In the future after the Barbie film formally crossed $1 billion on the field workplace, Invoice Maher joined Republican lawmakers throughout the aisle like Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz in airing his misgivings concerning the film—albeit with totally different gripes. Rendering his long-awaited verdict on Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster, Maher slammed the movie as “so 2000-LATE” due to, amongst different issues, the way it depicts the Mattel company board as all-male.
“I hoped it wouldn’t be preachy, man-hating, and a #ZombieLie—alas it was all three,” Maher wrote on Twitter, referencing a time period from his present outlined as “political statements which can be definitively confirmed fallacious and but refuse to die.”
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Maher recounts how Margot Robbie’s Barbie “fights the Patriarchy” together with “the Mattel board who created her, consisting of 12 white males!” led by Will Ferrell because the movie’s cartoonish CEO. However Maher has a bone to select. The precise Mattel board of administrators? Oh, he’s Googled it. And the physique really incorporates seven males and 5 girls. “OK, not excellent even-steven,” Maher continues, “however not the way in which the board IN THE MOVIE—which takes place in 2023—is portrayed. And probably not any longer deserving of the phrase ‘patriarchy.’
“Sure, there was one, and remnants of it stay,” Maher helpfully provides, “however this film is so 2000-LATE.”
When Vainness Truthful requested Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz how he feels about the way in which his firm is depicted within the film, Kreiz was unabashedly effusive. “We embrace self-deprecation,” he stated. “I assumed many components of [the movie]—particularly the Will Ferrell half—have been very humorous, hilarious at instances. We take our manufacturers very significantly and we take what we do very significantly, however we don’t take ourselves very significantly.”
However the board is just not Maher’s solely beef with Barbie. He additionally takes subject with the sequence that reveals Barbies “pretending to behave helpless and never know do stuff” so as to reclaim energy over Barbieland from Ryan Gosling’s Ken. “Sure, that WAS a factor,” Maher continues. “I noticed Barbie with a lady in her 30s who stated, ‘I don’t know a single lady of any age who would act like that at present.’” However earlier than you cry mansplaining, Maher provides, “That argument is so outdated and so foolish. In fact, none of us can know precisely what others undergo life, however I can see the world round me, and I can learn knowledge.”
Then, he’s again to his favourite new rule—let Mattel be Mattel! “The actual Mattel board is a reasonably shut mirror of the nation, the place 45% of the 449 board seats crammed final yr in Fortune 500 corporations have been girls,” Maher concludes. “Reality is, I’m not the one who’s out of step—I’m residing within the yr we’re residing in. Barbie is enjoyable, I loved it—but it surely IS a #ZombieLie. And individuals who don’t go together with zombie lies didn’t take some purple capsule—simply staying true to CURRENT actuality.”
It’s clear that Maher didn’t heed the warning of fellow comic Marc Maron—who stated on TikTok that the film’s “comedy about males is impressed” and “any dude that may’t take these hits in that film” are “a bunch of fucking insecure infants.”
