Plastic, Yes...but Fantastic or Iconoclastic? - Barbie, Reviewed

The day after watching Oppenheimer, we were back at the theatre (Landmark this time) to see Greta Gerwig's Barbie, statting Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

For context, I have never been a fan of Barbie - the perpetually high heel, the impossible shape, the prominence of fashion over substance. There was a brief moment, when Fenya was very young, where I explored the possibility of keeping the household Barbie-free. 

Audrey shook her head. "You can't do that," she patiently explained. "Barbie is ubiquitous. In dolls, it is babies and then Barbie, but on the plus side, Barbie can be or do anything." Watching the Barbie episode of The Toys That Made Us was very helpful to my understanding as well, and I highly recommend seeing it before this film.

The movie works from this same premise. Stereotypical Barbie (Robbie) lives in her pink plastic dream house that has a slide but no stairs, as she can float down to ground level. You can almost imagine a gentle hand guiding her descent - and car crashes are handled in exactly the same way. 

Her relationship with Ken (Gosling) is ill-defined, something that seems more troubling to him than her, but she has also been experiencing depression and thoughts of death, and leaves Barbieland for the Real World to find out why, with Ken tagging along to find his own answers.

And that is all I am going to tell you about the story. 

I was excited when an indie filmmaker took the helm of what should have been a tasteless leveraging of an IP and resulting cash grab, but Gerwig and her writing/partner Noah Baumbach have somehow done the impossible. Like walking the tightrope between commerce and art while simultaneously threading the needle of approachable mainstream success - they have made a fun summer movie good for all ages, that is also going to be an important cultural touchstone. 

There will be people who will tell you that Barbie is anti-male, or unnecessarily divisive, or over-feminist. Very few, if any, of these people will be women. Responses like this are the reason the Barbie movie date night is becoming a litmus test for many discerning females, and I am here for it.

Make no mistake - despite being a very funny, entertaining and touching film about an unreasonably popular toy, Barbie asks some pretty tough questions about why things are the way they are, and questions whether or not they have to be, and the whole idea of patriarchy. And to me, this is no bad thing.

It also puts us males on the spot a few times, in ways that we may find uncomfortable. As a fella who has owned a beer-stocked mini-fridge and told people they really, really need to watch The Godfather, I felt myself being highlighted a couple of times.

But you know what? It's fine. I'm fine. I benefitted from the privilege, so I can take the ribbing that comes with it. And so can rampant consumerism, corporate culture, and middle-class ennui.

Barbie clocks in at just under two hours and uses its time masterfully. It follows up broad humour that appeals to all ages with dissonant and uncharacteristic dialogue that will zoom right over the kids' heads while making adults giggle, not unlike a vintage Warner Bros. cartoon. It's a great time and seeing it with a crowd if you can will only enhance your enjoyment of it. But the larger question remains:

OPPENHEIMER vs BARBIE - WHO WINS?

So let's make one thing clear: Barbie owns the box-office on this one. It's PG-13 rating gives it access to a massive audience that Oppenheimer and its R-rating cannot hope to approach. Barbie's shorter run-time also facilitates more screenings, and kids being out of school means matinees will get better than average attendance. 

I think Oppenheimer will get more Oscar nominations, but Gerwig and Baumbach can certainly count on a nod or two as well, for a brilliant screenplay and simply outstanding production design and costumes.

But I don't think winning more Oscars necessarily makes one movie objectively better than another - God only knows how many times I have shouted at my television after those envelopes have been opened. And even if it is 'better', I still wouldn't take a pre-teen to see Nolan's flick.

No, stacking these two brilliant but vastly different works against each other is not like comparing apples to oranges - it is like comparing oranges to forklifts. Thankfully, movies are not a zero-sum game, and the solution is clear: you should see both films. And soon! so Hollywood takes note and maybe takes a few more chances on something besides franchise tentpoles (which I love, but variety is the spice of life, right?).

But watching Barbie approach one billion dollars in global box office in only its second weekend, and knowing so many children are being exposed to the iconoclastic ideas wrapped snugly within this brightly coloured cinematic confection makes me pretty happy. 

So if you have to pick one to see first and you make it Barbie instead of Oppenheimer, and you maybe take a young person along (and not necessarily a girl either - boys really need to see this movie!), you are going to get a solemn nod of approval from me.

