BARBIE

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A wrench and a cat walk into a bar.

Ouch!

Preachy, insipid, wrongheaded, mean-spirited, and fossil fuel-driven, "Barbie" is by far the worst movie (or more accurately, commercial) I have ever witnessed.

"Barbie" is to feminism as a wrench is to a cat.

This plastic character has no charm, no grace, no sense of romance or inner beauty of mind.

To be clear, "Barbie" is not a movie; it is a rip off.

Evidently, it would have taken John Waters or Trey Parker and Matt Stone to properly trash the capitalist monolith of Mattel with a transgressive movie based on a sex doll turned pop toy icon.

And yes, Mattel (the toy company) produced this overlong commercial.

Could anything be more obvious?

And, yes that's right, the creator of Barbie based this popular landfill ingredient on a sex doll.

They probably should have left the sex doll parts intact, at least then it could have been used for sex education.

Too late now.

Corporate cult pap. Unrelenting dystopia.

Vomiting all of the time.

You've heard of "cult of personality," well this is cult of image, used to dumb down society in the service of profit. Forget about life imitating art, here life follows toys.

Gross. Really, really gross, and sour.

Toxic.

"Brave New World" indeed.

Aldous Huxley was right all along.

Here is narcissism, infinity squared.

Let's put it this way, "Barbie" is the exact opposite of "The Wizard of Oz" in every square centimeter of quality, metaphor, and nuance.

"Barbie Land" is a gated community inhabited by lesbian Barbies and gay Kens.

How do we know this?

When Ken asks Barbie if he can stay over one night for reasons he can't explain, Barbie says, "no."

Barbie is a Breadcrumber.

"Every night is girls' night" at the Barbie house of endless fun. This is not to say that sexytime doesn't happen between consenting plastic girl/women with no vajayjays. Feet are the operative sex organ here.

In response, Ken usurps that long revered animal of teenage girl fetish obsession, the horse, as his personal connection to all things manly.

Choke.

Barbie's red or blue pill moment. She chooses the one she has to buy on Amazon.

Oh the ugliness of its sickly sweet set designs. This commercial looks like Mattel spent $1000 to make it. And yet, they still spent way too much.

At least Mattel got their money's worth out of their herd of actors. Here is a perfect example of why Alfred Hitchcock called actors, "cattle." Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie, and the rest, are nothing more than mindless props.

Meanwhile, Barbie (Margot Robbie) has thoughts of...wait for it...death.

The death of capitalism, or the death of Mattel's profitable practice of polluting the globe with plastic?

Not so much.

No, we would have needed John Waters, or maybe even Todd Haynes, for such grounded satire.

Nevermind that David Lynch already gave us the movie that addresses female stardom lust, namely "Mulholland Drive."

This is more, battle-of-the-sexes Barbie. Equality, as a benchmark human value, is never mentioned. Take that, Simone de Beauvoir.

Valley Girl baby. Like, "literally."

"It's like barf me out. Gag me with a spoon," as Frank and Moon Zappa put it.

Anytime you hear someone utter the word "literally," I suggest you exit the room immediately.

"Barbie" is nothing more than a (nearly) two-hour commercial, designed to send hordes of potential customers to Amazon to purchase an endless array of plastic toys. And you thought only Marvel could play in that crap-infested sandbox.

Extermination of rational thought is this commercial's goal. For nearly two-hours, it achieves its mission.

Co-screenwriters Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig stumble over themselves with face-plants of dialogue and monologues that wallow in stupifaction.

"I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don't even know."

What is this "us" bullshit?

The crux of all nature's beauty springs from the female form. This commercial doesn't know what beauty — female or otherwise — looks or sounds like.

Immaturity and idiocy go hand in hand. In Barbie Land there is no such thing as individuality.

A trip to the OBGYN substitutes for a sexual encounter.

Where is John Waters when you need him?

"Barbie" is a chunky diarrhea stain on humanity.

Notice how you feel sick to your stomach just from looking at images from this worthless commercial.

Peter Bogdanovich was a skilled and informed master filmmaker and screenwriter. Check out "The Last Picture Show," and compare it to this filmic (sic) turd called "Barbie."

