Tag: Margot Robbie

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Barbenheimer

Why pick Barbie or Oppenheimer when you can do both?

It began as an internet joke. Barbie and Oppenheimer were both scheduled to open on July 21st. Wouldn’t it be weird to watch both of them back-to-back?

Counter-programming is a long tradition among film distributors. Whenever there’s a big “boy” movie, like The Dark Knight, someone with a “girl” movie, like Mamma Mia!, will schedule it for release the same weekend. The theory behind “Dark Mamma” (which really happened in 2008) is that maybe girlfriends and grandmas who are not into Batman can be scraped off of a family outing by the promise of something they would actually like.

By that logic, the hot pink good cheer of Barbie is the perfect foil for the dark, brooding Oppenheimer. No one expected the audience reaction to be “Let’s do both!” Maybe that’s because the studio execs’ conception of who their audiences are and what they want is deeply flawed and out-of-date.

On the surface, the two films couldn’t be more different. But there are a lot of parallels. Both Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig are writer/directors with exceptional track records. Both got essentially free rein to do what they wanted. In Nolan’s case, it was because Universal wanted to lure him away from Warner Bros. In Gerwig’s case, the film was greenlit just before the pandemic and Warner Bros.’ takeover by Discovery. In the chaos, executives focused on rescuing The Flash, and no one cared enough about “the girl movie” to interfere with Gerwig’s vision.

Both films are, relatively speaking, mid-budget. Nolan kept the ship tight at $100 million; Gerwig ended up spending $145 million. For comparison, Marvel films can’t even roll camera for less than $200 million, and Warner Bros. will lose $200 million on The Flash alone. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny cost an eye-watering $295 million after Covid delays.

More unexpected parallels emerge on screen. Both main characters face a reckoning for what they brought into the world. In J. Robert Oppenheimer’s case, it’s the atomic bomb. In Barbie’s case, it’s unrealistic expectations of female perfection.

In her Memphis Flyer review of Barbie, Kailynn Johnson writes, “The idea of a doll visiting the real world and learning to adjust to a life that’s not so fantastic was always in the cards for Barbie — the 2000 movie Life-Size starring Tyra Banks walked so Gerwig could run with Barbie. As she is catcalled by construction workers in Venice Beach, Barbie realizes misogyny did not end with Supreme Court Barbie. She suffers an existential crisis when she realizes that her very brand is determined by an all-male team led by Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell). … Gerwig uses Barbie to explore the nuances of feminism, but the film never feels too heavy or takes itself too seriously. She carefully sandwiches some of the deeper moments with satire. It helps that Mattel isn’t afraid to laugh at itself.”

Barbie may have benefitted from low expectations from those who were unfamiliar with Gerwig’s near-perfect filmography, but expectations couldn’t have been higher for Nolan, the inheritor of Stanley Kubrick’s “Very Serious Filmmaker” mantle. Big, complex, and messy, Oppenheimer doesn’t lack for ambition. I wrote in my review, “The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientists’ queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done. … If only the whole movie were that great.”

The weekend box office results exceeded everyone’s expectations. Barbie raked in $162 million domestically — the biggest opening haul of the year, and the biggest ever by a female director. Oppenheimer did $82 million, a stunning result for a talky three-hour movie about nuclear physics. Overall, it was the fourth-largest grossing weekend in film history.

Viewers who rolled their own Barbenheimer double feature on some internet dare to experience the most intense psychic whiplash possible found two well-made movies, each with their own voice and something to say. Instead of competition, these two films have lifted each other up and inspired real conversation. The tribal question of “which one is better?” has, so far, been secondary. (It’s Barbie, FWIW.)

In Hollywood, unexpected success is more upsetting than unexpected failure. The public’s embrace of original, creative, filmmaker-driven pictures over legacy franchises systematically drained of originality by cowardly executives is now undeniable. As the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes grind on, and the studios plot to break the creatives’ will, audiences have sent a clear message about who is necessary and who is expendable.

Barbenheimer (Barbie + Oppenheimer)
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Barbie

Margot Robbie as Barbie.