Along with a grin, because I know you are in for a good time.

"Of Arms and the Man": Oppenheimer, Reviewed

"Armo virumque canto / I sing of arms and the man" - Virgil, The Aeneid

I will admit, I was a little apprehensive about sitting down to watch Oppenheimer tonight.

It was a foregone conclusion I was going to go - Christopher Nolan is probably my favourite filmmaker at this point in time. But I was a little afraid that the dialogue would be indecipherable at points, like it was in Tenet, or that his resistance to linear order might prompt him to tell the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," from the point of view of a sub-atomic tachyon traveling backwards in time from the Trinity test explosion. Or that the three-hour runtime might prompt me to leave the theater briefly and miss some unexpected awesomeness. Or anything, really.

I needn't have worried.

Oppenheimer is an engaging, even captivating film despite its length. It deftly balances a grandiose science and engineering story about the day human history was divided into perhaps its most significant pre- and post- epochs, and the amazingly personal details and struggles of the flawed genius who brought that epoch into being. 

Based largely on Kai Bird and Michael Sherwin's Pulitzer-winning biograpohy of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, Nolan tells one story on two parallel tracks: one, in colour, has Cillian Murphy defending his history and life decisions to a hostile board trying to strip him of power and credibility in 1954 ("1. Fission"). The other, in black and white (the first ever IMAX footage shot in b&w!) features Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, founder of the Atomic Energy Commission, being grilled about Oppenheimer during his Senate confirmation hearings in 1959 ("2. Fusion").

Both these leads bring tremendous power and subtle nuance to their performances; Murphy in particular. His inevitable Oscar nomination highlight reel might not even feature him speaking, such is the power of his facial expression, and his frequently tortured, hollowed eyes. And RDJ disappears almost completely into his role, letting his trademark sass out only on brief occasions, and always on a leash.

Oppenheimer is very likely Nolan's strongest screenplay to-date and one of only a handful not co-written with his brother.  He has been fairly criticized for the limited amount of strong female roles in his films, and while this one would still not pass the Bechdel test, both Florence Pugh (as Oppenheimer's lover Jean Tatlock, whose strong communist affiliations trail him throughout the film) and Emily Blunt (as his wife Kitty) give wonderful, human performances that go far beyond basic girlfriend/spouse representation.

Frankly, I don't think there is a character in this film who does not need to be there, and there are a lot of them, recurring on both the Fusion and Fission tracks that Nolan lays out for us. It is a panoply of great performers, both character actors and leads.

The dialogue is fast and crisp, the interactions touch on family, labour, politics, sex, and of course, physics and the war. I knew very little of Oppenheimer's life after the war and his infamous Trinity quote: "I am created Shiva; Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." So learning of his transition from theorist to project manager to policy influencer was both fascinating and tragic to witness. 

And while it is boldly directed, with both impressionistic, surrealist, and waking dream sequences woven throughout, there is very little of the flash and glamour we associate with Nolan as a brilliant visualist, and his restraint makes for a very powerful introspective film. 

But the Trinity test?

How do you build so much anticipation and drama into an event that the audience already knows the outcome to? I can't say for certain, but look for Nolan's now-trademark manipulation of time in a slowing countdown prior to detonation, as well as Ludwig Goransson's score making good use of Hans Zimmer's sonic illusion from Dunkirk, where the pitch feels like it is steadily increasing, but never peaks. Masterful stuff all around, really.

I haven't seen a whole lot of this year's grown-up films and Oscar bait, but at this point, I am ready to throw 8-10 statuettes at Oppenheimer: Picture, Screenplay, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Score, Sound, Visual Effects (with zero CGI!)...

It is also a profoundly affecting film, with a lot to say about how fear guides our best and worst decisions, humanity's questionable exercising of the power of life and death, and the potential impacts of atomic weapons on our survivability as a species. I would hesitate to characterize it as depressing, but it is certainly sobering.

My only regret at this point was not seeing it in IMAX, which I may yet end up going and doing at some point. 

Memories of Bayport and The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook

With Fenya currently packing up her belongings in order to move them out to Toronto, there is quite a bit of sorting going on, mostly of the keep/ditch variety. Some hard choices for sure, but with limited space in their first shared dwelling (550 sq. ft.), she had been doing pretty well at divesting thus far.

