Greta Gerwig
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But because the marketing campaign has been so clever and so ubiquitous, you may discover that you’ve already seen a fair amount of the movie’s inspired moments, such as the “2001: A Space Odyssey” homage and Ken’s self-pitying ‘80s power ballad.
The film opens with a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey .
It opens, of course , with an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
That 2001: A Space Odyssey reference from the first teaser trailer is no less amusing in the film itself, when it introduces the viewer to a monolithic version of the toy, before thrusting us into the technicolor world of Barbieland.
With Helen Mirren providing the narration (including a fourth-wall-breaking aside midway through the film that kills), “Barbie” begins with a prologue proving there’s still some original humor to be mined from paying homage to “2001: A Space Odyssey” as we see little girls reacting with great, um, enthusiasm to the arrival of Barbie, who pretty much breaks the mold when it comes to dolls.
Barbie begins with a brilliant scene (also the film’s first teaser) that illustrates the arrival of the Barbie doll as akin to Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking science fiction epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey .
Barbie deliriously draws inspiration from a wide range of cinematic sources, with references to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , Groundhog Day , The Matrix , Toy Story , and, most hilariously, The Godfather .
It’s here, too, that Gerwig and Baumbach have scripted some of the funniest, most incisive, laugh-out-loud jokes in film this year, referencing everything from Matchbox Twenty to The Godfather to The Snyder Cut .
Along the way, Gerwig and Baumbach find both humor and nuance in everything from mini-fridges to the Matchbox Twenty hit “Push,” the male urge to explain “The Godfather” to the Supreme Court, the limits of modern feminism to neon-bright Rollerblades.
Now favoring a faux fur coat that makes him look like a surfer pimp, he moves into Barbie's Dreamhouse and reduces the whole Barbie line to subservient, man-obliging nitwits who don’t mind pretending to enjoy a mansplained screening of The Godfather.
Sin lugar a dudas el último acto de la epopeya es el mejor porque ahí la directora afloja un poco con el sarcasmo permanente y hoy caduco de posicionamiento de marca a lo La Gran Aventura Lego ( The Lego Movie , 2014), de Phil Lord y Christopher Miller, y Super Mario Bros.: La Película ( The Super Mario Bros. Movie , 2023), opus de Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Pierre Leduc y Fabien Polack, e impone un enfrentamiento bastante simpático entre hembras y machos que implica una semi revolución de Ken y los suyos -distintas caras pero todos llamados Ken- contra el contingente de Barbies en cuestión -asimismo con rostros diferentes pero respondiendo al mismo nombre- como si se tratase de una versión remozada y fantástica de la screwball comedy o comedia alocada de lucha de sexos de los años 30 y 40, aunque en esta oportunidad filtrándolo todo desde la efervescencia del cine picaresco de los 60, 70 y 80. Gerwig se esfuerza demasiado por presentarnos una especie de blockbuster intelectual o simplemente a…
But the film it reminded me most of was Pretty in Pink , which first-time director Greta Gerwig—the actress best known for Frances Ha and 20th Century Women—is clearly paying homage to (there’s even a scene where Lady Bird wears a pink prom dress).
Lady Bird’s pink hair, repurposed prom dresses and self-proclaimed identity as living on the “wrong side of the tracks” may scream homage to “Pretty in Pink,” but this is a resoundingly modern, assuredly female-voiced comedy that portends more great things to come from Gerwig behind the camera.
Little wonder there are subtle echoes of “Pretty in Pink” throughout, from not one but two pink-hued frocks and a pair of unsuitable suitors to a dad who is down on his luck (playwright Tracy Letts) and a batch of pop oldies on the soundtrack (Alanis Morissette and Dave Matthews Band loom large).
Lady Bird and her mother stop bickering for a moment in the thrift store when they suddenly unite in the ecstasy of finding the perfect prom dress (inspired, Gerwig told me, by “Pretty in Pink”).
Both performances are remarkable, brittle and diffident in wholly original ways that distinguish Gerwg’s film from The Edge of Seventeen , Pretty in Pink , and other canonical coming-of-age works that attempt to honestly reckon with issues of privilege.
Mixing the introspective resilience of Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (which Gerwig co-wrote) with the whimsical emotional dramatics of a 1980s John Hughes comedic melodrama like Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful , the movie never hits a false note, each beat of the story building one upon the next to produce a melodious coming of age symphony that’s absolutely sensational.
