psocoptera

Barbie. I thought it was fun! I mean, you have to go in with the understanding that you are being marketed to, that more or less my demographic is being encouraged to feel nostalgic about our childhood Barbies and to want to let our own daughters have them, but they did a good job with it. A bunch of good jokes, a reasonable exploration of feminist themes, they did fun stuff with the music, what's not to like. I would have liked it to be a little more queer - Earring Magic Ken doesn't get any lines, and it felt like a waste to cast Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie and not give her a Barbie girlfriend. I'm pretty sure that before I ever knew people were gay in real life, some of our Barbies were married to each other because we had a zillion Barbies (mostly my sister's, but I had a few) and like two Kens (at least one of whom was a Heart Family Dad and not a Ken and could only be paired with Heart Family Mom and their baby), and obviously we wanted more couples. So in a fantasy world of gorgeous accomplished Barbies, all of whom are, like, definitionally more interesting than the Kens, why don't we see some Barbie-Barbie romance? Credit where credit is due, though, I guess at least one of the Barbies was a trans actress, I liked that the harassing construction workers were just like "yup some women don't have a vagina", and Barbie going to the gyn at the end has got to be some kind of trans analogy, right? like, getting exciting new genitals is mostly something trans people do, in real life? I still would have liked one shot of two Barbies awkwardly stacked in a bed together. Authentic play. :)