Pink Plastic Fever Dream

Barbie.

Pink. The excessive pink coloration creates a visual effect that sears itself into your eye retina because Mattel designed it to achieve this specific result. The film by Greta Gerwig contains an element which continues to disturb me. The pink color represents more than its surface appearance. The color scheme of Barbie's dream house kitchen displays coral and salmon and peach tones which I found confusing because I thought they were incorrect. People experience memory distortions through their false recollections of past events.

The film starts perfect. Margot Robbie wakes up perfect, slides down perfect, waves perfect. She starts thinking about death during a party gathering and she feels exactly the same way. Actually wait, that's not what bothers me. The movie creates confusion because it fails to determine whether it should focus on the existential breakdown or Ryan Gosling's discovery of patriarchal values through Rocky film analysis. Both? Neither? The Mattel boardroom scenes with Will Ferrell feel like they wandered in from a different movie entirely. One that I wouldn't watch.

I want to discuss the beach with you. Every scene there uses this specific turquoise that doesn't exist in nature but absolutely existed in every Barbie commercial from 1987 to 1995. Rodrigo Prieto demonstrates complete mastery of color temperature in his work. The real world scenes drain the saturation just enough that you feel homesick for plastic paradise even when Ken's turned it into his Mojo Dojo Casa House. (That joke lands better than it should.)The costume work kills me because Jacqueline Durran dressed every single Ken in variations of the same fur coat during the patriarchy takeover and they're all slightly different textures. Who notices that? I did. For twenty minutes.

America Ferrera gets this speech about being a woman that should feel preachy but doesn't because she delivers it while wearing the most aggressively normal mom cardigan against the backdrop of neon pink chaos. "It is literally impossible to be a woman," she says, and every Barbie stops cold. The film includes precise details whenever it needs to show them. Barbie approaches an elderly woman at a bus stop to tell her she looks beautiful without any sarcastic tone or humorous twist. Just says it.

Look, the third act completely falls apart trying to wrap everything up. Gloria's arc disappears. Sasha disappears from existence following the middle section. The character Weird Barbie appears whenever the show requires Kate McKinnon to deliver an extreme and unpredictable line. But when Barbie cries for the first time, actually cries, Robbie's face does this thing where she looks surprised by her own tears. The experience makes the ticket price completely worthwhile.

Ruth Handler appears as a ghost. Or maybe not a ghost. The film doesn't care to explain and neither do I. She tells Barbie, "Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever."Heavy stuff for a toy commercial.
Ken sings. Twice. The second time involves choreographed beach fighting and I hate that it works.