BARBIE***

BARBIE is a fun light film that isn't really as profound or original as it thinks, but worth seeing for Ryan Gosling's star-turn as Ken. Greta Gerwig shows us how cine literate she is, but she tangles herself in knots trying to show us how Barbie is actually a feminist icon. Worse still, she wastes a truly heartfelt pre-ending with housewife turned Barbie inventor Ruth Handler with yet another tonally uneven shift into broad comedy.

First the good stuff. For much of its running time BARBIE is a lot of fun. It looks fun, the pop songs are great, the costumes are fabulous and it has the same kind of crass gonzo energy as ZOOLANDER.  Ryan Gosling is absolutely superb as Barbie's overlooked boyfriend Ken, really channelling that Owen Wilson-Ben Stiller vibe with his outrageous prickly vanity.  I also loved Michael Cera - long known to us a dry comedy genius - as Ken's even more overlooked sidekick. 

The problem is that these charismatic, hilarious, male characters overshadow Barbie in her own movie.  Ken's enlightenment upon leaving Barbieland for contemporary LA is that men (and horses!) rule! The path of Ken from friendzoned sidekick to champion of the patriarchy and thence to working on himself and being "Ken Enough" is genuinely fascinating and funny and at times genuinely poignant. It's something we haven't really seen addressed in contemporary film before: the reaction of men in a world that is now empowering women - or at least paying lip service to that. 

By contrast, Barbie's enlightenment that the real world is not a matriarchy is pretty hackneyed.  America Ferrera makes a superb speech in the final act of the film about how tough it is to be a woman in contemporary society - be pretty but not too threatening, be thin but not too thin, have a career but also be a great mum. The speech resonates but felt like so many speeches I had heard before. There is (sadly) nothing new here for us, even it's new to Barbie. 

I also don't feel that the film ever squares the circle of how to reconcile the "fascistic" uber prettiess of Barbie with the concept that Barbie is actually a feminist empowerment telling little girls everywhere they can be doctors and scientists and President.  What Barbie actually tells them is that society recognises and rewards an impossible standard of beauty.  The character Sasha gets it right with her epic second act takedown but Greta Gerwig (in partnership with Mattel) never has the balls or the scope to really explore that.

Last but not least, let's talk about tone, and how Greta Gerwig tries to have it all - from dayglo Barbie pink with songs by Lizzo and Dua Lipa, to ethereal mournful existential angst in the words of Billie Eilish.  I feel that is particularly jarring in the final scenes of the film where a genuinely moving scene between Margot Robbie's Barbie and Rhea Pearlman's Ruth Handler is sandwiched between Barbieland fun and a gynie joke. Pick a lane, Greta! Pick a lane.

BARBIE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 114 minutes.

GETTING IT BACK - THE STORY OF CYMANDE - BFI London Film Festival 2022

If you've listened to track by The Sugarhill Gang, The Fugees or Soul 2 Soul you've probably heard Cymande sampled.  Their sound is cool jazz, soul, funk, unique.  What you might not know is that they came together in early 1970s South London, first generation immigrants from the West Indies, and despite being ignore at home, discriminated against by society, they rose to be the first British band to play the Apollo, before splitting up in 1975.  After that they might have slipped into obscurity were it not for generations of hip-hop artists that discovered and sampled their work, resulting in a mid-2010s return to touring.  

This documentary is a labour of love from documentarian Tim Mackenzie-Smith and benefits from interviews with five band members, including leaders Steve Scipio and Patrick Patterson. (The latter too became lawyers which helped in actually getting paid for all that sampling!) It also benefits from a lot of interviews with famous musicians talking about how they went on their own journeys to find the band behind the sound, and were inspired by Cymande in their own work. 

Even more consequentially, we see how Cymande's refusal to conform, and refusal to be held back by societal discrimination, spoke to kids experiencing just that - not least a young Craig Charles.  

The result is a film that will speak to fans of Cymande who didnt even know they were - people like me who instantly recognise their sound from endless reinterprations. But it deserves to be seen by anyone with an interest in the post-war British immigrant experience and remains shockingly relevant to our time. What I really loved was its message of getting on with it anyway, refusing to be pigeonholed and ignored, and carving your own path.

GETTING IT BACK - THE STORY OF CYMANDE has a running time of 89 minutes. It played SXSW 2022 and will play the BFI London Film Festival in October.

MORTDECAI

What really annoys me about this piss-poor attempt at a caper film is that Johnny Depp's vanity project is likely to put people off reading the marvellous source novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli.  And this is a shame because those novels combine the wit of P.G. Wodehouse, the political incorrectness of George Macdonald Fraser and a surprising familiarity with the intricate workings of crime.  Taken together they create a marvellous world of 1970s intrigue in which our hero, wily art dealer Charlie Mortdecai, outwits various intelligence agencies and evil-doers, with his loyal sidekick and thug, Jock.  To be sure, the books vary in style - the first two are basically thrillers - the third is a detective story and the last is a prequel more akin to a high seas adventure.  All of them contain a rich vein of comedy running through them but they aren't just or even mostly comedies.  And Charlie himself, while a very witty man, is not chiefly a comedic character. He's middle aged, overweight, often wrong, but very very cunning and can always be relied upon to outwit his enemies.  He is also not remotely camp.

And yet, in this woeful excuse for a film, Charlie Mortdecai becomes just another Johnny Depp weirdo - as camp as a row of buttons - sporting an absurd British accent and a moustache hardly worthy of the name.  Worse still, the movie plays as pastiche, rather than straight, which is always the death of comedy.  I feel that the director, David Koepp (writer of the similarly woeful last INDIANA JONES film) and screenwriter Eric Aronson didn't really know how to tackle the novels. So instead of just adapting the first, which would have been coherent in tone and style - being a James Bond style thriller - they use elements of all three. The result is an incoherent mess - is it a detective story or a caper?  Moreover, they do not seem to know when they want to set the movie.  It looks like the present day, although clearly Charlie could not be a plausible undercover agent in such a world, and yet Mark Ronson has provided a campy 1970s score. 

The result is so bad it's embarrassing. To be sure, Johnny Depp is the worst offender, but Gwyneth Paltrow - utterly miscast as Johanna Krampf - is utterly irritating. Paul Bethany plays Jock as a thug but without that softer side and without his very deadpan humour.

Avoid at all costs, but please do try the books.

MORTDECAI is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes.  The film is on global release.