When I saw the New Yorker headline calling the new "Barbie" movie "brilliant," I braced for news that the esoteric critic Richard Brody had maybe been lobotomized. His intellectual analyses can sometimes leave you with a dull headache. He, himself, is brilliant.
But then I read his first few sentences of his review, and I knew he was still his old self:
It’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished the genre’s name with the commercial excesses of superhero stories and C.G.I. animation, because fantasy is a far more severe test of directorial art than realism. This is, first off, because the boundless possibilities of the fantastical both allow for and require a filmmaker’s comprehensive creativity. But, crucially, fantasy is also a vision of reality—the subjective truth of filmmakers’ inner life, the world as it appears in their mind’s eye. The great directors of fantasy are the ones who make explicit the connection between their fantasy worlds and lived reality ...
He goes on to say:
"Barbie” is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of making pre-existing subjects one’s own, and it advocates for imaginative infidelity, the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property. Moreover, it presents such acts of reinterpreting familiar subjects, as a crucial form of self-analysis, a way to explore one’s own self-image and to confront the prejudices and inequities built into prevailing, top-down interpretations of them.
Don't ever change, brother.
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