Feldstein, who is 26, is carving out a niche for herself as a one-woman tribute act to adolescence; she was BFF to Saoirse Ronan’s title character in Greta Gerwig’s brilliantly directed teen dramedy Lady Bird (2017), and here she plays the wily yet ebullient guide to Dever’s less demonstrative character.
For anyone who might have been living under a rock after Lady Bird, Feldstein is a dynamic performer who is here to stay.
Best friends Molly and Amy, played respectively by Beanie Feldstein (Lady Bird) and Kaitlyn Dever (TV's Justified) are straight-A students who've worked hard to get into the top colleges of their choice, but the good girls want to go bad and take a walk on the wild side.
After four FOMO-resistant years, domineering Molly (Beanie Feldstein, whose breakout role as Saoirse Ronan’s bestie in Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” marked her for greatness) and reserved Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) realize at the eleventh hour that they had avoided wild times in high school for no good reason: If the kids they wrote off as drug-addled idiots and slacker sluts also got into top-tier colleges, what in the hell was the point of cloistering themselves in the library for four years?
Both have had smaller parts in other high-school comedies (Feldstein in Lady Bird and Dever in The Spectacular Now ).
Anchored by gut-bustingly hilarious performances from Kaitlyn Dever (Justified) and Beanie Feldstein (Lady Bird), Booksmart tells of an insane two days in the lives of soon-to-be high school graduates.
There is a drolly self-aware tone here that recalls Rushmore , and as with that Wes Anderson film, Lady Bird is so poised and fresh that it seems to herald a stellar career for its author.
The film that I would compare this to most, in terms of what it tells us about the filmmaker, is Rushmore .
There are echoes to Frances Ha (think of this as a kind of prequel), or even Anderson’s Rushmore , yet Lady Bird is very much its own thing, feeling both comfortable and entirely original at once.
Just to get things out of the way early, “Lady Bird” is a nearly perfect film—perhaps of the funniest and most endearing coming-of-age film to come along since “Rushmore.”
But, like Wes Anderson's Rushmore, Lady Bird juxtaposes its young protagonist's precious posturing with the rough-edged truths behind the curtain.
Those films were quite good, but neither quite nailed the tragi-comic tone of The Graduate , or even Rushmore .
It may share an early-aughts Catholic school setting with Lady Bird , but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
Maine depicts online-fueled sexual awakening at the turn of the 21st century, and the virtuous homogeneity of youth group culture, in a way that combines the earnestness and specificity of Lady Bird with the absurdity and liberation of But I’m a Cheerleader .
Audiences can already experience this with Bruce McCulloch’s Superstar (1999), find the ironic version in Brian Dannelly’s Saved! (2004), and explore the class issues in Greta Gerwig’s heartwarming Lady Bird (2017).
Unlike one of its filmic peers, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Catholicism and the mostly hypocritical Catholics in the movie are the butt of nearly every joke.
Lena Dunham with Girls, Laurie Nunn with Sex Education and Greta Gerwig with Lady Bird (not to mention Phoebe Waller-Bridge) have all established that young women can be complex, sexual and not completely kindly creatures.
Perhaps enhancing some of the film’s personal frames with more visceral camerawork could have rendered an even more meaningful experience, similar to what Greta Gerwig accomplished with her debut film Lady Bird (though in the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly minute complaint).
Toy Story (1995)
Directed by John Lasseter
influenced Barbie (2023), Little Women (2019)
Themes Plot
A sixth film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel might seem even less necessary than a fourth Toy Story.
Barbie deliriously draws inspiration from a wide range of cinematic sources, with references to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , Groundhog Day , The Matrix , Toy Story , and, most hilariously, The Godfather .
Written by Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach, “Barbie” boasts a joyously wry self-awareness akin to the “Lego Movies,” taps into childhood innocence a la “Toy Story,” plus goes deep weaving in actual Barbie history.
Pulling from such inspirations as “The Truman Show” and “Toy Story,” Gerwig — who co-wrote the script with Noah Baumbach — plunges her heroine into an existential crisis brought on by a dimly perceived real world that is encroaching on her plastic, reassuringly monotonous idyll.
