Barbie

I'm not quite sure why I felt so driven to see this film at the cinema. I'd never bought the silly toys for my Offsprogs and was quite miffed when their childminder turned up one day with a whole Gladstone bag stuffed with her own daughter's ex-Barbies. Some while later, I heard thumping from upstairs. It was Offsprog Two whacking the chest of one of them hard against her bedroom wall to flatten it's pneumatic breasts.

Because of my short attention span I went for a swim beforehand, and asked at the cinema how long the trailers lasted. Twenty five minutes was a long enough time to cross the road and read the day's paper with a coffee.

It has literally taken me 24 hours to realise that the crap lyric of the intro song was deliberate. The film is so cleverly put together that it swipes you from all sides. It's definitely not about dolls, that's for sure. It's not anti-men, either, although some people seem to have read it that way. It's one of the funniest films I've ever seen, and one of the best. It parodies so many films: Toy Story, Westerns, even, I think, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It takes a seconds-long pop at Elon Musk and Richard Branson ('Yay, Space!'), the fact that it's seconds long being the whole point. 

It's very emotional in places, all the more so because those hits happen suddenly in the midst of hilarity. 

At the end, I thought how meaningless Jordan Petersen and Andre Tate's diatribes are, because they can't cope with humour. There are no guns here, and no rapes. What the Kens really like is horses. And Barbie cheerily and innocently tells some construction workers who try to undermine her by commenting about her body and what they'd like to do to it, 'I have no vagina!'. 

She is White Saviour Barbie, who thinks elder women are beautiful. Indeed the former Ugly Betty is here too, from the human world, being beautiful both in appearance and deed.

This is a film that has so many hidden depths I know I've missed loads of them. I burst out laughing several times and cried twice, against my better judgement. Thank heavens for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, who held out for their principles and have created a simultaneous critique and celebration of just about everything. Wonderful.