We'll see -- we can't say superhero movies are on the way out until the MCU has a big flop. Ant-Man 3 didn't do great but it wasn't way off previous Ant-Man movies. The Marvels is an interesting one on the radar -- Captain Marvel did $426M domestic / $1.1B worldwide. I think Marvels would be lucky to hit half that on both sides, but we'll see...
We'll see -- we can't say superhero movies are on the way out until the MCU has a big flop. Ant-Man 3 didn't do great but it wasn't way off previous Ant-Man movies. The Marvels is an interesting one on the radar -- Captain Marvel did $426M domestic / $1.1B worldwide. I think Marvels would be lucky to hit half that on both sides, but we'll see...
I've been done with the Marvel movies for a while, but it doesn't bother me if they still keep making them for their fans.
It would be nice to see a shift away from Marvel/Star Wars/etc as the only movies the studios will invest in a big budget action movie. Would the original Star Wars or Indiana Jones even get made today?
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They are both, in fact, killing it at the box office.
Barbie with $155M, best opening weekend of the year.
You know what really emphasized to me just how well Barbie is doing?
The people wearing pink at the theatre. A huge mob of people, at least three quarters of whom were wearing something Barbie-branded or something pink in general. The crowd was mostly female, but the wearing of pink attire was across the board. Girls, boys, women, men, it didn't matter: still wearing pink.
I kept thinking of 'Yogurt' from Spaceballs: "Moichandising! Moichandising! Where da real money from da movie is made!"
It's phenomenal, but also incongruous with a lot of what goes on in the movie. The teenager in the movie cuts 'Barbie' down by calling her a symbol of rampant consumerism and capitalism, and a "fascist" who set feminism back. Here I was having paid money to Cineplex Entertainment, who paid money to Warner Brothers, who paid money to Mattel to make a movie about this line of dolls worth billions to begin with, and they're telling us the audience that she is this capitalist/consumerist/in-some-ways-anti-feminist symbol... and she is! And most of the crowd spent money on pink attire anyway. I don't know if it was clever on Greta Gerwig's part or not.
One thing about Barbie that I hadn't thought of before, but gives me pause now:
Spoiler!
Margot Robbie's 'Stereotypical Barbie' has an existential crisis because America Ferrara's character is imparting these feelings of dread upon her, because she herself has these feelings. We never really get any resolution to this: is she feeling better after having encountered Barbie? It feels completely glossed over, and I feel ####ing horrible that I glossed over this!
I enjoyed barbie, and I also immediately knew when Ben Shapiro started hating the movie. It actually gives me a lot of schadenfreude to know that he hated the movie, I wish I could have seen his dumb face when they talked about the patriarchy. I don't think it was heavy-handed I think it was a fairly reasonable take on the world and was a fun couple hours. Ryan gosling stole the show imo
100%. I just saw it with the S.O., I think I liked it more than she did. I'm currently looking for a Mojo Dojo Casa House sign for the man cave.
I enjoyed Barbie, but not as much as Oppenheimer. There were parts of the movie I thoroughly enjoyed and laughed out loud at and other parts that I thought were a little too heavy handed. Margo Robbie & Ryan Gosling were perfect for their roles, and I LOVE the aesthetic. Also I love how they keep casting Will Farrell in these bad-guy, big boss roles - he's perfect for them. Overall it was a lot of fun, and even my husband dressed in his only pink shirt to come see it with my mom, mother-in-law and me!
Oppenheimer totally sucked me in, though. Afterwards I didn't feel like I'd just sat through a 3+ hour movie. Now I'm looking for interesting audiobooks to download on the subject. Excellent cast and incredible performances. I really enjoyed how Nolan did the black & white and the colour scenes. Nolan is a master of tension, and leading up to the test scene my heart rate was so high that my Fitbit thought I was working out and encouraged me to keep going. Such a great movie.
Also as a side note: the trailer before Oppenheimer for The Exorcist: Believer looked amazing! Can't find it on YouTube though, looks like it's exclusive for Op for now.
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Also as a side note: the trailer before Oppenheimer for The Exorcist: Believer looked amazing! Can't find it on YouTube though, looks like it's exclusive for Op for now.
