July, Consumed
Mostly About Barbenheimer....
Let’s do another one of these, why not!
July was a beautiful month of movie theaters, and trains, and being covered in a thin layer of sweat and flour at all hours of the day. I’m going to omit a lot of stuff from this month because I was just too damn busy to get a head start on this, but I simply have too many opinions to not say anything. Gonna be keeping it just to movies. Commence!
Spoilers………..
Barbie (2023)
I walked into Barbie with extremely tempered expectations, and left with them being… met! Not exceeded. There are moments that the film truly shines— Margot Robbie does some really great work balancing humor and melodrama, Ryan Gosling is almost overwhelming enjoyable, the rest of the supporting cast ranges from stellar (Hari Nef, Micheal Cera, Rhea Perlman) to inoffensive (…), Barbieland is particular, vibrant, and definitely earns the film a production design award (even if the Real World felt stiff and sanitized as an air freshener advertisement). There is great spectacle (hello dance sequence!) but Greta Gerwig’s fascination for small human moments is still here— the moment Barbie people-watches in a Los Angeles park was easily my favorite.
And yet there was a fundamental flaw in the story that felt so unlike Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach. Just a few too many characters to follow and not enough time to flesh out the connections between them. The main Barbie and Ken don’t have any relationship worth caring about— and while I admire that part of the final conclusion was that they didn’t need to have a romantic relationship, at least a sense of friendship or comradery would’ve felt nice. Any sense that they cared about each other, had learned things from each other… the kind of things that main characters usually feel towards one another in a film.
The boardroom, while funny, overstayed their welcome— they did nothing in Barbieland, so letting them have their first scene and then moving on would’ve been fine. And cutting them could’ve made room for America Ferrerra’s character, who’s so underdeveloped it hurt a little bit. Her sadness, the inciting incident for the film, is never explored past “feeling a little lonely lately”— her relationship with her daughter is never expanded upon past “moody tween” who reluctantly gives her a hug at the end of the film after displaying absolutely no change. They have a single one-on-one conversation in the whole film! While I found the husband Duolingo cutaway to be funny (even through the blatant, painful product placement), why would you introduce that she has a husband, who is making her feel lonely and sad, without addressing it further!? A damn waste of a character who’s supposed to be the “beating heart of the film”.
Finally, my own personal conspiracy theory about the ending: While Barbie’s decision to become human isn’t completely out of left field, it certainly could’ve used a bit more build up. But, to me at least, it seemed clear that Barbie’s final act of self realization wasn’t that she wanted to be human, but that she didn’t want to be defined by a career. The reason she felt out of place in Barbieland was that she didn’t have an identity (she’s just “stereotypical Barbie”)— but every non-Margot Robbie Barbie has an identity that is a job. Margot-Barbie’s final rejection of Barbie-ness isn’t finding a place for herself in a world completely defined by work, it’s rejection of work entirely— which I think is the intention of the final joke, where it seems that Barbie is heading into a job interview, only to reveal she’s seeing a gynecologist. This seems like such a clear reading of the text that I can’t help but wonder if it was originally intended to be explicit within the film, but had to be cut because Mattel wouldn’t allow an anti-work narrative— what is Barbie without her job, after all? She’s certainly not a mother, that’s made clear– what else is there for the modern woman to have?
I have more thoughts about the film’s politics, but I think others have already said the same things I think. Here’s one of my favorites, The Plastic Feminism Of Barbie.
I saw it twice. Both times I was overwhelmed by watching Gerwig’s career pivot into big budget studio films, which, as a devout lover of her indie work, left a pit in my stomach. Her previous writing with Noah Baumbach and directing on Ladybird and Little Women not only resulted in some of my favorite films, but is work that I consider formative to my own artistic identity. In comparison, Barbie, as fun and fabulous as it (sometimes) is, ultimately comes out a disappointment.
Oppenheimer (2023)
I saw Oppenheimer with four self described “non-film people”, who were worried about getting bored during the run time, and all came out saying they were completely engaged through the whole thing. That is an absolute feat, as far as I am concerned. Oppenheimer is so tightly paced, edited, scored, and thought out, the filmmaking itself feels like a puzzle you want to take apart and put back together. The writing is occasionally a bit too corny, the characters are occasionally a bit too one note (Florence Pugh’s “no flowers” bit was immediately grating), but I was completely on board and wide eyed through the entire thing.
The internet’s reaction to the film’s ethics range from understandable (it’s reasonable for the descendants of those affected by the bomb to question their absence from the film, even if it serves an important narrative purpose) to ridiculous (the rest). The consensus on TikTok that this film is military propaganda is mind-numbingly stupid, especially because I think it is a film about military propaganda more than anything else. Not literal pieces of propaganda art, but the idea behind it, the way the military preys upon Oppie’s fear, the manufactured urgency for the bomb to be completed even after the intended target is defeated, the construction of a narrative that it must be used and that the bombings in Japan are unambiguous victories for mankind. Once Oppie buys into the propaganda, he can’t untangle himself from it— even if it leaves him with a lifetime of regret. It’s not the swan song of a war hero, it’s a devastating cautionary tale. And it’s soooo sick that they all call him Oppie.