When it was announced that a Barbie movie was in the works, it’s safe to say that one of the questions that crossed everyone’s mind was “Why?”

Barbie’s dream universe has covered everything from nutcrackers to mermaid lore, and it seemed like Barbara Millicent Roberts was past her prime. The Y2K aesthetic only made room for Bratz dolls, and the meme-ification of American Girl dolls transformed them from status symbols to internet mainstays. Meanwhile, the opinion of feminist scholars who had long criticized Barbie for the outrageous beauty standards she perpetuated had gone mainstream. Girls still love their dolls, but Barbie’s star has burned out.

My interest was piqued when I heard Greta Gerwig would be tasked with telling Barbie’s story. The plot has been kept tightly under wraps, with rumors ranging from a Wizard of Oz-esque storyline to something like The Truman Show. Those rumors were not entirely wrong, but Barbie exists as its own film.

From the beginning, it’s evident that the film is a meta-narrative, which adds to the satirical charm. Helen Mirren narrates Barbie’s zeitgeist origin story in a 2001 Space Odyssey-themed sequence, in which she explains that the Barbie doll was created for girls to aspire to something other than motherhood. Barbie is aware of her existence in the world, and aware of the impact that she has had on society as a trailblazing role model for career-minded women. As Mirren notes in her narration, Barbie has solved all the problems of feminism and equality – or at least, that’s the lore in Barbieland.

Margot Robbie stars as the Stereotypical Barbie. She lives in Barbieland with an endless array of Barbie variants, such as Doctor Barbie (Hari Nef), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp) and President Barbie (Issa Rae), who preside over this matriarchal democracy.

Many Barbies live in Barbieland. But only Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie has flat feet.

Then we meet the Kens, who are just as varied as the Barbies, only less cool. Ryan Gosling’s iteration of Barbie’s companion lists “beach” as his profession. But it’s not easy being a Ken. Mirren explains that while Barbie has a great day every day, Ken has a great day only if Barbie looks at him.

Barbie’s perpetual string of great days takes a turn for the worse when she brings one of her nightly blowout parties/soundstage musical numbers to a record-scratch halt when she blurts out, “Do you ever think about dying?” The next morning, she wakes up with bad breath, falls out of her dream house, and discovers that her feet have gone flat. Realizing that something is wrong, she pays a visit to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who explains that the only way for Barbie to restore her perfect tiptoe and avoid cellulite is to trade in her heels for Birkenstocks and take a trip to the real world. Since Ken only exists as an ornamental addition to Barbie’s iconography, he joins her on the journey to reality, where they make discoveries that pose an existential threat to Barbieland’s women-run utopia.

Good morning, Barbieland!

The idea of a doll visiting the real world and learning to adjust to a life that’s not so fantastic was always in the cards for Barbie – the 2000 movie Life Size starring Tyra Banks walked so Robbie could run with Barbie. As she is catcalled by construction workers in Venice Beach, Barbie realizes misogyny did not end with Supreme Court Barbie. She suffers an existential crisis when she realizes that her very brand is determined by an all-male team led by Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell.)  

Gerwig uses Barbie to explore the nuances of feminism, but the film never feels too heavy or takes itself too seriously. It helps that Mattel isn’t afraid to laugh at itself, like the recurring joke where Midge (Emerald Fennell), a pregnant version of Barbie that was deeply unpopular with kids, is banished to Skipper’s Treehouse. Gerwig’s attention to detail and dedication to the source material not only satiates a longing for nostalgia, but also showcases her intentionality. Since no child ever made a doll take the stairs in her Dream House, these Barbies float through the air from bedroom to dream car. Gerwig makes that floaty feeling last.

