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I think if you go into Barbie thinking it's going to be a silly lightweight movie about dolls that you, an adult with sophisticated taste, will have no interest in, that's probably what you'll see. I'd read a fair amount about it beforehand, including praise from critics, and having watched other movies involving Greta Gerwig I trusted her to do something clever with it because that's just her. Her other movies have been interesting, and heck, she did clever things with Little Women, and that had been a respected classic for more than 100 years that had already been done to death including one with my favorite actor Christian Bale. But GG found a new way in. Later, my older son told me he'd liked Barbie and he 1) does not play with dolls and 2) usually has a pretty gritty but sophisticated appreciation for movies (he generally likes complex very indie movies like, some of which I find too depressing to watch, like Requiem for a Dream, and he also liked Brokeback Mountain).
As for Gone With the Wind, I think that's pretty much an American thing. In grade school I read the book about 12 times and same with the movie, when I was growing up in Minnesota -- far from the Deep South. Everyone I knew or saw at that age was white. So I didn't think much about the book's racism. My dad did and scorned it, but I didn't know why exactly; later I learned he had gone through the Deep South with the Army during peak Jim Crow and was horrified at what he saw. So he was very pro-civil rights and I think was offended for that reason.
Anyway, I loved GWTW and knew both book and movie very well. I went to the Margaret Mitchell Museum in Atlanta while waiting for a flight, and it was really fascinating -- a lot of echoes of the book in her life. And the origin story: some talent scout from a major publisher was touring the South trying to find other great writers (I guess because of the success of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner) and Mitchell, an Atlanta journalist/socialite, was chosen to lead him around her city. By that time, she'd written like a three-foot pile of typed pages of GWTW (the finished book was 1,039), but according to legend she wasn't going to even tell the scout she'd written anything until she heard one of the other socialites say, "That silly Peggy Mitchell thinks she's written a book" or something like that, so she gave it to the scout before he left. He called her when his flight landed and told her he wanted to publish it. It is by far the most successful book ever by a Southern writer, and maybe by any American writer, period (since that would exclude JK Rowling).
GWTW is more or less canceled at this point among American progressives, and understandably so. It's a sympathetic tale about the Confederacy and slave owners, and you can't get much more un-woke than that. But Mitchell actually was LESS racist for her milieu at the time -- she not only gave to organizations that helped Black people but her book treats them like real people with three-dimensional characters, which most books by white authors did not and is why Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her role in the movie (but was not allowed to sit with the other stars during the ceremony, I guess).
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) who had seen some reviews that made him interested. 