This shouldn’t work at all – Johnny Cash singing Barbie Girl thanks to AI – and I bet you think it won’t. Then again you’d probably say the same about the film. Until you’ve heard and seen them.
To be fair, this is just Folsom Prison Blues with the lyrics altered, thanks to the wonders of the modern world. But it’s done so well, right from the opening “Hello – I’m not Johnny Cash.”
And of course the original is so great that it’s hard not to love it.
As for the film, I had no interest at all after seeing the trailer. I thought it’s definitely not for me: in fact I couldn’t think of anything worse.
Then word began to grow that there was an ironic feminist approach in Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script and, since they did such sterling work together on Francis Ha and Mistress America, my interest began to grow too.
And guess what? It’s a joy, from start (a 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof voiced by the narrator, Helen Mirren) to finish it’s a riot of hot pink fun.
And yes, there’s a feminist message that isn’t so much subtly suggested as the central theme of a film that achieves the difficult task of making the gender politics debate a whole lot of fun.
Not that I was expecting that. When I arrived at the sold-out cinema to find myself surrounded by girls, many of them dressed in pink, I thought my worst fears were about to be realised. Especially when someone in front of me in the queue said: “It’s 60% ladies, 30% gay men and 10% confused straight people.”
In fact it was more mixed than that, though I was thrown by how young most of the audience were. Surely too young to have grown up with Barbie dolls, though they might have grown up with Aqua topping the charts with the original Barbie Girl, with its 1.2 BILLION YouTube hits.
The performances are fantastic – don’t be surprised if Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling both get Oscar nominations – and the script is as sharp as a button, as are the occasional ironic interjections of Mirren’s narrator.
You would really have to be a bit of a misanthrope not to enjoy it.