Although Barber was pleased with the “Barbie” partnership, he was clear-eyed about its implications. “Is it athing that our great creative actors and filmmakers live in a world where you can only take giant swings around consumer content and mass-produced products?” he said. “I don’t know. But it is the business. So, if that’s what people will consume, then let’s make it more interesting, more complicated.
More important, in the intervening years, the opportunities available to ambitious directors have narrowed further. The notion of a starry, C.G.I. “Bambi” reboot has gone from a joke on the HBO Max industry satire “The Other Two” to an actual movie that Sarah Polley is making in the wake of her Oscar-winning film “Women Talking.” During the pandemic, multiplexes collapsed.
Barbie was far from universally beloved. Some mothers found her anatomically impossible figure inappropriately sexual; others objected to her perfectly coiffed blond hair. Feminists argued that these qualities reinforced gendered stereotypes and unforgiving beauty standards. In the seventies, “I am not a Barbie doll” became a refrain of women’s-rights protesters. Other people came to see Barbie as a tool for empowerment—a proto-girl-boss.
Though Dickson was excited to work with Gerwig, he was also nervous about damaging the brand. He went to London, where the film was largely shot, a half-dozen times, spending days on set and engaging in lengthy discussions about the highs and lows of the doll’s history. Once, he flew in to hear dialogue from the script which worried him. Robbie told me that the conversation around the exchange—in which her character is lambasted for hurting girls’ self-esteem—was “about six hours long.
Mattel was sometimes uneasy with Gerwig’s interest in the brand’s missteps. In 1964, the company released a doll named Allan, whose packaging marketed him as “Ken’s buddy,” with the tagline “All of Ken’s clothes fit him!” Allan was soon pulled from shelves. When Gerwig learned about him, she found the ad copy both sad and amusing. In “Barbie,” Allan is played by Michael Cera, and much is made of the fact that his relationship to Ken is his main identifying feature.
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Source: Slate - 🏆 716. / 51 Read more »