Yes, I “Barbenheim”-ed yesterday.
For those unfamiliar, there is present cultural interest in two movies that could not be more dissimilar in subject and tone opening over the same weekend. One movie is Barbie, centering around the generationally iconic toy doll, and the other is Oppenheimer, based on the far less generally familiar physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose lead contribution to developing the atomic bomb greatly changed the country’s scientific, military, and political trajectories.
I ventured yesterday to see both films at the nearby Olympus Theater, as the agenda to do so — co-opting the films’ titles into the amusing portmanteau “Barbenheimer” — reached near cultural zeitgeist.
Admittedly, if these films had opened on different weekends, “Barbenheim” wouldn’t exist, and I — as I suspect some others — would have just waited for the films to come out on streaming services, so the matter of this whole exercise was purely folly.
That being said, I am glad that I watched Oppenheimer in the theater on the big screen, as my viewing greatly benefitted from the stunning visuals more majestic scale as well as the seat-vibrating audio.
Barbie boasts its near literal eye candy, as much of the film — when it takes place in Barbieland — as swathed in its default bubblegum pink, which befits the lighter cinematic fare it promises (and delivers), compared to Oppenheimer’s darker and less saturated colors.
Barbie’s lightness and brightness befits the film’s core woman-identity themes, of which there are many. At times farcical, clever, self-referential, satirical, scathing, empowering, ideological, cynical, sweet and saccharine, the film, to me, watched as if several people were asked to put ideas on what a Barbie movie should be about onto a piece of paper and thrown into a hat, then instead of going with maybe 2 or 3 of those ideas, Barbie the movie tried to go with them all.
I also found some of themes contradict each other, as when the film (rightfully) decries the continued blanket generalization and stereotyping of women, then spends a good chunk of the film doing exactly that to the men in the film.
(A surprising amount of screen time centers around Ken; if you have Ryan Gosling in your movie, you don’t let him go to waste, I guess.)
Turn around, as they say, is fair play, and I enjoyed (i.e., wasn’t “triggered” by) men being reduced to wide brushstrokes of mere shallowness and caricatures (or not!) of “patriarchal privilege.” I can take as much as we, as men, have given. I was amused by the men being “put on blast,” as the kids say(?), and not at all threatened or insulted by it.
Margot Robbie, as our now go-to major summer movie blond, is convincingly affable in the titular role, as our Ryan as Ken and Kate McKinnon in a supporting role. Will Farrell hams it up as expected, but much of the rest of the characters felt flat and purely peripheral.
I am fully aware that the Barbie does not at all require the level and length of analysis I just offered. (Bless you who have made it this far!) To the contrary, Barbie intentionally invites you to just enjoy light and breezy bombast of a trip down memory lane.
It’s as if every Barbie joke and debate and meme were mixed in a blender and thrown at the silver screen like a Jackson Pollack painting. Imagine every possible Barbie-themed SNL skit presented as a compilation in narrative form. It is meant to be summertime escapism, via a reference that nearly everyone is familiar with. It’s “meta” fun — I did smile, chuckle, and laugh at times at its own self-referencing and self-deprecation.
It’s one of those milkshakes that also has whipped cream, marshmallows, skittles, sprinkles, cherries, cotton candy, and Twizzlers — it’s granularly sweet, unnecessarily overwrought, and intentionally over the top, all with empty calories.
It’s the kind of thing I’d have once a year, but wouldn’t “stay” with me. (My audience, mostly teenage girls, as expected, seem to have a great time watching the film.
Conversely, Oppenheimer is a quadruple shot of straight espresso — dark, searing, sobering, eye-opening, and palpable with nervous, buzzy energy.
Director Christopher Nolan shoots and delivers a beautiful, taut film, with top-notch acting from top to bottom, from lead Cillian Murphy to Robert Downey Jr. to Matt Damon and everyone else down the cast list. It is a gritty, cautionary, faith-shaking thriller of a an even that made history for not necessarily all the right reasons.
Inevitable or not, the global “power” dynamic got irreversibly redesigned my the invention of the Atomic bomb, and the moral dilemma in being paramount in that endeavor is evoked through solid performances showing the human foibles — minds and souls — of the people involved, not just with a visual “dissertation.”
I’m glad I saw Oppenheimer second, as I left the Olympus Theater on a noticeably bigger “high” than I did after seeing Barbie. And I’m grateful that “Barbenheimer” is a thing because I got to experience twice in one day the post-pandemic, singular thrill of seeing major films on the big screen in surround sound with popcorn in my lap and a near keg-sized cup of soda (that I’ll never finish).
I was nicely reminded of — and rewarded by, this time — the nostalgic thrill of “going out to the movies,” regardless what type of movie I might be in the mood for.
[Image photo credits: Barbie - Warner Bros. Pictures; Oppenheimer – Universal Pictures]