"Barbie and the Diamond Castle" DVD

If you've been reading my work for any length of time, you know this kind of title is wildly uncategoristic for me. You know I'm usually hitting the kind of stuff an adult audience might prefer, and in many cases, a young adult audience. I don't normally go foraying into Barbie movies, which is why I'm actually very happy to be bringing you this one.

See, they walked right into it, sending us a copy for review and marching themselves straight into the mouth of madness.

The plot, such as it is, involves Barbie and best friend (I will NOT lower myself to using the term BFF) Teresa, who apparently make a living as songwriters. They quickly segue, on the flimsiest of justifications requiring the introduction of a throwaway character who is so unmemorable that I can't even recall her name a day later, into a pseudomedievalist tale of two girls who look exactly LIKE Barbie and best friend Teresa, but can't call themselves that because it'd be one fewer doll for Mattel to hawk. The new dolls--err...characters---are Alexa and Liana. Anyway, the knockoffs then proceed to engage in activities that would no doubt enrage feminists everywhere--collecting flowers, finding puppies for no clear reason, and gabbing about boys. And there's some kind of overarching plot here involving music and the muses (which have absolutely nothing to do with original Greco-Roman mythology) and preposterously large castles made from songs.

Simplistic? Oh yeah. This plot was clearly geared toward an audience of seven year old girls.

Let me be clear: if you rent this movie you will be subjecting yourself and those you love to a toy commercial of a duration of just over an hour. Do not labor under the delusion that this is anything but--the source material sent along with the screener DVD was a one-page toy catalog telling all who read it precisely how much the objects seen in the film will cost to own.

This is reprehensible beyond all imagination. I understand that toy companies have driven children's programming for years and people gotta eat, but wow, my mind still boggles that Mattel is willing to sink to these depths just to hawk shaped plastic at outrageous prices. The phrase "invented demand" was coined with this in mind.

That and if they were going to hawk toys to a captive audience they could've at least done it with some STYLE, I mean, for crying out loud--I have a Y chromosome. I am no feminist. But even I was pretty upset that pretty much all these chicks did for the first half of the movie was pick flowers, gab about boys and insist, musically and amelodically, that they were BEST FRIENDS and this was not to be questioned. The irony, of course, is that the villain is the greedy self-centered materialist who lives alone whilst the two poor chicks (whose dolls cost four hours at minimum wage to own) are the heroines of this laughable little tale.

Call it writer's bias, but at least on this side of the keyboard, the point of it all is to warn people away from the bad and steer them toward the good as best as I possibly can. I owe anyone who reads my work the absolute truth as best as I can generate it. My work is subjective--for every one who likes what I like, there's two or three who can't stand it. But I can't say it's good when I could barely get through it all.

Barbie and the Diamond Castle
zero stars
DVD

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