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

A BOY CALLED SAILBOAT

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Australian actor-turned-director Cameron Nugent’s debut feature is an inept magical realist story infused with a tone-deaf sense of humor and a vague sense of thematic direction. This film’s rudderless political subtext, involving an immigrant Mexican family living in an unnamed dusty American border town, gives way to bizarre sexual content (witness Jake Busey’s cock-show as an elementary school teacher in tight sweat pants with no underwear). A pro-Big-Tobacco message gets smuggled in for good measure. Shooting guns into the air for no reason also happens out of context. Nothing adds up.

Noel Gugliemi plays Jose, a face-tattooed Chicano family man with Meyo (Elizabeth De Razzo), his loyal housekeeping wife, and their six-year-old son Sailboat (Julian Atocani Sanchez). Jose supports his family’s leaning ramshackle house with a single wood beam that prevents the structure from collapsing on its occupants, ostensibly killing them. Jose drives around in a homie-not-approved four door ‘50s Oldsmobile missing its backseat doors.

There might be some arcane political commentary the filmmakers are attempting to make with the collapsing-house metaphor, but it doesn’t come across. 

The child actor Sanchez delivers monotone voice over narration that upends the movie before it gets started.

“You find the most important things when you’re not looking.” Sailboat finds a ukulele that every character inexplicably calls a guitar.

This “important thing” enables our young musical prodigy to write a song that casts a spell over anyone who hears it. The problem is that the filmmakers didn’t go to the trouble of creating a piece of music to fill the bill. They instead play a single tone akin to a honking car horn whenever Sailboat performs his soul-quenching sonic creation. This is just lazy filmmaking. It’s infuriating for an audience to feel so openly insulted by irresponsible filmmakers.

Without irony, a repeating guitar motif arrives in the guise of “The Sound of Silence.”

J.K. Simmons’s presence seemingly endorses “A Boy Called Sailboat,” although the A-List actor probably shot his scenes in a single day, and didn’t know much about the movie beyond his isolated bit as a used vehicle salesman in the middle of nowhere.

The people who come from miles around to hear Sailboat play his (silent) song sure do enjoy Meyo’s spicy meatballs. There are a lot of things not right about “A Boy Called Sailboat,” not the least of which are the mixed messages the film sends to kids. This is not a movie to leave laying around for your children to watch alone or even with parental guidance.

Not Rated. 92 mins.

 

STAR WARS: EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS

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The magic is gone from the “Star Wars” franchise. It has been for a very long time. The franchise started its decline when “Return of the Jedi” fell short of its predecessor (“The Empire Strikes Back”) way back in 1983. Every sequel or (ill conceived) prequel that has arrived since “The Empire Strikes Back” has possessed ever-less panache. If you think otherwise, go back and watch the films in the order that they were made.

You’ll never hear a Star Wars fan criticize George Lucas’s decision to abandon a linear approach to the storyline by inverting the series to break up the narrative into an abstract puzzle. Still, the overall effect is annoying to the point of distraction. No audience member should feel impelled to do a refresher course to figure out where the latest film of a franchise falls into its grand scheme. Faulty logic. This is one of a myriad of reasons that the James Bond franchise far outweighs Star Wars.  

This latest installment of fandom’s favorite mongrel pet is a poorly paced MacGuffin-chase plot, ginned up with groan-inducing spoonful doses of pro-war imagery and its attendant rudimentary vocabulary.

“We blow up the big gun.” “Keep the target hard.”

I kid you not.

Such dumbed down dialogue flows like so much toxic water in Flint, Michigan throughout this movie.

Yes, yes, yes, and amen. This is war fantasy cinema propaganda for kids. Barf.

This film’s pro-war indoctrination warms kids up to the idea of killing faceless victims (as always the soulless storm troopers, who it’s hinted at might be an army of black slaves).

No one ever said “Star Wars” was highbrow entertainment. If you doubt that this film’s core genre is children’s cinema, just look for its corollary toy merchandising. The bloated, overworked, storyline is all bubblegum gobbledygook about a map that leads to Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill, looking oddly similar to a late era Oliver Reed).   

The franchise’s culturally malnourished formula is to blame. “The Force Awakens” has none of the political commentary of “The Legos Movie,” but it does possess a political agenda, however oblique, aimed at its intended pre-teen audience.

The narrative surface is shallow and brittle. It’s all recycled style with accidental war propaganda thrown in as subtextual substance. George Lucas might believe in socialist ideas in his private life, but that’s never on display in the Star Wars films. Such potential complexity is a moot point considering that co-writer/director J.J. Abrams (“Star Trek — 2009) oversees this film’s production.

Rejiggering the same formulaic storyline results in an awkward cast of bland character prototypes reused though another sluggish round of children’s soap opera cinema parading as sci-fi. This is not the science fiction of social satire that Paul Verhoeven or Neil Blomkamp brings to the sci-fi genre.

The filmmakers here avoid an obvious opportunity for social subtext by not taking advantage of interracial romance between Daisy Ridley (as Rey, a junkyard salvager) and John Boyega (as Finn, an AWOL stormtrooper). Daisy Ridley is a spot-on cross between Emma Watson and a young Keira Knightley. That might sound like a compliment, but it’s not. If ham acting is your thing, then you’ll love watching Ridley mugging and pulling faces like a community theater actress playing to the last row.

What could have provided the movie with some much-needed heart merely gets blended through the Star Wars machine recipe. The writers go out of their way to renege on Finn’s potential as a renegade freedom fighter for the resistance. Finn describes himself as a member of the resistance when it suits him in the moment, but is quick to privately reveal that he holds no such allegiance. The character’s lack of integrity speaks to the film’s unwillingness to make any meaningful allegories, ever. The film’s ostensibly mindless viewer is invited to shut up and eat his or her freaking popcorn.

Sure the filmmakers make sure to tug at nostalgic heartstrings to induce a tear wherever possible, but that isn’t enough to redeem this undeniable snooze of a film. The movie could loose 25 minutes and still feel too long. As if that weren’t enough, this picture’s lame use of 3D is a final insult to make you wish you’d spent your money and time on “The Hateful Eight” instead.

Rated PG-13 135 mins.