After Mattel, they find the culprit: America Ferrara, playing a frustrated feminist whose young daughter is giving away her toys a la “Toy Story.”
This is a clever take on growing up as seen through the point of view of the doll itself, like Toy Story and The Lego Movie.
Barbie deliriously draws inspiration from a wide range of cinematic sources, with references to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , Groundhog Day , The Matrix , Toy Story , and, most hilariously, The Godfather .
The movie’s jokes and visual cues often borrow from cinematic classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Matrix; these are usually jokes, but the latter makes for an apt comparison, given its own meta-textual sequel a few years ago.
Such examples include Jumanji and Heat , The Matrix and 10 Things I Hate About You and The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia! It’s really only the latter example (complete with also featuring a Christopher Nolan movie) that comes vaguely close to capturing the sort of genre/color palette dichotomy that Barbie and Oppenheimer do.
Frances Ha (2013)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019), Barbie (2023)
Themes
In film after film, she’s let us see the social striving — posh, put-on accents, affected to-the-manner-born posing, feigned enthusiasm and self-promotion in every character (“Frances Ha,” “Mistress America”).
She co-authored her own star vehicle, “Frances Ha,” in 2012 with her longtime boyfriend and director Noah Baumbach, and the dialogue in “Lady Bird” is consistently and honestly funny and cliché-free.
In Frances Ha (2012), the first of two movies to date that Gerwig has co-written with her romantic partner, Noah Baumbach, who directed, she plays a twenty-seven-year-old struggling to, among other things, make it as a dancer in New York.
Gerwig, making her solo directing debut (she previously collaborated on the 2008 mumblecore movie Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg), injects Lady Bird with the kind of vivacious energy that suffused the films she co-wrote with the director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha and Mistress America).
Undeniably reminiscent of Gerwig’s turn as a twentysomething wander in “Frances Ha,” the new movie may as well be its prequel.
Greta Gerwig, the one-time mumblecore starlet who wrote and directed the movie, has already established herself as a poet laureate of anxious youth, having co-authored and starred in Noah Baumbach’s bittersweet, screwball study of arrested development, Frances Ha .
Through nods to a kaleidoscopic list of cinematic references (their screenplay is The Red Shoes -meets- The Truman Show , through a Barbie-fied lens) and Robbie’s truly versatile performance, Barbie ’s biting cultural commentary works in both small doses and big swings.
Pulling from such inspirations as “The Truman Show” and “Toy Story,” Gerwig — who co-wrote the script with Noah Baumbach — plunges her heroine into an existential crisis brought on by a dimly perceived real world that is encroaching on her plastic, reassuringly monotonous idyll.
Interestingly, The Truman Show plays a role in inspiring the film’s lighting when audiences are watching Barbie Land.
From there, we’re plunged into Barbieland, a self-contained, Day-Glo-colored world that is so cheerfully artificial it makes the town in “The Truman Show” seem downright gritty.
This bleeding of stark reality into an obsessively engineered fantasy calls to mind the revelations of “The Truman Show” and “The LEGO Movie,” but through a wry prism that’s specifically Gerwig’s.
Fans of Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You and Thora Birch in Ghost World and American Beauty will be right at home with Christine, very much in the stable of wise-beyond-their-years, gobby teen malcontents.
…by Walter Chaw Greta Gerwig's hyphenate debut bears the influence of erstwhile collaborator Noah Baumbach's urbane micro-comedies--Hal Hartley's, too, along with some DNA borrowed from Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse for spice.
She’s an insightful quipmaster à la teen heroines like Juno, Laney Boggs, the women of Ghost World , and others—even with variation, it’s a familiar archetype.
With its smart, snarky, anti-suburbs heroine—and a strong female friendship at its center— Lady Bird will remind some people of the great Ghost World .
Under Gerwig’s perceptive direction, Ronan spins on a dime from Ghost World sarcasm to open heart revelation as she maps Lady Bird’s fumbling from self-absorption to the first intimations of adulthood.
The opening sequence is one for the ages, a deliberately paced mother-daughter fight that involves both women tearing up to “The Grapes of Wrath” on tape followed by a sudden, violent punchline that conveys the essence of the movie in a matter of minutes: smart, edgy, and unpredictable just when you think you’ve figured it out.
