Review of Barbie

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. It seemed quite clever and funny to me, and I liked the acting - playing the live-action equivalent of plastic doll is obviously role that Ryan Gosling has been waiting for.  The Guardian review is itself clever and funny, and hard to improve on...but a few things in passing occur to me that don't seem to have been noted elsewhere. 

Firstly, this film is overtly self-referential - it doesn't quite have characters addressing the fourth wall, but the narrator does refer to it being a film, with casting choices - not something I remember from anything else. It does't need to make sense of the fact that Barbieland is a fantasy, and instead it chooses to make fun of this...Barbie doesn't expect drinking vessels to have fluids in them when she's in the real world, and the wave on the beach is of course solid, as is the surface of the pool at Barbie's dream house.

Is this lost on what I assume is the film's target audience...young girls who either still play with Barbies or did until recently? Or is that not the target audience at all? The film opens with a parody of the opening of 2001 A Space Odyssey, complete with Thus Spake Zarathustra, and showing very young girls smashing their baby dolls as they embrace the possibilities of the new Barbie toy. I thought it was funny...but who else did? Is today's pre-teen audience so media-literate that they get this joke too? Or what?

Watched at an actual cinema, the Vue in Stroud - the first time in ages!