completely satisfying resolution to all the threads and themes he was tying together. Therefore, when I saw the trailers for Knives Out, a comedic whodunnit, I was intrigued, knowing it would be a riveting mystery with plenty of twists, but I was also concerned it would suffer from the same drawbacks that I thought hurt his previous two films.

I don’t know if it was juggling the large cast of characters, having one central twist that everything leads to, or just a case of the third time being the charm, but Knives Out has no such shortcomings and is one of the most clever and enjoyable films of this year.

Johnson knows the expected beats of a murder mystery, and he respects his audience enough to assume they know those beats too. Predictable guesses are quickly subverted, and Johnson is a master of using our expectations as a means of misdirection. Recaps and standard expository material are briskly presented to focus on the driving forces of the movie—the eccentric characters portrayed with juicy flare by the all-star cast and the not particularly subtle but fittingly biting social commentary.

At the head of the cast is Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, a cross between Columbo, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and even a touch of Clouseau. He references Conan Doyle’s detective stories and humorously strikes one piano key as if he knows when someone is lying to him. The eccentric accent is some sort of cross between French and Southern American, and it’s a fitting cultural blend in a movie that wants to exalt the meek and humble immigrants while casting down the mighty white nationalists.

The meek and humble immigrant is Marta, played by Ana de Armas, who serves Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) as a nurse and friend after coming to America from Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, or whichever South/Central American country pops into the mind of one of Harlan’s family members at the current moment. Most of the family wanted her to attend Harlan’s funeral, but they were all outvoted.

Marta is equally honest as she is meek, and Blanc refers to her inability to lie as a “regurgitatory reflex to un-truthing.” Therefore, when Harlan is found with his throat slit by apparent suicide, Blanc enlists her as his Watson to learn the truth about each family members’ secrets, especially since Blanc received a large sum of cash from an anonymous source to investigate foul play in regards to Harlan’s death.

Most of the family obviously has a motive for wanting Harlan dead, and Johnson spins those motives into a farce of the family politics common at most large family gatherings. It’s especially fitting and comic given then film’s Thanksgiving release. At the same time, Johnson continues his twisting of the tropes one would find in an Agatha Christie mystery with developments that connect the politics and the intrigue as apparent altruism quickly turns into more selfish motives.

In addition to the three main characters, each cast member is given enough material that they make a memorable impression in their supporting roles—all nine members of the family, the maid, the family lawyer, and the two police officers assisting Benoit Blanc. As Harlan’s two surviving children Linda and Walt, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Shannon both display the entitlement of spoiled rich adults. Their children Ransom (Chris Evans) and Jacob (Jaeden Martell) have taken that to further extremes. Linda’s husband Richard (Don Johnson) fits right into the family’s arrogance and materialism. The scene where and he and Joni (Toni Collette), the widow of Harlan’s deceased son, spar is probably all too familiar to most Americans. Joni and her daughter Meg (Katherine Langford) are the liberal black sheep of the family, at least as long as it’s convenient to be so.

I’ve avoided saying as much as possible about the plot, and it is definitely best to avoid reviews which discuss any of it in detail. The best surprises are not only the mystery reveals and the insignificant details that aren’t, but the ways in which Johnson makes sure every character gets what they deserve.

Knives Out is a film that understands the value of entertainment, and Rian Johnson delivers that in spades on multiple levels, from the thrill of the mystery to the social justice themes. The final scene masterfully ties everything together not only narratively but visually as well, closing a highly worthwhile murder mystery.

 

Personal recommendation: A