Thursday, July 20, 2023

"Barbie" is the platonic ideal of the IP movie

Director Greta Gerwig has done the impossible — and created a new camp classic along the way.

A flashy, glossy vision in pink, Barbie is, first and foremost, a commercial. The fantasy comedy centers around arguably the greatest product ever developed. Since her introduction in 1959, the Barbie doll has superseded nearly every other toy to become a bonafide cultural icon — and a hypocritical representation of the capitalistic machine that created her. Gerwig is intensely aware of this and turns her commercial for the most fashionable toy of all time into a treatise on girlhood, womanhood, and everything in between. While it’s not as biting or sharp as it imagines itself to be, Barbie’s plastic parade of camp and goofy hijinks slowly give way to the kind of tender, insecure emotion that Gerwig is so damn good at.

Some may call Gerwig a sellout, but she’s the one who hid a moving, emotional journey of self-discovery inside a toy commercial. FULL STORY from Inverse

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