Bill Maher’s Take on ‘Barbie’ Is One of the Lamest Movie Reviews Ever – Rolling Stone
You could have heard that Invoice Maher hated the Barbie film — an all-too-predictable consequence for a 67-year-old crank who some HBO exec thinks is “edgy” as a result of he spends a lot of his airtime railing in opposition to “wokeness.” You’d assume somebody whose movie performing CV contains winners like Pizza Man, Tomcats, and Cannibal Girls within the Avocado Jungle of Loss of life would have a bit extra self-awareness; then once more, this isn’t one in all Maher’s sturdy fits.
On Monday afternoon, the Actual Time host took to the platform previously often called Twitter to crank out a 365-word assessment of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a summer time blockbuster in regards to the titular Mattel doll (performed by Margot Robbie) who transports herself into the true world solely to study that women-ruled Barbieland is a far cry from our patriarchal actuality. Ken (Ryan Gosling), after stalking her via the portal, involves the conclusion that he now not needs to be a friendzoned accent, goes full incel, and leads the opposite Kens in a hostile takeover of Barbieland, transmogrifying it right into a males’s rights activist’s moist dream full of “Mojo Dojo Casa Homes.” The film was launched to near-universal essential acclaim and has grossed over $1 billion worldwide, making Gerwig the primary solo feminine director with a billion-dollar film.
Maher tweeted that Barbie was “preachy” and “man-hating,” whereas additionally calling it a “#ZombieLie,” which is a phrase he’s desperately making an attempt (and failing) to make occur. He goes on to criticize it for taking sure inventive liberties to drive house its level — specifically, depicting the Mattel board as all-male within the movie when it isn’t, and having the Barbies “act helpless” to trick the Kens within the third act, quipping, “Helen Gurley Brown known as, she needs her premise again.” The comic additionally boasted of seeing Barbie “with a girl in her 30s who mentioned, ‘I don’t know a single lady of any age who would act like that right now,’” and implied that the “patriarchy” is a factor of the previous as a result of “45% of the 449 board seats crammed final yr in Fortune 500 firms had been girls,” including, “I can see the world round me, and I can learn information.”
Effectively, apparently Maher can’t “learn information” very nicely. He seems to have misinterpret (or intentionally misinterpreted) a latest report commissioned by Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Variety concluding that 46.5% of board seats in Fortune 100 firms had been made up of ladies and minorities (not simply girls). Of all Fortune 500 firms, the report concluded that solely 22% of board seats got to girls and minorities, whereas 78% of board seats within the Fortune 500 had been held by white males. Girls additionally solely make up about 12% of the world’s billionaires, their our bodies are at the moment being legislated in opposition to throughout the U.S. (and world), and, in line with a Pew Analysis Middle evaluation, the gender pay hole within the U.S. has remained comparatively steady over the previous twenty years, with “girls incomes a median of 82.2% of what males earned.” Hell, in Maher’s personal area of late-night tv, there are a grand whole of zero feminine hosts after Amber Ruffin’s Peacock present was lately downgraded to a sequence of specials. And, not like the fictional realm of the Barbie film, there’s by no means been a feminine president within the U.S.
Sure, Invoice, the patriarchy is actual, and we’re a good distance from gender equality on this nation.
As for his plot criticisms, I’m nonetheless a bit baffled by Maher’s problem with the Barbies performing “helpless” within the third act to trick the oblivious Kens, and Maher quoting his thirtysomething film date as saying, “I don’t know a single lady of any age who would act like that right now” as proof that the movie is one way or the other far-fetched. Apart from the truth that this can be a spin on a basic film trope — damsel acts distressed to entice dim-witted man — and is a blatant act of subterfuge on the a part of the Barbies, the Barbies are… Barbies. Barbieland shouldn’t be an actual place, and the best way folks behave in Barbieland shouldn’t be meant to be sensible (fairly the other). That is satire, Invoice!
Maher concludes his assessment of types by saying that, regardless of every thing he wrote, the Barbie film “is enjoyable, I loved it — nevertheless it IS a #ZombieLie.” Look, let’s name this what it’s: a 67-year-old man tweeting out an offended, hashtag-filled assessment of the Barbie film to make headlines. And we haven’t even touched on essentially the most embarrassing a part of it: at one level, Maher manufacturers the Barbie film “so 2000-late” — a nod to a Fergie line from the Black Eyed Peas’ 2009 anthem “Growth Growth Pow” the place she raps, “I’m so 3008 / You so 2000 and late.” And he dropped this cringeworthy, decade-plus-old line in a screed in regards to the Barbie film being out of contact. I believe it’s time to sign off, sir.
Maybe the primary reactionary troll to publicly lose their thoughts over the Barbie film was Ben Shapiro, a Hollywood nepo child (the son of a TV exec and a composer) who has apparently harbored a grudge in opposition to the business ever since he was rejected from a writing gig on CBS’ The Good Spouse. Shapiro made a YouTube video known as “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Film for 43 Minutes” (caps his) that noticed him burn Barbie dolls over a barbecue and decry its “wokeness” — an embarrassing show even for him.
In recent times, Maher, like Shapiro, has used his Actual Time megaphone to spout unhealthy film takes, whining about “Girl Ghostbusters,” defending Inexperienced E-book and Bohemian Rhapsody (Maher: “Now, the sexuality is positioned within the background and it’s, the place is the dick-sucking?”), you title it. Something for these contrarian factors. I’m not even positive what the hell this implies:
Then once more, Maher couldn’t be a worse messenger in relation to misogyny. He’s a sexagenarian who, when he isn’t dropping the N-word, has gleefully known as girls “bimbos” on his present. And, as one in all Maher’s exes, Karine Steffans, who’s Black, as soon as mentioned of him, “Invoice needs somebody he can put down in an argument, inform you how ghetto you’re, how huge your butt is and that you just’re an fool. That’s why you by no means see him with a white woman or an mental.”
No marvel he discovered the Barbie film so triggering.
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