Found it. Looks like it was just released this morning.
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I've seen Oppenheimer twice now, the second time on IMAX. On second viewing, everything coalesced. Every character, every motivation, every revelation, it all really pieced together, like the formation of an atom.
I didn't think IMAX would matter much, but it's hard to describe: the film is so immersive and absorbing in this format. Watching as incredible images fill the giant IMAX screen is really something.
When someone describes the power of film, maybe they aren't just pretentious ###holes, maybe this is what they are talking about? (Wow, did I just say that? Maybe I'm a changed man now after seeing it in IMAX) I digress.
Going in, I assumed the A-Bomb test would be the most memorable part of the movie, but wasn't. It barely made the top five most memorable scenes. For me it was
Spoiler!
immediately afterwards when Oppenheimer was delivering a speech to a stadium in Los Alamos. Haunting.
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When someone describes the power of film, maybe they aren't just pretentious ###holes, maybe this is what they are talking about? (Wow, did I just say that? Maybe I'm a changed man now after seeing it in IMAX) I digress.
Maybe you're a pretentious ###hole!
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Y'know what the worst part of this movie is? It's going to be a raucous success and the same sort of hapless "suits" the film satirizes—the very same idiotic Mattel execs—are going to think that making movies about all of Mattel's toy lines is a great idea. These dumb mother####ers are, without a hint of irony, going to try to make a "Mattel Cinematic Universe" out of this and it's going to fail miserably because they're too stupid, arrogant and greedy to "get it".
Mattel already has 14 other films based on toys in various stages of development, including a Hot Wheels movie produced by J.J. Abrams, Lena Dunham’s take on the world of Polly Pocket, and a Tom Hanks–led vehicle about the obscure toy astronaut Major Matt Mason.
Apparently, some of the other properties they're working on movies for include the Magic 8 Ball, Uno, and View-Master. Oddly, one Mattel property that doesn't have a movie in development is Masters of the Universe.
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Turn up the good, turn down the suck!
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Barbie is a ####ed-up fever dream of a movie, and by god the opening scene hooked me. I felt like the only person in the theatre who even knew it was a spoof of 2001 though...
The first half hour or so had me grinning ear to ear, but the more it went on the more I felt things were falling flat. Everyone who sees it will have their own opinion and interpretation of the film's central tenets and the moral of the story, but for me it just... didn't land well. Or at least not as well as it should have, or could have. I think in that first hour or so I had already built it up to be something far cleverer than it ended up being, and my dashed expectations left me feeling conflicted.
I really liked it, but I wanted to love it.
Spoiler!
The entire idea that Ryan Gosling's "Stereotypical Ken" would end up brainwashing all the Barbies into domestic servitude after seeing how "great" the "patriarchy" in the "real world" was was handled in a very facile way that just didn't "hit" for me at all. The solution to the problem being America Ferrara's character just explaining to all the Barbies how ####ty it is to be a woman in the real world and tricking the Kens back into their subservient roles was just like, "Huh? Doesn't this run counter to the point you're trying to make?"
It fell back so hard on negative tropes and stereotypes of men that it was like... a satire of a satire, if that makes any sense? The Kens' entirely selfless existences in Barbieland with absolutely no agency for themselves was a horrendous dystopia. Maybe even more dystopian than Barbie's experience as a woman in the real world. It felt like a point they were trying to make but couldn't bring themselves to say.
But hey, it's a goofy movie about plastic dolls. Like I said, I think I was building it up to be something more profound than the makers intended.
Y'know what the worst part of this movie is? It's going to be a raucous success and the same sort of hapless "suits" the film satirizes—the very same idiotic Mattel execs—are going to think that making movies about all of Mattel's toy lines is a great idea. These dumb mother####ers are, without a hint of irony, going to try to make a "Mattel Cinematic Universe" out of this and it's going to fail miserably because they're too stupid, arrogant and greedy to "get it".
Sensibility is what's lacking, I would say.
Just because something may (or may not) roll in some dough doesn't mean it should get made. There has to be a line somewhere just out of reason. Otherwise it indicates that money rules everything creative, and theres no line nor limit to that. And that's just sad.
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