It's taken me a couple of days to ponder over what I really thought of this movie. That's a plus, in that it really made me think. However the more I think about it, the more turned off I am by the whole thing.

Pros: The style is pretty fresh, and I was happy to see an original movie do well at the box office. Ryan Gosling was hilarious and nailed the balance between tongue-in-cheek and taking it super seriously. Simu Liu was great too. Taken by themselves, so many of the scenes were spot-on and funny, but the movie as a whole was just too much. That leads me to the negatives.

Cons: Some of the Barbieland kitsch went on for too long and started to give me a headache. In the beginning when that song started up again for perfect day #2, I thought my brain was going to melt. The narrator was funny at first and then got annoying, especially when she started breaking the 4th wall. Some of the monologues (mainly THE monologue) would have read just fine as blog posts or opinion columns. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read it before. In the movie it started coming across as buzzword-filled lecturing. I cringed whenever Barbie had a feminist lightbulb moment and used the academic-turned-popular jargon. Eventually it was like they were trying to get extra credit for using vocabulary words. Amusing at first, but got old fast.

Finally, ironically, I (a mom...a very pregnant mom) went to see this movie with my own mom. For all the different kinds of Barbies out there, one type of identity Barbie isn't allowed to have is Mother. The repeated gag where everyone cringes at Midge, the briefly shown "pregnant friend", told me this movie really wasn't for me. The film took pains to show women of almost every description and identity category in positions of power in Barbieland, but the "mom friend" was the actual, unironic butt of the joke. I get it, she's an awkward footnote in Barbie history. She DOESN'T fit into the Barbie message as stated in the film. I could've brushed it off as tongue-in-cheek like the rest of the movie, but it went further. That line: "We mothers stand still so our daughters can see how far they've come"? That shows me where mothers belong in this world. On the sidelines. Forever in the background, just a plot device. Or a joke. If you HAVE to have children, at least relegate yourself to your rightful role as the picture on the wall, history that no one wants to repeat. Even this movie, that satirizes the roles typically played by women in popular media by reversing the role onto Ken, still manages to keep one huge group of women in the-what shall we call it?-Ken-zone.