On Barbie
A brief summary of the film, before we get into the whys and the hows and the Ryan Goslings. Barbie (Margot Robbie) is a Barbie girl in a Barbie world, where - generally speaking - life in plastic is fantastic. Barbie, like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, lives in a simulacrum of the real world, where every day is very similar to the one before - she and gazillions of other Barbies do things like go to the beach, have dance parties, win Nobel prizes for literature, while various Kens stand around and look pretty - until thoughts of mortality spur her to leave her own world and join the 'real' world (Los Angeles). One of the Kens (Ryan Gosling) joins her on this trip. Barbie discovers that her feelings of estrangement have been caused by a pair of real-world humans, a mother and daughter (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt) who are growing apart; the mother cherishes her daughter's old Barbie dolls (and also works for Mattel (?)), while her daughter is now a moody litt...