Yeah, this happened. No, I haven't lost my mind or been replaced by a Stepford android. A long time ago, when I was first populating my queue, Netflix recommended this film at four stars. I was curious what about it would garner such a rave prediction so I went ahead and added it. The next time I checked, Netflix had changed its mind and gave it only two stars. So I don't know if it hadn't finished computing the personalized algorithm or if it just had a bug that was subsequently corrected, but I decided to say "fuck it" and leave Barbie in there. Five years later, it finally hit the top of the list and appeared in my mailbox.It sucks.
I knew it would, but I was surprised by the ways in which it sucks. I have a goddaughter who is six-years-old and loves ballet, nail polish, and coloring. She is a girly girl. She would have been bored to tears by this movie. The animation looks plastic, the plot is ridiculous, there are too many characters, and the musical numbers --God help me, it was a musical-- are insipid.
Princess Tori (Kelly Sheridan) wishes she could trade places with her idol, pop star Keira (Ashleigh Ball), while the latter is in town for a concert. Keira wants to escape the pressures of touring and longs to be waited on hand and foot like a princess. The two girls discover that they look exactly alike except for hair color and decide to trade places for a day. Unfortunately, Keira's unscrupulous manager (Peter Kelamis) has a plan to steal a national treasure from the castle and only these two can stop him.
Mark Twain probably would laugh his ass off if he were alive to see his novel about class inequality and non-judgment turned into a cotton candy-colored commercial. I understand the need to sell toys. I understand that you want to have cute animal sidekicks and lots of sparkly costumes and accessories that are sold separately. All I ask is that you do that without making it so blatantly obvious that it makes adults want to be lobotomized with a nail gun.
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