The Four Color Media Monitor

It's a shame to see that the film allegedly based on Mattel Corp's Barbie franchise got such a big opening with $150 million in its premiere week, because I'd thought there were already signs and writing on the wall just how woke it was, and some reviews since have made clear it's far worse than expected. As a Breitbart writer notes:

Warner Bros’ Barbie film is tracking for a huge opening weekend, beating Guardians of the Galaxy 3 to take the crown for the best Thursday previews box-office haul of the year. But early reviews have revealed the Greta Gerwig-directed picture devolves into a series of moralizing monologues — not the light, fun adventure promised in its marketing.

The trailers for Barbie did not give away much of the film’s plot — just that producer and star Margot Robbie’s character lives in an idyllic world resembling the aesthetics of the iconic toys, and when she starts to notice imperfections, she embarks on a quest to the Real World to find the answers to her new dilemmas. Sounds a tad gnostic, personally, but you can see how that premise could be a good time at the movies.

However, several conservative commentators have called out Barbie for getting bogged down in culture-war pedantry. Robert Barnes, a lawyer who has defended clients such as Nick Sandmann and Kyle Rittenhouse, calls the movie a “bait-and-switch” that is not geared toward children at all:

And it includes a transvestite actor - apparently the only kind of man who's exempt from the male-bashing - along with some shocking contempt for the toys themselves. Particularly interesting is that this movie was turned out by WB, the same studio behind the otherwise unsuccessful line of recent DC adaptations (and also contained woke themes in at least a few entries), and their shrouding the actual purpose of this atrocity in promotions makes clear they're adapting to how the public is onto them. That's why a boycott of WB products will have to be considered, along with Mattel.

John Nolte gave his view on how the studio managed to pull the wool over many eyes:

It could very well be that after woke’s 100 percent franchise-killing flop rate that Hollywood has figured out a way to thread the needle… To sell this agenda in a way that attracts crowds. I doubt it, but we’ll see. Here’s what I think happened, why Barbie is probably a unicorn…

Barbie didn’t sell itself as woke or political. It sold itself as candy-colored escapism and glamour, a girly-girl movie filled with beautiful people.

Barbie is not dumping all over what came before. No one had to fear that Luke Skywalker would be twisted into a misanthropic child killer or that Indiana Jones would get punched out by a homely, 75-pound Fleabag. Barbie is its own thing.

Barbie is a massively popular brand and has been for more than a half-century.

Barbie is an original movie. Like the three other box office hits of the year — Super Mario Bros., Oppenheimer, and Sound of Freedom — moviegoers appear to be suffering superhero/franchise fatigue in a big way. They want something new. The domestic underperformance of Mission: Impossible 7 tells us a lot.

The Barbie marketing campaign was brilliant and everywhere. After the costly failures of Shazam 2 and The Flash, Warner Bros. did this one right.

They may also have an advantage Disney doesn't at this point: see, although WB was the studio that gave the world famous cartoons and characters like Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, they never branded themselves as majority family entertainment like the Disney brand did, to the point where, when Disney did produce more adult fare, they set up a special studio called Touchstone in the mid-1980s, around the same time Columbia founded Tri-Star. For decades already, WB sold their products to whatever age bracket they fit, without directly resorting to an affiliate, even though, IIRC, they own New Line studios as well. As this woke movie makes clear, however, all concerned will have to boycott all WB's new films, as noted before, if that's what it takes to send a message. Because it's clear they've become as woke as Disney, and worst, they're taking the stealth route in advertising PC-laced products to foist upon unsuspecting audiences.

The Federalist told more about what's wrong with this picture:

If this summer’s blockbuster based on a doll that promised “girls can do anything” has one defining message, it’s that actually it’s “literally impossible” to be the one thing every girl grows up to be: a woman.

“It is literally impossible to be a woman,” America Ferrera’s human character preaches to the Barbies in a monologue the L.A. Times thought was so “powerful,” the paper reprinted it in its entirety.

(For one character — the Gender Dysphoria Barbie played by male actor Hari Nef — Ferrera’s words are true: No amount of garish makeup or over-the-top dresses makes him “one of the girls.” But that’s not the monologue’s intended point.)

Ferrera’s character inspires the Barbies to take back their world from the patriarchy (yes, really) with her riveting list of complaints about how being a woman is “too hard.”

“You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough,” she says to Margot Robbie’s despairing titular character. “Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.”

Every woman has wrestled with the insecurities of being “good enough” at some point in her life. But is that really the legacy of womanhood? Being a woman is wonderful — something to celebrate, not complain about.

Ferrera continues, frustrated that women “have to be thin, but not too thin,” “have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean,” have “to love being a mother” and also “have to be a career woman,” “have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line.”

“It’s too hard!” she concludes. “It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”

The speech reportedly moved the “entire set” to tears, according to director Greta Gerwig. Women and magazines raved online about how “the monologue outlines the challenges women face under the patriarchy.”

Yikes, there were, undoubtably, many far-leftists working on the project, and even if Gerwig was boasting emptily, this is one more reason to boycott the studio at this point. And according to this, curious there's no "plus-size" Ken:

Barbie herself, presented as an unrealistic version of a 1950s housewife, lives in a female-dominated fantasyland complete with the neighbors of a diverse California utopia featuring all the identities on the victimized hierarchy. Barbie’s black, Barbie’s trans, Barbie’s Asian, weird, and even disabled. Of course, Barbie’s also plus-size. But for their male partners in paradise, diversity was an afterthought.

Plus-size Ken had no place in Barbieland. And the Kens who did were mocked by their female counterparts as ultra-narcissistic for their commitment to fitness. Stereotypical Ken himself, played by Ryan Gosling with washboard abs, was only happy when validated by Barbie.

In her lecture on how much she hates being a woman, America Ferrera’s character condemns female body standards enshrined in the Barbie of 1959.

“You have to be thin, but not too thin,” she complains at the top of her monologue. “And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also, you have to be thin.”

Vilifying those who care about their health, meanwhile, is just blatant pro-fat activism.

And that's disgusting too, when one realizes the underlying message is for women to degrade themselves at the expense of their health, and beauty. It is, quite simply, misogyny. And that's surely the worst part of the screenplay.

The hopefully good news to come out of this mess is that there won't be a sequel, though it does suggest this movie was intended as hit-and-run propaganda for pushing noxious concepts. That aside, it's beyond laughable how Hollywood's increasingly relying on toy merchandise as much as comics and cartoons for the sake of entertainment. Seriously, in hindsight, the live action Transformers movies were some of the silliest and unnecessary "adaptations" to come down the pike in the mid-2000s, and the way the 1st live action GI Joe movie was written explains perfectly why it's better remaining in comics, if anywhere other than toyland. As for the Barbie movie, its 2nd box office week or so will tell whether many are buying into such an atrocity. For now, however, Nolte's mistaken about something: the film did dump, specifically, over the merchandise itself. And that's terrible, especially for all the women who played with such items in their childhoods.

Labels: golden calf of LGBT, golden calf of villainy, licensed products, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics