Barbie and Oppenheimer Selflessly Saved Cinema This Weekend

Monday is movies. Sometimes TV. Today it's the biggie - the double - two movies teamed up to save cinema, don't you know!

Did you know that going to the cinema is back? Yes, all it took was some lazy, allegedly strategic marketing to pit a film about the atom bomb and a movie about Barbie the doll in the ultimate battle of guys vs. girls; the ultimate battle of science vs. popularity (as if there weren’t already daily reminders of that walking about in various states of nonchalance).

Movies are back. Now you know. You are now allowed to justify your spend – stand up and away from your screens at home and go, once again, to the cinema. Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan implore you.

What’s more, a bunch of breathless hacks couldn’t wait to compare and contrast. They even portmanteau’d the shit out of those movies to make it Tay-Tay cute and be giving of serious Brangelina vibes, yo.

Barbie is an SNL skit stretched to breaking point. But posing as some sort of feminism revenge hit. To argue that it’s not actually brilliant is, after all, to simply be a man. And if you don’t like Barbie then David Cunliffe will personally apologise for your take, just as soon as dated political references are allowed back in.

Oppenheimer is a very serious film directed by a very serious man featuring a, well, “bomb” cast – so it’s obviously brilliant. And the only shame of it was that it wasn’t longer. At a mere three hours, Oppenheimer barely has time to tell you of its brilliance – but don’t worry, the man in the gaming hoodie next to you has seen The Dark-af Batman Trilogy 14 times, and has the 4K Ultra HD Tenet which includes the bonus feature where it suddenly all makes sense. So he’ll tell you. Often. In fact, he’s quite prepared and ready to remind you that Christopher Nolan is a goddamn genius. And has been since 2000’s Memento decided to take Guy Pearce seriously, while taking a more laissez-faire approach to film structure. So there, actually.

But Barbie features the best ever Ryan Gosling performance. So that’s big kudos film points eh! Margot Robbie couldn’t possibly be brilliant on her own. Like she has been in films both great (I, Tonya) and terrible (Suicide Squad). Margot Robbie knows how to commit to the bit. Still, that doesn’t mean she ever deserves more than a Who Wore It Better-styled column update.

But the stars of Oppenheimer support the Hollywood striking action. So that makes them even betterer.

What really matters in the, urgh, Barbenheimer Battle is that people can feel good about spending money on art again. And it’s even better that someone else is making a whole lot more by telling them to spend that money. The machine is back up and working. And Simon Bridges is doing a podcast about how this is rilly good for the ecomonnnie.

You see Barbie and Oppie are a bit like the Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran of movies. They are saving movies the way Taylor and Eddie saved live music. It’s a valid comparison after all, Taylor and Barbie – that’s obvious, the colours, the dancing, the vibrancy, choreography, the bubblegum cuteness, the mother/daughter combos in attendance. And Christopher Nolan is just like Ed Sheeran in that they both love looping.

Movies must be meme-able if they are to mean anything. Which somewhat answers the question over who won in the battle of the science of motion pictures and the popularity contest of marketing.

The early ‘vibes’ are that Oppie is getting all the critical acclaim – which is shocking for a story about a man, written and directed by a man. But Christopher Luxon said he was thrilled something good came out of the wet, whiny opening weekend. New Zealand businesses have had a tough time thanks to both Jacinda Ardern and Barack Obama, and now it’s great news that cinemas were up and flying once again. (And Luxon knows a thing or two about flying!)

Barbie is doing twice the business of Oppie at the box office. Because Barbie’s office has always been a box. And because Taylor Swift is the greatest touring musical act in the world ever and so there. And because also manufactured nostalgia is the greatest type of nostalgia ever. Barbie is so good that it manages to keep going for a full hour and twenty minutes after its last decent joke. So if that isn’t clever filmmaking then I don’t know what is?!

As someone who worked in retail at precarious times for both the music and book industry, my thoughts this weekend were not with which filmmaker/production company I would be supporting under the guise of throwing local business a bone. No-no. My thoughts were with the living wagers getting boomers telling them amid spittle that it’s great that people are going to the movies again. I had it with Norah Jones saving jazz. And JK Rowling saving books.

And as someone who had forever been listening to Anita O’Day and reading Roald Dahl, I just smiled and took all the medicine I was given on my meagre retail income.

So, I have seen neither of the movies above that I’ve been mildly poking fun at. I hoped you’d have guessed that almost instantly. Instead, I supported movies and movie-making this weekend by returning to two of my all-time favourites, Hellbound: Hellraiser II and The Toxic Avenger. What wonderful – bonkers – films they continue to be. In competition with no one and in tune with their own unique madness.

It seemed the better option.

I won’t see Oppenheimer because I hate three-hour movies as a rule. And because (buried hot take): I think Christopher Nolan’s a bit shit.

I probably will see Barbie one day, on DVD – but I won’t tell you about it.

I will tell you about going to the movies, often, as I do here most weeks. Cinema hasn’t needed saving for me. It’s been a salve, and a sanity-break and a cathedral for escapism for nearly 40 years of my life so far. And hearing Jesse Mulligan on RNZ bray to his film reviewer that he couldn’t remember a time when there were two competing movies this big had me fucking wincing at my car’s stereo on Friday afternoon. I remember not being able to get into Return of the Jedi as a distraught kid (sold out) so quick-thinking mum ripped us around the corner to crash into a screening of Octopussy. So, what the hell was that fucking clown on about? (ed [not Sheeran]: that’s a bit mean, we’ll just go back to breathless hack I think…?)

But I’ll open this up for you now – were you at Barbie or Oppie this weekend. Which team were you on as you saved movies this weekend? Or were you not just Team Tay-Tay but actually Team Cray-Cray and you achieved the split double-feature, seeing both?

Postscript: I asked AI to combine the posters of Barbie and Oppenhiemer to make an image for “Barbenheimer” and these two images (top and bottom) are the fitting proof of AI’s brilliance, no?