but in all seriousness guys, I am the biggest fan of the BCU! If you don't follow Preminger fan cam accounts on TikTok are you really a Barbie fan...

A couple things that should be clarified:

1. I have no aspirations to join SAG, I was not paid by the struck companies to make this video, and I am not an influencer. This is film criticism. And I figured instead of supporting the strike symbolically, I wanted to use my platform to raise awareness/money for it. This is a discussion that many people in my field have been having, and we all came to different conclusions for how we should move forward based on the kinds of video we make, our particular genres of Youtube, and our plans for the future. This was my decision, and no, it does not qualify as crossing a picket line as some of you have suggested I have done. It was a decision made after extensive consultation.

2. I love my community post responders! But the community page is not a sacred space - I can engage with it how I would like to, as it's my channel :)

"Barbie is wearing the clothes of artful cinema, putting on an edge-lord voice and hitting all the necessary talking points so we have nothing left about it to criticize, and everything left to buy."    Wow.

Barbie is inside us all...in the form of microplastics.

i felt like the mother/daughter plot got interrupted when they had to get all of the barbies out from under the spell, it just felt like so many plots were going on that they all fell flat for me. it's also crazy about the pink pigment shortage!

The movie also doesn't understand many of Barbie's controversial dolls, the reason pregnant barbie was discontinued WASN'T cause a pregnant doll was seen as weird, but from people complaining that the doll wasn't wearing a wedding ring and "promoting" teen pregnancy,  even though it wasn't, there are plenty of pregnant dolls out there, many doll collectors still make material to make their barbies look pregnant, nobody actually cares if a barbie doll is pregnant, also the camera barbie was controversial due to the FBI thinking it can be used to stalk children, but the film just makes a joke about how weird it is that barbie has a camera in her back, it also jokes about Ruth's tax fraud, but never mentions the plagiarism allegations with the original barbie's design, it's acting like it gets the criticisms, but it doesn't, even with seemingly easy targets

I feel like a lot of this "you cannot possibly criticize the barbie movie" is also coming from how little nuance people allow into arguments like this, that oftentimes, they believe that if you criticize something, that means it's horrible and should be tossed aside. I enjoyed the Barbie movie immensely, and I think criticizing it, seeing where it fell short and where it hit the mark, what cultural and economical factors lead to it, just makes me enjoy it more! It's so much more interesting that way!

God do I wish Barbie was an existential psychological thriller

I remember watching the movie and once it was over I turned to my boyfriend and said "It's not what I expected. It was fun, I had fun, but something's missing" and I'm glad more people noticed the story was lacking and underdeveloped. Sometimes it felt as if I was watching one of the Lego movies. I was expecting something more like the quieter moments of the movie.

The best parts of Barbie for me were the more quiet moments when Barbie was becoming a real person and getting in touch with her personhood and developing individuality, when things weren't said out loud, which sadly didn't happen much. Barbie talking with Ruth in her kitchen and realising all these expectations put on her were not why she was created and that she was enough just by existing in the eyes of her creator, Barbie looking around at the world in the playground with all its cracks and defects and different people each with their interior lives and then looking at an old woman, something that has never existed in her world, with all her wrinkles and "imperfections" that Barbie was so worried about that she left barbieland to "fix", and seeing how beautiful she is for living a whole life, and then her responding with "i know", showing she didn't need to be the ideal version of a woman (in the eyes of the world) to be confident and happy... And it leading to her wanting to be that, getting to experience a full life in a difficult and unpredictable world because that's when she could make choices and  change ans grow.... Those form a full movie for me if they were able to be explored with more freedom, and all the surface feminism, while very marketable, was just a bit cringy to watch and felt off to me.

Idk, i think the movie had some really good ideas that weren't fully explored (couldn't be, probably) and others that were too in our face to feel genuine. I really liked the movie btw, as a fun and pretty and entertaining thing to watch, but that kept it from being any kind of subversive or revolutionary as people were making it out to be

In the opening skit, it took me way too long to realize you were saying "Doc" and not "Dawg".
"I don't know, dawg. You gotta help me."

Funny thing is, I didn’t even feel like Barbie was for The Girl’s. Ryan Gosling was the star of the show and arguably carried the movie on his back. The biggest takeaways from the movie were “I am kenough” and “big Ken energy”

My biggest issue with the film was that it felt like it really dropped the ball with the mother and daughter - THANK YOU for bringing this up

I’m not gonna lie, as someone who’s always had a love for dolls, I personally loved the Barbie movie despite it being nowhere near perfect, however, I do also feel cynical about it. The moment mattel announced a “cinematic universe” and also watching people go from hating the movie dolls to sweeping them off the shelves right after the movie came out it really hit me. You explained perfectly why I feel this way.

You've just put into words what I couldn't express myself. I absolutely loved the movie and I thought it was hilarious. But in the end, it was shallow and ended up feeling like a guilty pleasure rather than a feminist masterpiece. Quite literally it felt like looking through rose-coloured (or pink-coloured) glasses. It was like a very pretty, polished and well-presented slideshow but missing a lot of the actual information needed to complete the assignment. I have to say, it was a lot of fun though and I felt a high of female empowerment walking out of that cinema along with an army of women and girls dressed in pink. Yet, I couldn't shake the sour taste of a giant production company taking advantage of us once again and the whole capitalist commercial undertones to it all.

thank u so much for bringing up the whole ferrara monologue feeling like it was made to create snaps from the audience, it felt super superficial and i completely agree that it felt like i was being sold feminism, rather than "empowered". my friends all left the theatre in like awe of how deep and hard hitting it was to them and obviously i dont want to detract from that sort of response, but, i couldn't help but feel entirely cynical about so much of the themes.

Someone pointed this out in the comment section and something I have been thinking for some time is, the "pick-me" criticism because you didn't like something stereotypically feminine always completely ignores the fact that this pick me attitude didnt emerge out of nowhere and formed because of patriachy's hostility towards gender non conforming women. We really are coming full circle.

Okay so I keep seeing people say that Barbie's message about men is 'men are harmed by the patriarchy, too!' and I feel like I'm going crazy, but, like. Is it, really...?
Like... the Kens in Barbieland are second-class citizens, right? They don't hold any positions of power or own property maybe? (Barbie straight up doesn't even know if Ken is homeless or not. Or seem to care.) So they're equivalent to women IRL. That's explicitly confirmed at the end, where the narrator jokes that eventually they'll reach the same level of power women have IRL. So the Kens are an oppressed group. Who learn that things can be better (from very flawed sources, of course), and try to change things so they're on top. And it goes horribly. And then they learn that it's actually better to return things mostly to how they were? That they're happier if they stay second-class citizens?!
Also, Ken was unhappy with the status quo from the very beginning, long before he encountered the patriarchy. So it seems like the matriarchy was what harmed him, initially. The patriarchy probably actually made things better for him overall.
So. I'm not really sure how you can even say the movie had a coherent message about patriarchy. The setting just conflicts with it too much. It presents a world where men are secondary to women, but then still wants to portray them as whiny, privileged babies. And I think that as a result it actually gives pretty damn shitty messages about power and oppression.

Something I hate about online media discourse is that if you like or dislike something, it always reflects on your character in some way. People have learned ,“I personally don’t like this” doesn’t have as much weight as, “if you like/dislike this then you’re a bad person”. People are not the media they consume.

It's ok to be cynical about the Barbie movie.

I also didn't like how they treated Allan. He was ignored by EVERYONE. Both the Barbies and the Kens. Yeah he was there but he was never addressed. People praise the movie about his character and how he's autistic coded or trans coded or whatever. But no one embraced his being different yo everyone else. He was just there