ON Culture | Barbies, Beanie Babies, and Amazing Architecture

This edition of ON Culture was originally emailed to subscribers on August 12, 2023. To receive Leslie Dinaberg’s arts newsletter in your inbox on Fridays, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

ON The (Big) Screen

It wasn’t on my radar at all until I saw the trailer before Asteroid City at Metropolitan’s Hitchcock Cinema, but Santa Barbara’s eccentric Beanie Baby billionaire is getting the big screen treatment in a new film The Beanie Bubble, an Apple original starring Zach Galifianakis as Ty Warner, with Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan, and Sarah Snook (ah Shiv, we miss you!) as the significant women in his life. The film comes out in theaters July 21 and hits Apple TV a week later. I thought the trailer was pretty funny. You can check it out here. 

Speaking of the big screen, Barbie (directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling), which opens July 21,  tops the list of the many movies I’m looking forward to this summer. I’ve had a special relationship with Barbie ever since my Grandpa Jules, who was in the toy business, got a hold of one of the original prototype Barbie sets (with 20 dolls, including ONE that could be worth more than $27,000 if it was in good condition today) and gave it to 4-year-old me to play with.