In the opening scene, the two of them listen to The Grapes of Wrath on tape in the car, weeping openly.
(At one point we watch them tooling along in the family car listening to an audiobook of The Grapes of Wrath—talk about California illusions.)
After sharing tears over an audio version of "The Grapes of Wrath," Marion says "let's just sit with what we've heard," with Lady Bird coming back with "Are you serious?"
One moment, mother and daughter are tight, weeping in the car over an audio book of The Grapes of Wrath (!); the next, Marion has turned on Lady Bird, pouring all her anxiety and self-doubt into her daughter’s head to the point where the girl throws herself out of the moving car.
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Little Women (2019)
Themes Visuals
Overall, the visual and tonal sobriety find the depth in the book, and give or take a few years, the film brings Alcott’s world close to that of Edith Wharton’s novels, placing it in the same social universe as The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence .
(Gerwig steals this device and much else from Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence , because good filmmakers know where to steal from.)
Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Age of Innocence (1993) perhaps come close, but neither attempts to, as writer-director Greta Gerwig does here, alter the structure of their sources as revisionary, in a way that draws out the modern contexts and political radicalism of Louisa May Alcott’s tales of growing up in Civil War-era Massachusetts.
With a screenplay as much of a misfire as we have here, no one could make it work, despite all the frantic attempts to enliven the action with elaborate musical numbers (including one that recalls classic-Hollywood-musical ballets à la Singin’ in the Rain ).
But there’s only one Greta Gerwig and if any director could convince a major studio to fork over a truckload of cash and disguise a movie based on the world’s most instantly recognizable doll as a thoughtful (and rollicking) meditation on gender norms, what it means to be a human, and fragile masculinity while also doubling as an homage to “An American in Paris” and “Singin’ in the Rain” (complete with dream ballets!) it would be her.
If one threw Playtime , The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , Singin’ in the Rain , Sabrina , Young Frankenstein , and Josie and the Pussycats into a blender and poured the contents into a glass, it’s likely that the pink-colored concoction would look a lot like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie .
Gerwig upgrades the teen realism of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles .
Instead, those moments in Sixteen Candles , or Weird Science , we'll say, where he seemed to capture something so elementally correct about the human teen condition -- its churning chaos, and everyone's desperate bid to try and match a series of feelings and predilections to an actual identity -- it was if he were writing seated at a den filled with his angst-ridden protagonists as they wailed and laughed and sobbed their stories out to him.
“Sixteen Candles” (1984) and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (2012)).
Barbie deliriously draws inspiration from a wide range of cinematic sources, with references to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , Groundhog Day , The Matrix , Toy Story , and, most hilariously, The Godfather .
If one threw Playtime , The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , Singin’ in the Rain , Sabrina , Young Frankenstein , and Josie and the Pussycats into a blender and poured the contents into a glass, it’s likely that the pink-colored concoction would look a lot like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie .
It harkens back to that classic Billy Dee line from Mahogany when he says “…success it nothing without someone you love to share it with.”
Pop culture references and riffs help to incessantly poke fun at itself, generating a self-aware sense of humor that maintains an aloof strangeness; unlike in the similarly patterned “Enchanted,” the merger of fantasy and reality here provides uncomfortable revelations about toxic masculinity, consumerism, a warped sense of body image due to unachievable dimensions, self-esteem issues, objectification, and identity crises, among other serious subjects.
What follows next when these two doll figures arrive in LA is not so different from what Amy Adams’ fairy tale princess character experiences in “Enchanted” (2007).
This fish-out-of-water premise calls to mind Ferrell’s Elf , not to mention Enchanted .
…the shift away from Barbie (de facto, femme) supremacy in 2023…
The unprecedented success of Barbie loosened the floodgates, becoming a catalyst for films and TV shows based on games, dolls and cartoon classics from The Last Of Us to A Minecraft Movie.
As corporate-endorsed blockbusters go then, F1 isn’t quite up there with Barbie…
Not true. Barbie roundly interrogated that brand. One of its most memorable lines was the furious takedown, “You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.”
Is it smart? No. Is it Barbie? No. Is it entertaining? Absolutely.
Overall, the visual and tonal sobriety find the depth in the book, and give or take a few years, the film brings Alcott’s world close to that of Edith Wharton’s novels, placing it in the same social universe as The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence .