[R] Barbie Movie

Going into this one, I don't know what I expected other than the colour pink. What I saw was love, loss, anguish. I saw cinema. It's a shame Mattel and other toy companies have already started to announce their own brand tie-in movies, because this is THE brand tie-in movie. It's shameless advertising for the Barbie brand and a critique of capitalism and the Barbie brand. It's incredible that this got written, and more incredible that the takeaway isn't any of those things. It's to love and let others love. It is to let girls have their own power fantasy in Barbie. And the framing for this being in juxtaposition to other popular movies which play into a more masculine power fantasy is probably lost on a lot of people who aren't either women or adjacent with femininity, which is unfortunate. This movie isn't going to make sexist men realise they're sexist, it's not going to change anyone's mind about anything if they weren't already receptive to having their mind changed, but that's okay. It is a celebration of womanhood, of what Barbie represents for womanhood, and it doesn't need to be more than that.

"Mothers stand still so that daughters can look back and see how far they've come" is a line I will be thinking about for a very, very long time. I hugged my mom when we came out of the theatre together.