This week on The Deep Dive: Barbie’s makeover movie B-plot, Spiderman’s swings and a happy medium between man and machine, how Forrest Gump accidentally became a conservative icon, a quick reminder that Chappell Roan is a character (but also a person), and the moral panic that quietly took over social media.

FILM

Why We Can’t Fix the Makeover Movie by verilybitchie (18:18)

In the film industry’s spectrum of womanhood, it’s all about running toward the ends before finally meeting in the middle. In this video, verilybitchie makes the convincing case that every popular movie is, in some way, a makeover movie. And no, I’m not just talking about She’s All That or The Devil Wears Prada or Miss Congeniality, but also the ones we may not have realized were makeover movies at all – like Barbie. Behind America Ferrera’s Feminism 101 monologue and the film’s surface-level commentary about how the patriarchy does, in fact, hurt everyone, one character was quietly being girl-ified and robbed of her blossoming activism in the background. And it all traces back to Audrey Hepburn and a little movie called My Fair Lady.

TECHNOLOGY

How Spider-Man's Web Swinging Changed by Alex Boucher (19:02)

I just love it when people love things and then tell me all about them. I’m not one for superhero movies, but after watching this video, I’m officially forever fascinated by the nuances of the evolution of Spiderman’s swings and how innovations in computer animation made them so much better…before making them worse. In this video, Alex Boucher takes us through history marked by Spiderman eras – from inventive and dangerous real-life stunts to Kirsten Dunst swinging with a mannequin to peak CGI and human collaboration in the 2010s. But somewhere along the way, as we got closer to modern day, we started to have a liiiitle too much faith in computer graphics. Once a hallmark of each new film, why did the Spiderman franchise start putting less effort into its iconic swings?