Looking at the bookshelves in the basement, I know my own time of reckoning is coming nigh; dusty college textbooks, references untouched since Wikipedia is easier, wonderful paperbacks meant to be read again "someday"... the list goes on. 

Some books will be kept because they are likely to be reread (Lord of the Rings), some because they should be re-read (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and still others because they are great ones to lend out (like that copy of Inside Delta Force I loaned out to someone and has yet to return).

Some are on the bubble, tipping between practicality and sentimentality. That kids' edition of Tarzan with the Ape/English dictionary in the back? That will be hard to part with. Harder still will be the long-coveted grail of my childhood - The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook.

I was reading before I trundled off to first grade (no kindergarten in rural New Brunswick where I grew up) and was a voracious reader. A cousin of Mum's introduced me to the Hardy Boys when I was in first or second grade, and I was agog. These weren't kids like me or grown ups like my folks, but something in-between...

They went to school but also drove cars, knew judo and boxing, were proficient with scuba equipment and firearms, and regularly thwarted kidnappers, smugglers and thieves. They also regularly rescued their own father, who got into an awful lot of tight scrapes for a world-famous detective. I fell for the series like a safe dropped out a window.

My personal collection was only a handful of second-hand books gathered from garage sales or received as gifts, but I pored over the stacks in the library at Willow Park Elementary (after passing Mrs. Cameron's read-aloud test required to check out books from the upper elementary section) to make sure I hadn't missed any.

I read all the Hardy Boys I could find at the Leduc Public Library as well, looking over the checklist on the back covers to see if there were any titles I had missed. One volume tantalized me terribly with its unfamiliar formatting and the absence of any descriptor you might use to convey a sense of the unknown, such as mystery, secret or clue: The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook.

My mind reeled at the thoughts of what legerdemain might be contained within such a tome, and its very elusiveness only increased its credibility in my eyes over the years.  And on one fateful day, when Dad was purchasing a book at the Coles in Southgate Mall and I dutifully looked over the DI-DO section of the young readers section to fill gaps in my Hardy Boys reading list, there it was.

I hurriedly brought it over to my father, breathlessly explained how long I had been searching for this particular title, and begged him to purchase it for me. This was not something I did a whole lot of (I don't think?), and he and Mum both liked to encourage my reading. This coupled with the real-world information credited on the cover to a retired Bureau man swayed him enough to drop $3.95 and elevate him to truly heroic status in my eyes.

And make no mistake, I devoured that book. It was set as a series of short stories featuring everyone's favourite teenaged detectives, but each one was followed by a non-fiction chapter outlining the techniques, science or equipment used in the preceding tale. Fingerprinting, surveillance, crime scene analysis, plaster casts of foot or tire prints and photography were but a few of the topics covered. What nine-year-old didn't want to learn how to tail a suspect without getting caught, or where the best places were to dust for fingerprints? 

I never got so far as to build my own fingerprint kit (with dusting powder, adhesive tape and index cards) but marveled at the inside lingo of loops and whorls provided no doubt by legit G-man William F. Flynn.

One lesson about observation really stuck with me; after witnessing a motor accident, Frank and Joe Hardy describe one of the autos involved while their hapless friend (and consistent transportation provider thanks to his jalopy) Chet Morton confesses he only made out a blur. 

One of the brothers patiently explains that observational skills can be developed over time, like a muscle, but will not perform if left unexercised. He demonstrates by turning Chet around and saying, "You've been with us all morning; describe the shirt I'm wearing."

Poor Chet guesses incorrectly, and the brothers don't chide him, but encourage him to work on it, because they may be quasi-fetishized establishment squares, but are good chums and stand up fellows nonetheless. I immediately pictured myself failing that selfsame test, and would probably do so today as well, despite the valuable lesson Frank and Joe tried to teach me. But their encouragement of their less-observant comrade stuck with me even more.

Despite my fervent and misguided childhood wishes (pro tip: don't tell your friends you wish one of them would get kidnapped so you could rescue them), I never got the opportunity to truly apply anything I'd learned from the Hardy Boys Detective Handbook. I did get a nice basic understanding of how forensics worked, and its limitations, which made me a bit more critical of other youthful mystery series.

