The Totally Winning, Stupid Comedy That Made Me Feel Better About Hollywood’s Obsession With IP

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Hello new friends,

Bilge, I completely understand what you’re saying about this year being so filled with great work from established directors to an almost perversely frustrating extent. It didn’t feel like a year of discovery so much as a year of reassurance. I remember that after I was at Cannes in May, friends asked me about the best films I saw there. I tried to reach for titles that weren’t expected—I loved Pictures of Ghosts, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s documentary about movies and memory, for instance—but I often would default to saying, “Well, I loved the Haynes and the Scorsese.” That said, if it’s boring to think that Todd Haynes (May December) and Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon) made great movies, maybe I don’t want to be all that interesting. (Plus, Pictures of Ghosts, while eligible for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, is not technically being released in 2023. So there you go, Bilge.)

Both the Haynes and the Scorsese showed up on my Top 10 list:

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Asteroid City
Beau Is Afraid
Fallen Leaves
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
May December
Oppenheimer
Showing Up
The Zone of Interest

Honorable mentions: The Boy and the Heron, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, El Conde, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Killer, Poor Things, Passages, You Hurt My Feelings

Now that that’s out of the way, I do want to bring the conversation back to Barbenheimer to touch on the Barb- side of that portmanteau. Barbie didn’t land in my Top 10, but I do like the movie a lot, even if I feel that the second half is a bit messy. Though I think we spend too much time with the Kens and their revolution—this is Barbie, after all—it’s hard not to succumb to the many pleasures of Greta Gerwig’s film, which is so filled with joy and ingenuity it feels like a little miracle. Barbie leads with its big, open, pink beating heart and is filled with a love for the craft of cinema—from the way Gerwig employs practical effects to the musical numbers, which feel as if they were dropped in from the 1950s.

During my first watch of Barbie, I wept multiple times. Should I count the moments? When Margot Robbie’s Barbie tells an old woman, played by legendary costume designer Ann Roth, that she’s beautiful; when Barbie meets her creator, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), for the first time; when America Ferrera’s Gloria gives her big speech about the confusing realities of womanhood; when Barbie discovers she wants to leave Barbie Land behind. I was wiping away tears as Robbie delivered that zinger of a final line—and “I’m here to see my gynecologist” instantly entered the pantheon. Barbie doesn’t always lead with logic, but in that way it’s true to the fantasy of playing with dolls as a child. Emotions overrule everything else.

And yet, Barbie, I keep reminding myself, is still essentially a product of IP, that acronym that has started to sound like a dirty word for us critics. The boom in intellectual property–driven movies makes us think of nothing but soulless blockbusters with big explosions and Easter eggs for quote-unquote “real fans,” who tell the rest of us that we have to wait another couple of years to learn that Gloop Glop or whatever is actually the real villain.

Unlike so many IP plays, though, Barbie starts from a place that seems craven—Mattel wants to sell dolls, after all—but turns out to be genuinely meaningful even as it wrestles with what its IP means. It starts from that place of shamelessness, then rises above that, and it’s not the only film to do that this year. Bilge and Dana, I was tickled to see that you both loved Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, as I did. Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (aka Sam Weir from Freaks and Geeks), the D&D movie was not a success on the level of Barbie, but they actually have a lot in common. Both take their source material—one a doll; the other a fantasy tabletop role-playing game—and loosely use that to create an engaging narrative that is both very funny and shockingly heartfelt. (Hey, I also cried during the climactic scene of D&D.)

I have never played Dungeons & Dragons, but Honor Among Thieves had me from its very first sequence, an extended prologue in which Chris Pine’s bard Edgin pleads for his release from prison alongside his companion Holga (Michelle Rodriguez). It’s an expertly structured bit in which Pine delivers a long sob story but keeps interrupting himself to ask for a council member named Jarnathan, explaining that Jarnathan will really understand what he’s trying to say. First of all, Jarnathan is such a funny name to say, especially, like, the 11^th time. Second, it leads to a great punchline, wherein Jarnathan turns out to be an oversized bird-man whom Edgin wanted to use just to fly out the window.

Goldstein and Daley previously made one of the great recent movies I love to simply throw on at home, the incredibly savvy action comedy Game Night, and I can see myself having that relationship with D&D too. While it works as a whole, it’s also full of excellent independent beats that make me smile. I love the graveyard sequence in which the gang interrogates corpses, as well as the pitch-perfect deadpan turn from Regé-Jean Page as an overly honorable paladin. D&D takes its world building incredibly seriously but doesn’t get bogged down in it, instead just giving us delightful little glimpses of its weirdness. In one moment, we see a giant fish open its mouth to free a cat-person baby, which is returned to the arms of its cat-person parent. Truly, what’s not to love?

And I adore this phase of Hugh Grant’s career. In D&D, he plays the charmingly self-absorbed con man Forge. Grant uses the caddishness he once put to such good use in rom-coms like Bridget Jones’s Diary and About a Boy, now on a grander scale. Between this and Paddington 2, he’s the ultimate baddie you can’t help but love, an incredible evolution for a former heartthrob. He also makes a great Oompa Loompa in Wonka—another example of how old IP can be spun into something new and delightful.

On one hand, this year felt like something of a death knell for IP entertainment as we once knew it. The superhero movies were mostly severely underwhelming; the Fast franchise is holding on for dear life. And yet the aforementioned filmmakers proved there’s a way to do it right. What say the rest of you?

Off to go find Jarnathan,

Esther

Read the next entry in the 2023 Movie Club: The End of the Superhero Movie Phenomenon