Bill Maher’s ‘Barbie’ Movie Review Is a Total Embarrassment
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
You may have heard that Bill Maher hated the Barbie movie — an all-too-predictable outcome for a 67-year-old crank who some HBO exec thinks is “edgy” because he spends so much of his airtime railing against “wokeness.” You’d think someone whose film acting CV includes winners like Pizza Man, Tomcats, and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death would have a bit more self-awareness; then again, this is not one of Maher’s strong suits.
On Monday afternoon, the Real Time host took to the platform formerly known as Twitter to crank out a 365-word review of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a summer blockbuster about the titular Mattel doll (played by Margot Robbie) who transports herself into the real world only to learn that women-ruled Barbieland is a far cry from our patriarchal reality. Ken (Ryan Gosling), after stalking her through the portal, comes to the realization that he no longer wishes to be a friendzoned accessory, goes full incel, and leads the other Kens in a hostile takeover of Barbieland, transmogrifying it into a men’s rights activist’s wet dream filled with “Mojo Dojo Casa Houses.” The movie was released to near-universal critical acclaim and has grossed over $1 billion worldwide, making Gerwig the first solo female director with a billion-dollar movie.
More from Rolling Stone
Maher tweeted that Barbie was “preachy” and “man-hating,” while also calling it a “#ZombieLie,” which is a phrase he is desperately trying (and failing) to make happen. He goes on to criticize it for taking certain creative liberties to drive home its point — namely, depicting the Mattel board as all-male in the film when it is not, and having the Barbies “act helpless” to trick the Kens in the third act, quipping, “Helen Gurley Brown called, she wants her premise back.” The comedian also boasted of seeing Barbie “with a woman in her 30s who said, ‘I don’t know a single woman of any age who would act like that today,’” and implied that the “patriarchy” is a thing of the past because “45% of the 449 board seats filled last year in Fortune 500 companies were women,” adding, “I can see the world around me, and I can read data.”
OK, "Barbie": I was hoping it wouldn't be preachy, man-hating, and a #ZombieLie – alas, it was all three. What is a Zombie Lie? Something that never was true, but certain people refuse to stop saying it (tax cuts for the rich increase revenues, e.g.); OR something that USED to be…
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) August 7, 2023
Well, apparently Maher can’t “read data” very well. He appears to have misread (or deliberately misinterpreted) a recent report commissioned by Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Diversity concluding that 46.5 percent of board seats in Fortune 100 companies were made up of women and minorities (not just women). Of all Fortune 500 companies, the report concluded that only 22 percent of board seats were given to women and minorities, while 78 percent of board seats in the Fortune 500 were held by white men. Women also only make up about 12 percent of the world’s billionaires, their bodies are currently being legislated against across the U.S. (and world), and, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, the gender pay gap in the U.S. has remained relatively stable over the past two decades, with “women earning an average of 82.2 percent of what men earned.” Hell, in Maher’s own arena of late-night television, there are a grand total of zero female hosts after Amber Ruffin’s Peacock show was recently downgraded to a series of specials. And, unlike the fictional realm of the Barbie movie, there’s never been a female president in the U.S.
Yes, Bill, the patriarchy is real, and we are a long way from gender equality in this country.
As for his plot criticisms, I’m still a bit baffled by Maher’s issue with the Barbies acting “helpless” in the third act to trick the oblivious Kens, and Maher quoting his thirtysomething movie date as saying, “I don’t know a single woman of any age who would act like that today” as evidence that the film is somehow far-fetched. Aside from the fact that this is a spin on a classic movie trope — damsel acts distressed to trap dim-witted guy — and is a blatant act of subterfuge on the part of the Barbies, the Barbies are … Barbies. Barbieland is not a real place, and the way people behave in Barbieland is not meant to be realistic (quite the opposite). This is satire, Bill!
Maher concludes his review of sorts by saying that, despite everything he wrote, the Barbie movie “is fun, I enjoyed it — but it IS a #ZombieLie.” Look, let’s call this what it is: a 67-year-old man tweeting out an angry, hashtag-filled review of the Barbie movie to make headlines. And we haven’t even touched on the most embarrassing part of it: At one point, Maher brands the Barbie movie “so 2000-late” — a nod to a Fergie line from the Black Eyed Peas’ 2009 anthem “Boom Boom Pow” where she raps, “I’m so 3008/You so 2000 and late.” And he dropped this cringeworthy, decade-plus-old line in a screed about the Barbie movie being out of touch. I think it’s time to log off, sir.
Perhaps the first reactionary troll to publicly lose their mind over the Barbie movie was Ben Shapiro, a Hollywood nepo baby (the son of a TV exec and a composer) who has apparently harbored a grudge against the industry ever since he was rejected from a writing gig on CBS’ The Good Wife. Shapiro made a YouTube video called “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Movie for 43 Minutes” (caps are his) that saw him burn Barbie dolls over a barbecue and decry its “wokeness” — an embarrassing display even for him.
In recent years, Maher, like Shapiro, has used his Real Time megaphone to spout bad movie takes, whining about “Lady Ghostbusters,” defending Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody (Maher: “Now, the sexuality is placed in the background and it’s, where is the dick-sucking?”), you name it. Anything for those contrarian points. I’m not even sure what the hell this means:
Theres no blacks at the oscars but Felicity Jones at least sounds kind of black
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) February 23, 2015
Then again, Maher couldn’t be a worse messenger when it comes to misogyny. He’s a sexagenarian who, when he isn’t dropping the N-word, has gleefully called women “bimbos” on his show. And, as one of Maher’s exes, Karine Steffans, who is Black, once said of him, “Bill wants someone he can put down in an argument, tell you how ghetto you are, how big your butt is and that you’re an idiot. That’s why you never see him with a white girl or an intellectual.”
No wonder he found the Barbie movie so triggering.
Best of Rolling Stone