The cast is nearly perfect. Einsteins is goofy, but I get that he had to be there. Josh Peck absolutely did not and shouldn’t have been. Best score of the year.
Interstellar (2014)
Wanted more of that Nolan juice, and I remember thinking this was bad when I was 15, so I wanted to see if I was right. And while I was right about the film being exceedingly stupid in its most important moment, I was wrong about it being bad! It’s awesome! Love does conquer all.
I think that the conceptual stuff, especially on Earth and each individual planet, is really interesting and crunchy in that cool sci-fi way. Actually being in space I can give or take— the ending is silly. I cried! Nolan is really good at getting good performances out of his actors. This means that I’m now 2/3 on liking Nolan (still don’t like Tenet) but I guess I gotta go watch the Dark Knight movies or Inception or something to really form an opinion.
No Hard Feelings (2023)
Teetering right on the edge of greatness with this one, but never truly gets there– I personally think it’s because there were too many side characters with too little to do, and bits so insignificant their scenes should’ve just been cut. I always hate to say that about Kyle Mooney, but it’s true. Balanced sweetness with raunch pretty well, but there were a couple mean spirited jokes that felt way off base (most delivered by Scott MacArthur). Yet, I am always glad for a mid budget comedy. Andrew Barth Feldman, they were damn fools to cut you out of White Noise.
Theater Camp (2023)
Most of my friends who I wanted to see this with couldn’t make it because they had play rehearsal— so I’m basically exactly the demographic this film was made for. It is clearly a labor of love, and the cast has the kind of chemistry with one another that really only comes from being friends in real life, but it also has the overall feeling of something a bunch of friends made together, a little too indulgent, not quite enough outside voices. There wasn’t much that outright didn’t work for me, but I also constantly felt that the film could be doing more— all adequate but with so much more potential. One round of punch-ups could’ve made this so much better, and the lack of talking heads was DEVASTATING. The film is entirely funny character bits— that’s what talking heads are made for!
On the bright side, the cast is crazy good, especially Ayo Edibiri (who should’ve been given more to do) and Noah Galvin (who is the only one to really get a show-stopping moment). I got teary eyed. I will definitely watch it again as a comfort movie some time in the future, but only because I am, and always will be, a theater kid to the bone.
Original Cast Album: Company (1970)
Speaking of being a theater kid! Company is one of my all time favorite musicals, and while I’d seen clips from this documentary before, I never sat down and watched it in full. Did you know it’s on YouTube? So you can watch it for yourself, if you like! It’s not that long.
Beautiful testament to performance, and art, and collaborating. Every actor is just stupid, crazy good. Everyone is smoking! The tension and exhaustion is palpable, and it’s awesome. If you like musical theater at all, even a little bit, you should definitely watch it. If you don’t, then uh… I don’t know! Your call.
Nimona (2023)
Nimona follows accidental villain Ballister Boldheart and his self appointed sidekick (the titular Nimona) through their part medieval, part futuristic, part modern day city/kingdom on a journey of mishaps. Since I was very active on Tumblr in 2015, Nimona will always have a special place in my heart. And while this adaptation is certainly updated (most obviously the art style, which unexpectedly changed the vibes in a neutral, but crazy, way) it hasn’t really aged out of its 2015-ness. Most lines have a kind of marvel-esque “did that just happen” quality to them, the animation technology is the same as RWBY, a Try Guy is even in the main cast. I guess you can’t knock the graphic novel for being a product of its time, but I can and will knock the 2023 adaptation. Adapt more!
ND (Nate) Stevenson, the author/artist of the original webcomic, has come out as trans in the years since Nimona’s conception. And while there was always a sort of gender-fuckery going on in the story, the one place this movie shines as an adaptation is in sharpening that fuckery into fully realized allegory. Yes Nimona is still a quirky girl in this movie, but she’s also pretty explicitly a quirky… something else. It really works! I hope she’s a genderqueer icon for the next generation of kids raised on Netflix.
Working Girl (1988) / Working Girls (1986)
I accidentally started Working Girls thinking that it was Working Girl— you see the confusion. Working Girl is a fun case of mistaken identity rom com where an assistant pretends to be her executive boss, while falling in love with Han Solo. Working Girls is about a lesbian working out of a modern brothel-esque New York City apartment where she chats with her coworkers and sleeps with men. Obviously, different vibes.
I think the two actually make a pretty cool double feature though— they both have strong opinions on labor, creating a false self for work, the relationships between men and women, liberation in the workplace— and they both have women bosses who suck, and AMAZING 80’s hairstyles.
What really struck me about Working Girls was the lack of any real trauma, which I really appreciated. No one (at least not in this establishment, on this day) is being beaten or assaulted— and they are still able to dislike the work, to acknowledge what’s wrong with it and what’s good about it, and ultimately free themselves from it, without having to rely on trauma as a reason. A lot of what they dislike about it is just normal work stuff, being asked to stay late, put on a customer service voice, to pretend not to be people with lives outside of this establishment.
What really struck me about Working Girl is that the camera work is fucking awesome. Why do rom coms look so BAD these days— this is bursting with color and glamor and interesting framing. Bring me back!!
I’m sure other people have suggested this double feature before, but still, now I pass it on to you. Enjoy!
It’s now August second, so I’m gonna go ahead and let this one go. See you next month <3