What a fecking embarrassment and insult "Barbie" is to society, and to Cinema.

Greta Gerwig is a hack screenwriter, and a remedial filmmaker at best.

You wanna see post-modern feminism in cinematic action, check out "I Am Curious, Yellow and Blue," and tell me how that beautiful piece of cinéma vérité art compares with Gerwig's commercial garbage.

I could go on but why should I. — Note the absence of a question mark.

I will say that anyone calling themself a "film critic" has no business giving "Barbie" a passing grade; if they do, they should turn in their credentials and quit because they haven't the first clue about Cinema, film, or movies — to pretend otherwise is just wrong.

Rated PG-13. 114 mins.

LESS THAN ZERO STARS

INHERENT VICE — NYFF 2014

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Blowing It
Paul Thomas Anderson Strikes Out, Again

There’s no way to sugarcoat it; Paul Thomas Anderson has made two duds in a row. If his lackluster half-film “The Master” didn’t you put you off the director responsible for such instant classics as “Hard Eight,” “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” and “There Will Be Blood,” then his latest effort will make you doubt if he is capable of ever returning to the height of his former glories.

Based on Thomas Pynchon‘s 2009 novel about the adventures of Doc Sporetello (Joaquin Phoenix), a stoner (“hippie”) private detective living in a fictitious L.A. town, “Inherent Vice” is a tweet-tweet-arf-arf movie for stoners.

The film seems custom-made for dope-smokers to watch while amending their vapes with an occasional line or two of cocaine. There really isn’t any other way for said potheads to stay awake for the film’s occasional (read rare) flashes of humor, sex, and violence that intersperse the movie, without a few snorts of amphetamine. The rest of us can take a nap.

Certainly, when Phoenix’s lethargic, facial-hair-obsessed, Doc is finally spurred into erotic action by his horny submissive ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston), the momentarily pleasant event arrives as a literal and figurative climax. After Shasta plays with herself for an extended period of time, she lays nude across Doc’s lap before he finally gets the message. Doc spanks Shasta’s bare butt like an amateur dom before slamming her from behind to give the movie more narrative meaning than it expresses before or after the pornographic scene.

Having not read Pynchon’s novel I can’t speak to the book’s ostensibly satirical implications. However, if they exist in Pynchon’s original text, any such methodical social commentary is noticeably absent from Anderson’s politically evasive film. “Inherent Vice” also fails as a comedy, and as a would-be neo noir. Even if you attempt to imagine “Inherent Vice” as a ramped-up version of “The Big Sleep,” whose MacGuffin was merely an excuse for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall to heat up the screen with their real-life romantic chemistry, you will be sadly dissatisfied because Joaquin Phoenix is perpetually incapable of sharing onscreen chemistry with anyone, male or female. 

Anderson continuously wheels out outlandish characters inhabited by objectively competent actors. Josh Brolin is endlessly watchable as lunatic LAPD lieutenant detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. Bigfoot is a reliably unreliable cop who is just as likely to go on a Bad Lieutenant spree as he is to carry on a civilized conversation.

Benicio Del Toro is squandered in a poorly defined supporting role as Sauncho Smilax, a maritime attorney who comes to Doc's rescue at various times. Del Toro's portrayal reminds us of the Oscar Zeta Acosta character he played in Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (adapted from Hunter S. Thompson's famous book) — a far better film that made far better use of Del Toro's immeasurable gifts as an actor. To that end, give me Hunter S. Thompson over Pynchon any day.

At two and one half hours, “Inherent Vice” wears out its welcome before the halfway mark arrives. A parade of characters prattles on in endless monologues and off-hand comments that are simultaneously colorful and utterly meaningless.

Empty plot machinations swirl around Shasta’s involvement in a scheme to swindle a billionaire real estate magnate out of his fortune by committing him to a mental institution. ‘70s era trappings of free love, drugs, and endemic corruption add up to a recipe for irrelevant narrative chaos. The ‘70s era dead-end characters in “Inherent Vice” are representative of a long-dead-gone generation.

