Posted on 01/23/2024 8:24:33 AM PST by sphinx
I'd never heard of the film until a podcast I listen to were singing its praises for this very reason. So I checked out the trailer and it looked hilarious.
I've read some critiques of Barbie that said this, that it was anti-woke, and others that said it was a feminist film.
I watched Barbie and I enjoyed it. I thought it was cleverly written and beautifully shot. And it had something for everyone. Kids, adults, conservatives, liberals. Little wonder it made a billion bucks at the box office. You can only rake in this kind of money if there is mass appeal.
The film's director was totally robbed.
I recommend it. The slamming of woke white liberals is a key theme, played against a complex, nuanced family and character drama. Be prepared for both. Monk’s family is highly educated and professionally accomplished, beset by myriad life issues that have absolutely nothing to do with being black. The topline theme is a protest against the relentless stereotyping of the black experience to fit a reductionist CRT political narrative. Basically, these are people who have moved far beyond an obsession with race. They are content of the character/meritocracy oriented people. Maybe the thematically best line occurs in a Barnes and Noble, when Monk goes hunting for his book and finds it in the African American section. He scoops up an armful of books and moves them to the correct area — with the other intellectually serious fiction — and in the process unloads on a hapless clerk, who tells him that the placement is a corporate decision: “the only thing black about my book is the ink on the page.”
And who is responsible for the stereotyping? Well, you know the answer. Apart from said hapless clerk, the white characters are drawn from the worlds of academia, publishing, and the movies — and they are complete idiots. Beautifully done. The trailer leans hard into this parody of woke liberalism and doesn’t prepare you for the family drama, partly to avoid spoilers and partly (I suspect) because the parody is so hilarious. But the serious and comic themes, however, complement each other. It’s a sophisticated balance.
Well-written. You've sold me.
I loathe Barbie did so well
Stupid fat nation
I thought Oppenheimer was good
Oppenheimer...it may have been just me but it was boring. Past Lives was a sweet movie...they could have made it “dirty”...have the characters cheat and run off together but they kept it pure and sweet and ethical.
“The Hill is a fantastic Christian movie. Dennis Quaid was the main actor and incredible job as always. True story”
We are about 90% through The Hill, we watch movies over the course of two or three days. It’s pretty good, Dennis’s Preacher character is pretty intense, I suspect he will come around at the end of the movie to support his Son’s dream of playing Baseball. We will finish it today.
Only Dennis Quaid could play that part unflinching.
For the good of the order and not you specifically ... I see this morning that many of the Oscar nominated films are getting major extensions/expansions of their theatrical runs hoping to get an Oscars bounce. American Fiction is among them. I am all in favor of this, as I think streaming is killing the industry qualitatively while at the same time trending towards consolidation, homogenization and a loss of viewpoint diversity (which was already a problem before streaming, but is now acute).
If you still venture into theaters, American Fiction would be one to see in the theater. No, there are no death stars, sandworms, T-Rex’s or stupendous action scenes that benefit from the big screen. But it’s a way to cast a vote for good movies. Ticket purchases and butts in seats are to streaming as in-person voting with voter ID is to mail-in voting, drop boxes and vote harvesting.
I mentioned earlier that the topline narrative of the film is a protest against the reflexive CRT framing of the black experience. I think this is true, but I also question whether the filmmakers are fully aware of this. This is an anti-CRT framing in the same way that Never Let Me Go is an anti-abortion film and The Florida Project is a conservative movie about poverty and the underclass in America today. I have the sneaking suspicion in each of these cases that the filmmakers all live in LeftWorld, are so deep in their echo chambers that they are unaware of their blindspots, and do not grok what they have done.
Which makes these quite subversive movies if conservatives will get into the discussion ....
If leftists were good at connecting the dots, many of them would no longer be leftists — which is what we’ve been saying for years about liberals who have been mugged by reality or redpilled.
I think the same is true of the parody of woke identity politics liberalism. The film conspicuously lacks any conservative white character to draw the contrast. This does not detract from the parody, which is doubleplusgood, but it does camouflage the point. I would have been tempted, when Monk first gets sideways with his department, to have the campus’ token conservative professor pay him a call and congratulate him on joining the resistance. Maybe that’s too heavyhanded and it’s better to hide the ball, leaving it as an unexplored theme in the subtext. But maybe it is unintentional. If the filmmakers are deeply enough siloed, they may not actually know any credible conservatives and naturally don’t think to put one in the movie. If that’s the case, they may conceive of the hilarious mockery as a parody of “white America,” when in fact it is a parody of woke liberal white America.
I suspect that conservative and liberal viewers see this film in very different ways. The lefties may look at the white characters, recognize themselves, and squirm. The conservatives will look at the white characters, laugh, say, “Yup, that’s them,” and cheer on the filmmakers for nuking the right target, even if the filmmakers are blind to the distinction.
Ok, that’s my meta analysis for the day. I hope you enjoy the film. Let me know what you think.
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