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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

About three-quarters of the way through Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “California Dreaming” floats to the top of the soundtrack. But even though, at this point, we’ve already smoked a joint with Michelle Phillips (Rebecca Rittenhouse), it’s not the version of the song that made the Mamas and the Papas into household names. Instead, it’s José Feliciano’s impassioned, flamenco-inflected cover. The wistful song about homesickness, swaddled in superfluous organ and string, is twisted to add to the mounting sense of dread. This is August 1969, and Charles Manson is about to bring the Swinging ’60s party to an end. “I suppose everything had changed, and nothing had,” wrote Joan Didion of the days that followed the shocking, ritualistic murders of Sharon Tate and six others.

When the Weinstein Company collapsed, and disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein’s most significant discovery announced he was on the market for a new studio with a movie about the Manson Family murders, the creeping dread and sudden, searing violence is what everyone envisioned. I sincerely doubt that the winners of the ensuing bidding war — Harry Potter producer David Heyman and Columbia Pictures/Sony — expected to get a $90-million buddy comedy. And yet, this is what they got, and they should be glad.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is something Tarantino hasn’t been in a long time—fun. If that seems like a strange thing to say about a film centered on the gruesome cult murder of seven people, that’s because it’s not really what the film is about. Or rather, this sprawling work is not solely about Manson, but about the context that produced him. As Family member Leslie Van Houton (Victoria Pedretti) points out, they were the first generation to grow up watching people murder other people on TV for fun.

Leonardo Dicaprio as Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth

Two of the people intimately involved in creating those fake, televised murders are Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Dalton is the former star of Bounty Law, a popular Western series that ran on NBC in the late ’50s, early ’60s. Booth was his stunt double on the show, and now his best friend/retainer. To reference another true crime sensation, he’a kind of a Kato Kaelin figure.

During a meeting with producer Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), Dalton is forced into the crushing realization that his career is on the downswing. Tarantino, with his simultaneous mastery of cinema forms and willingness to remix them, tells the story of Dalton’s career with a combination of voice-over (courtesy of Kurt Russell), flashbacks, and archival clips from fictional shows and movies. You might think a film that was initially billed as Tarantino’s take on Helter Skelter would resemble the director’s only literary adaptation, Jackie Brown, but it feels more like Grindhouse, the 2007 exploitation pastiche he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez.

Damon Herriman as Charles Manson

Dalton lives in the Hollywood Hills on Cielo Drive, right next door to Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and his wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Polanski, coming off Rosemary’s Baby, is the hottest director in Hollywood. Dalton, part of the older generation New Hollywood types like Polanski are making obsolete, wishes he could get an audition with his new neighbor. But he’s not even on their radar as they power around town in Polanski’s MG roadster on their way to parties with Steve McQueen (Damien Lewis), blissfully unaware they’re living in a doomed world, and the hammer is about to fall.

Tarantino’s post-modernism is, as always, a double-edged sword. Jackie Brown is the director’s most disciplined and most emotionally resonant work. Grindhouse is a carnival funhouse. Both have their place, of course, but the latter is certainly shallower.

Where Once Upon a Time in Hollywood redeems itself is in the depths of the performances. The casting is fantastic. Lena Dunham nails Gypsy, one of the Manson cult leaders. Dakota Fanning plays Squeaky Fromme with ice water in her veins. Nicholas Hammond, a Hollywood journeyman who played one of the Von Trapp kids in The Sound of Music, steals scenes from DiCaprio as a pretentious TV director named Sam Wanamaker. Ten-year-old Julia Butters gives method acting lessons to Dalton in a bravado scene that dances on the fourth wall.

DiCaprio delivers one of the best performances of his career as the washed-up Dalton, all sniffles, limps, and nips from the hip flask. Robbie is radiant as Tate, especially in a sequence where she charms her way into a screening of a Dean Martin movie she’s in and dons giant glasses to watch herself act on the big screen. But it’s Pitt who rises above the rest of the cast in a phenomenally self-aware performance as a guy whose lack of self-awareness is both his greatest asset and biggest handicap. When he picks up a hitchhiker and heads for the Spahn Ranch, where the Family is holed up, Pitt becomes the chill in your spine.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a sprawling mixtape of a movie. It’s long, self-indulgent, and never quite congeals into more than the sum of its parts, at least on first viewing. It could very much use the moderating influence of Pulp Fiction editor Sally Menke, who died in an accident after her Academy Award nomination for Inglourious Basterds But it’s an absolute joy to watch. The production design is impeccable; with the help of legendary special effects designer John Dykstra, Tarantino’s team seamlessly recreates 1969 Los Angeles. It is in turns funny, sad, exhilarating, and horrifying. I’ve called it a comedy, but it really defies genre description. It’s a comedy with a gun to your head, daring you to laugh while you wait for the shot that may or may not come.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