The best thing the movie does is that it reminds us that we too will wither and die — some sooner than later. Eat some pizza. Smoke a bowl. Have some hot sex. Any of those experiences will far surpass the one you will have watching “Inherent Vice.”

Rated R. 149 mins. 

THE ZERO THEOREM

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Less Than Zero
Terry Gilliam Slips On a Virtual Banana Peel

Terry Gilliam’s further slide down the stairs of filmic entropy is best summed up by an oft-repeated phrase by his latest film’s hypochondriac protagonist Qohen Leth, “Q” for short. “We are dying.”

However, the editorial expression of Q’s imminent doom, as spoken by a bald-headed Christoph Waltz, takes on little meaning as the film’s wafer-thin dystopian storyline moves from point A to point B, and barely that. Indeed, “We are dying, us, ourselves,” while watching this movie.

Q is a frail scientist working in stay-at-home conditions for an emblematic “management” (played by Matt Damon wearing a receding white hair piece) of a corporation known as Mancom. Q’s hyper stressful assignment involves “crunching entities” to prove whether or not human existence holds any meaning.

Gilliam’s use of near 3D graphics to represent the computer program that Q uses to maneuver around bricks of formula into gigantic walls containing billions of other such bricks is about as visually compelling as counting cracks in a sidewalk.

Waltz’s hairless “worker-bee” character holes up in a converted church in a future version of London where crossing busy streets filled with tiny eco-cars presents a dangerous proposition for pedestrians. Electronic advertising taunts the public at every step. “Everyone’s getting rich except you.” A giant billboard entreats the public to join the church of “Batman the Redeemer.” Think “Blade Runner” or “Starship Troopers.”

The offices for Mancom Corp. resemble a gaudy, smaller, steampunk version of the bureaucratic maze that Gilliam created for “Brazil,” via Michael Radford’s film version of “1984.” Much like the NSA, Mancom sees and records all human activity. Day-Glo colors plastered on cheap set designs do little to distract from the film’s all-too-obvious budgetary limitations.

Management’s “Zero Theorem” posits what our collective subconscious already knows, that humanity’s precarious place in the universe is predicated on an unstable quantum chaos that can and will come crashing down at any moment, just as surly as it sprang into being. “Zero must equal 100%.” “All is for nothing.” It’s a thematic punch line that arrives like a big wet fart.

Some people — like American politicians and CEOs for its Industrial Military Complex, for example — have figured out how to make vast quantities of cash by instilling fear and causing chaos on nearly every spot of land on the planet. Q isn’t one of these people. He is afraid of everything, but he fears “nothing” most of all. Q has waited all of his life for a phone call informing him of his life’s calling. The closest he comes to receiving such a message occurs when he meets Bainsley (Melanie Thierry), a sexy trollop sent by management to seduce him into wanting her before committing a clever act of bait-and-switch. Not one to be penetrated, Bainsley gives Q an all-body tantric sex suit with which he can sensuously interact with her through her website.

Q’s liberation of spirit and body lies only in his imagination. The movie seems to posit that the end of humanity, as part and parcel to the intrinsic nature of our chaotic universe, will most likely be achieved by technologically-produced illusions. 

Management sends its teenage son Bob (Lucas Hedges) to order pizzas and give youthful pep talks to the old man in case Bainsley’s naughty provocations aren’t enough to speed up Q’s formula solving. Management needs an answer, chop chop.

Newbie screenwriter Pat Rushin doesn’t know a plot point from a plot twist. Why Terry Gilliam chose to direct Rushin’s idiotic script is a mystery more puzzling than the zero theorem itself. Perhaps the director of such cinematic milestones as “Brazil,” and “12 Monkeys” thought he could elevate “The Zero Theorem” into some kind of resolution to his “Orwellian” trilogy.

However, there is no comparison between “Zero Theorem” and those two far more convincing films. Gilliam completionists will need to see for themselves — too bad for them. The genius that made “Time Bandits” and “The Fisher King” hasn’t made a good film since 1998, when he adapted Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” It may not be too soon to announce that “we” are finished.

Rated R. 107 mins.