And I read most of them: Alvin and the Secret Code, Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators, Encyclopedia Brown, etc. Kids interacting with adults, interesting settings, and always a puzzle to solve, a mystery to unravel- but only the Hardy Boys backed it up with one book of real-world knowledge, and I am grateful for that. And for Dad, who was not an easy sell on such things, who relented to my pleas almost a half-century ago.

Yeah, I am probably going to hang on to that Handbook.

(Original 1959 edition with even squarer Hardys)

S**t Doesn't 'Just Happen'

Last weekend we were playing bocce with my sister-in-law and her family at their place in Rocky Mountain House. One of her teammates' shots moved the pallino, or target ball, so instead of her team getting three points, my team got one. The shooter was upset while Betty was largely philosophical, and shrugged, saying "Well, shit happens."

I interjected. "You know, when people said that around my mum, she always said the same thing: "It does not just happen - it's created by an asshole."

Betty looked at me and grinned. "Your mom was a smart lady. I'm gonna use that one for certain!"

I've mentioned this favourite aphorism of my mother's to a few people. She did not come up with it, but it was definitely closely associated with her. And while it might not be true in every single case, I think the wisdom contained in it is very nearly indisputable.

My mother had a pretty simple outlook on life and a very, very low tolerance for bullshit. She believed everyone deserved to be treated with dignity and respect and treated people accordingly. When someone at the Legion told her they wouldn't watch the Rick MercerReport anymore since they learned the host was gay, she said, "Suit yourself, but you know he was gay before you found out, right? Was he funny then?"

The growing opposition some uptight people are increasingly bold about displaying when it has no real impact on their lives is not only puzzling to me, but also troubling. I thought we had reached a kind of live-and-let-live detente of some kind where a minority of people who felt sexual relations between folks of the same (or multiple, or indeterminate, or whatever gender) was unnatural were going to largely keep their opinions to themselves, and the rest of us were going to keep on letting consenting adults get married, increasing equality and diversity and not worry about it too much.

What happened?

Now we have a nervy granddad calling a 9-year-old girl 'trans" at a school track meet in Kelowna, jackasses regularly vandalizing rainbow crosswalks across my province, and an idiot hijacked the city council meeting in the town I grew up in to talk about how upset (some) people are with Pride events and that certain herbicides can reassign genders if you breathe them. And all while he bragged about being in the Freedumb Convoy, Canda's more polite version of the January 6 insurrection!

Our church hosts a table each year at the St. Albert Pride Festival each year, and to be honest, I was pretty relieved when I turned up and there wasn't a gauntlet of protesters to wade through. Talking to a table visitor about it (after we celebrated that St. Albert United is no longer Alberta's northernmost Affirming ministry since Grande Prairie had become Affirming the week before!), and asked her where she thought it came from.

"I think it's political," she said without hesitation. "I think there are structures and organizations that benefit greatly from such a distracted populace." 

The fact that so many wrong and wrong-headed people are clearly getting their misinformation from some single source really makes me wonder if she is right; Phil McDavid, the mental giant who derailed Leduc's council meeting, and his wife Laurel claimed that the additional colours in the Progress Pride flag (which stand for marginalized people of colour in the LGBTQ+ community as well as trans and bisexual folks) actually refer to "bestiality, necrophilia and pedophilia." This bizarre, unprovable and let me state again, clearly wrong interpretation still drew applause from the other bigots they had seeded the crowd with. 

A few months, two men took it upon themselves to enter my church and interrupt Bible study and accost the people there with the same nonsensical accusation. Part of me wishes I had been there, but a wiser part knows it is better I wasn't, and I am grateful that Rev. Mervin was able to firmly but gently show them the door.

I hate thinking like a conspiracy theorist, but the unanimity, the level of organization, the clear lines of communication, it all makes it easier to believe that someone or some group is pushing this hateful disinformation. They then cloak it in "what about the children? Leave our kids alone!" (despite the fact that it is statistically verifiable that straight, cis-gendered men known to the family are far more of a threat to children than gay strangers) so that people without the capacity for critical thought or independent reasoning feel prompted to act. 

Today's article in The Guardian about American evangelists lobbying the government of Uganda since 2009 to help them pass anti-LGBTQ+ legislation brought another level of focus to the picture. Not enough to stop it, sadly, but enough to recognize it as the pernicious threat it is, rather than the annoyance it likely appears to be to the majority of straight people.