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Goodbye Christopher Robin

Biopics, with their vaguely cancerous-sounding name, are the scourge of the entertainment industry. They make the fussy details of life programmatic. Characters must always state their intentions in declarative sentences. Orchestral soundtracks must always manhandle viewers into scheduled emotions. What is it about actual lives, especially British period ones, that are so resistant to movies?

One reason is that they have predetermined ends before a screenwriter ever sits down. Another is that you’ve already experienced the most interesting aspect: the acts or accomplishments the story buttresses. In the case of Goodbye Christopher Robin, that accomplishment is beloved children’s series Winnie the Pooh, about a bear and his friends who live in the woods. Goodbye is about the emotional neglect author A.A. Milne visited upon his son while making him the star of his books. It hits the note of parental abandonment well, but the staid tones of early twentieth-century Britain flood it and preserve the thing in amber.

There are points for trying, though. Some attempts to enliven—a croquet ball turning into a hand grenade in a pre-credits sequence, or Christopher Robin A-Ha video-ing his way through illustrations from the books—fall flat. Others work, from smart editing bluntly cutting off the ends of cookie cutter scenes, or the emphasis on the less-than-ideal qualities of A.A. (Domhnall Gleeson) and wife Daphne (Margot Robbie). They pretty much give the raising of their child over to his nanny (Kelly MacDonald). Child actor Will Tilston as Christopher Robin is good at beaming a wide smile—his constant reaction to Ashdown Forest/Hundred Acre Wood— but is a little more blank with other emotions. Gleeson is good with the arch cynicism of a World War I vet, but less solid at portraying gruffness and shellshock.

Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie as A.A. and Daphne Millne in Goodbye Christopher Robin.

Milne moves the family to the English countryside to write a book arguing against the notion of war. His PTSD comes in the form of fright at champagne corks and balloon pops. He heals and bonds with his son while making up stories about his stuffed animals. Moments dedicated to naming them —Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore— play like the Star Wars prequels (“Anakin Skywalker, meet Obi Wan Kenobi”) in their reliance on previous work for impact. But the movie gets childhood play right, like when Christopher Robin later accuses Milne of only playing with him in order to write a book.

Some lines have the feeling of compression of life for drama, like “Childhood was wonderful, it’s growing up that was hard,” or “I’ve had enough of making people laugh, I want to make them see.” Director Simon Curtis’ earlier My Week With Marilyn had a good Michelle Williams performance as Marilyn Monroe, but neutered the other half of her love affair, making him an innocent when the source material promised a more interesting cad. In Goodbye the only emotions that worked for me had to do with abandonment. Those that had to do with war or whimsy seemed puffed up to sell their importance. Next to the wars that bookend the movie, the annoyance of fame to Christopher Robin, his motivation for joining the army, seems minor.

Will Tilson (left) as Christopher Robin, along with the stuffed inspiration for Winnie the Pooh and friends.

Films like My Boy Jack, about Rudyard Kipling and his son, and Ken Burns’ documentary The Roosevelts, which dealt with Theodore and his son Quentin, covered similar material with a super-masculine historical father enthusiastically sending his boy off to World War I. Here, the Milnes prophesize they can’t keep their child out of war before he’s born, and feel doomed as World War II gets closer. A.A. has no machismo like Kipling or Roosevelt to hurl his son into violence; his flaw is his coldness (or, living in a world where there will be more fighting).