Same-sex relationships are now punishable by death in Uganda, where people don't have the same resources to combat the misinformation. And the "minivan Taliban" (as Jim "Stonekettle Wright refers to them) would be happy to see similar treatment here in North America. So perhaps that is the anal orifice that this particular type of fecal material is emanating from, hmm?

On the plus side though, the towns that stood up to these small-minded bigots enjoyed their Pride observances, even when they felt obliged to hire extra security for them. Most allies have not turned and fled, but instead doubled down. This is a setback, not an upset, even when it is upsetting.

But watching the legislative backsliding of LGBTQ+ rights in many U.S. states and knowing there are people who want the same thing here in Canada (and especially Alberta), and that they are working to make it happen, has redoubled my own resolve when it comes to calling out the bigotry and hate and disinformation when I see it. 

Be like my Mum: don't take shit when it is offered to you. And remind people that it doesn't just happen.

It always comes from an asshole.

The Dark Angels Return?

As near as I can figure, I have played perhaps two games of Warhammer 40,000 in the past 13 years. So why did I stop? And why am I thinking of getting back into it?

The first one is mostly due to budget constraints, but not financially, even though it is not an inexpensive game or hobby). Most tabletop wargames are designed primarily as a one-on-one experience. You can definitely split an army up into its component parts and spread out command over multiple players, and that can be a lot of fun, but in the end, 40K works better as a substitute for chess than it does for Risk.

So if I have a limited amount of gaming time, I want to maximize it by having as many of my friends involved as possible. This was a big factor in pushing us back into tabletop role-playing games after a long absence. 

But there have been two new editions of the rules since I stopped buying them in 2007 after the end of my employment with Games Workshop, the publisher and manufacturer. And each edition carries a cost of updating not only the core rules but also an army book or codex for each faction you collect. The last edition (9th) also required a deck of psychic power cards, something I was glad they had abandoned when they moved to 3rd edition in the '90s.

But in 2023, GW announced that a 10th edition was coming, and not only would the core rules be completely free of charge, but they would also make the stats and points costs for each army free to download as well.

Suddenly a number of people in my social circles (far more than whom were playing when I left GW!) were talking about getting back into Warhammer 40,000. In addition to being free, the new rules were being promoted as "simple but not simplistic," which has a lot of appeal to me as well.

Last week I started unpacking and auditing my three remaining 40K armies and exposing them to the light of day for the first time in many years. I hadn't printed off any rules or datasheets yet, so this was solely an exploratory venture. Would the models still be usable? Were the paint jobs as bad as I remembered?

I started with my chosen faction of Space Marines, the Dark Angels. This has been my army of choice since the original Space Hulk Boardgame I bought around 1991 (!), and all the subsequent lore and aesthetic has been right in my wheelhouse ever since - monastic warrior knights with a dark secret about their history, cloaked in robes and brandishing a winged sword as their icon.

Better still, while most Marine chapters limit you to a single colour for the most part, the Dark Angels actually have three separate liveries, the base version being a dark green:

Their cavalry arm, the Ravenwing, have their motorcycles and landspeeders painted black with white trim.

And my favourite element, the Deathwing, paint their Tactical Dreadnought (or Terminator) armour bone white, a change from the black shown on my Space Hulk box. This was done in memory of the squad who saved their homeworld from an alien incursion but did not think they would survive doing so, and dusted their suits in white ash during their death rites prior to battle (from a brilliant short story by William King).

The Deathwing is probably my favourite part of my Dark Angels army, as evidenced by not only their size but also the resin shoulder pads I purchased in the UK (with the embossed Deathwing icon of a winged but broken sword).

And this is fortunate because those Terminators are already on proper-size bases for the most part, unlike my tactical marines and command squads shown above, whose 25mm bases now need to be a larger 32 mm size. Thankfully some enterprising boffin has already designed a 3D printable adapter which will make things much easier once Jeff has had a chance to print some out for me!

It looks like I can field nearly 2000 pts of Deathwing as-is though, so now I need to start learning the rules. I watched an introductory video last week from a third-party gaming channel that was tremendously well-produced and very helpful, but gosh was it strange being taught this game by someone else after having done so on an almost daily basis for over a decade! 

Initial reports from my mates are that the game is as fun as GW suggests it is, which is extremely heartening. With any luck I get some more enjoyment out of these models I painted years ago, and resist the siren call of the newer, bigger and even flashier models they are producing nowadays...