Cinematically, World War I is World War II’s shadow. Instead of a worthwhile fight against evil it’s a meaningless slaughterhouse. That’s actually more modern, and appropriate, as film portrayals of organized group murder go. WWII is the exception that proves the rule, and undergirds our military-industrial-entertainment complex. We see it much more often on our screens, though Inglourious Basterds’ post-modern take might mark the end of its reign.

The Winnie the Pooh books and television show seemed to encourage emulation of its gentle main character. It’s exciting for Goodbye to resituate that call for gentleness between two wars, as the message of a veteran father to his affection-starved son. But reaching for such honey it gets stuck.

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The Legend of Tarzan

Has any fictional character been portrayed on film more than Tarzan? John Clayton, the Viscount of Greystoke, was created in 1912 by pulp writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. Six years later, Tarzan was the subject in the first of eight silent films. In 1932, Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller brought Tarzan into the talkie age, kicking off more than 30 films produced over the next 50 years. So when someone (like me, for example) bemoans Hollywood’s current mania for franchises, remember that it has always been thus.

Tarzan is a prototype superhero, so naturally, in this silver age of superhero movies, he’s ripe for a reboot. But there’s a problem with importing the character into the 21st century. Burroughs was an Englishman of his time, so his Lord of the Jungle is a white, English aristocrat constantly demonstrating his superiority over black, African tribesmen. To resurrect the franchise, a new angle was needed, and the person who cracked the problem was Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer. The solution he offered in his 2011 script for the film that would eventually become The Legend of Tarzan was to make colonialism itself the enemy. Brewer’s story was influenced not only by the extensive Tarzan lore Burroughs left behind, but also by King Leopold’s Ghost, a history of the African genocide the Belgian monarch perpetrated between 1885 and 1902, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The strength of Brewer’s script briefly landed him in the director’s chair, but he fell victim to studio machinations at Warner Bros. that took the project to the brink of collapse.

When Tarzan was resurrected, it was with David Yates, the director of the last four Harry Potter films, at the helm. Although several different writers were called in to try new drafts, the final script still retained enough elements of Brewer’s original that he retains a credit, alongside Adam Cozad.

Would The Legend of Tarzan have been better with Brewer in the big chair? That’s an academic question now, but one thing’s for sure: Yates was the wrong choice. The Legend of Tarzan is a wildly uneven film. Yates adopts the same languid pace he did for The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2, when narrative propulsion would better suit the pulpy material. We first meet Belgian bad guy Leon Rom in a scene that echoes the immortal beginning of Raiders of The Lost Ark. Brewer’s version of the character was a Colonel Kurtz figure, a Westerner gone savage trying to colonize darkest Africa. Christoph Waltz, however, plays him like Indiana Jones’ dandy nemesis Belloq. Alexander Skarsgård turns out to be a good choice for Tarzan. He’s the strong, silent type, introduced in London as an English aristocrat grown beyond grunting “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” Watching Tarzan code switch between English drawing rooms, daub huts of tribal Africa, and the apes of the jungle is one of the film’s pleasures. Unfortunately, Yates pairs Skarsgård with one of the greatest living American actors, Samuel L. Jackson, as George Washington Williams, an adventurer on a covert mission for Uncle Sam. Although Jackson is clearly toning it down, he can’t help but steal all of his scenes with the emo Skarsgård. Worst of all is Margot Robbie, whose phoned-in Jane fills me with dread for her turn as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad.

Yates tries to create tense buildups to explosive action scenes, but his gratuitous slow-motion fetish inevitably mucks it up. True to superhero movie form, Tarzan’s origin story must be shoehorned in. It’s handled much better than in Batman v Superman, but when the flashbacks stretch into the third act, things get confusing.

It’s not all bad. Like Yates’ Potter films, the supporting cast, such as Djimon Hounsou as Tarzan’s enemy, Chief Mbonga, are consistently compelling, and chunks of Brewer’s dialog still float through the butchered screenplay. I had more fun in The Legend of Tarzan than I did in The Jungle Book reboot, or X-Men: Apocalypse, but fun product from the Hollywood sausage factory has been in short supply this year.

The Legend of Tarzan
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