Lancemc
Blue Crack Addict
Brought to you by the journalism Gods over at Aint It Cool News:
Hola all. Massawyrm here.
It's not every day that I risk incarceration to review a film. But sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do. Sometimes you have to be the only grown man in a theatre that doesn't have a daughter with him. Some men run marathons. Some men climb mountains. Me? To prove my endurance I sit through all 110 minutes of Bratz: The Movie. What no one told me going in was that this totaled 6600 seconds, each one longer than the one before it. This isn't just a movie geared at little girls. This is their Lawrence of fucking Arabia, an epic tale of friendship, love and a Passion for Fashion (tm). In fact, David Lean should totally sue. They ripped his ass off.
And while I've spent months jacked into a testosterone and Mountain Dew fueled world of "flames on Optimus" and "No faceguard equals teh suck" I somehow missed the earth shattering debate on the raping of every little girls childhood. Maybe I really should check my Myspace more.
Little girls everywhere are pissed. They're texting. They're blogging.
They're calling their BFFs and crying. Because these Bratz…have normal sized skulls. W? T? F? SRSLY? Look, there are exactly two things preventing Bratz dolls from being cheap Barbie knock offs. The first is that the Asian, Black and Hispanic girls aren't simply relegated to being the white girl's back up band, and second they have ginormous fucking heads on top of impossibly small bodies. Yeah. I know. What were they thinking? What, was Nicole Richie busy? Really? Don't they realize that there are actresses destroying their internal organs every day to achieve the patented Bratz doll look? And they hire four complete unknowns with normal looking skulls? Nice.
You know the dolls I'm talking about, right? They're the ones you see in the grocery stores that look like they were modeled off of the girls you see in those internet videos that begin with the question "Do you know the password?" and end with the question "are you ready for the fiesta?" And these dolls are of vital importance to the future of this nation, and really, this society as a whole. Do you think guys like me can just get laid and reproduce on our own? No. Fuck no. It takes years of systematically breaking down the self-esteems of young women, of filling their heads with impossible expectations and then leaving them empty and hollow with a void that only booze and an endless string of faceless cock can fill. And that's where I come in. Just as we need pervert fathers eager to touch their daughters buttholes in order to keep the poles of this nation's stripclubs filled, so too must we give our daughters dolls that they can never live up to. Bratz.
Now I know what many of you are thinking. Why even bother reviewing a movie like this? Isn't this Ain't it Cool News? Your god damned right it is. But this movie was produced by Avi fucking Arad. Oh, yeah. Now you're listening. When Marvel's main man gets behind something, you know it's gonna be good. Just like The Punisher and Ghost Rider and Elektra. And in an interview last week he referred to Bratz as "X-men for Girls." Wow. You know, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the X-men. But clearly, I didn't know the first fucking thing about them. I didn't understand. X3 makes so much sense now. I'm sorry. I didn't know. I finally realize that a bunch of girls trying to desegregate the clique structure of the high school is exactly like everything the X-men went through. I was always focused on the awkwardness of puberty and the struggle against the oppression of minorities, and really it was all about teenagers in tight fitting outfits and having the right pair of boots.
And in order to tell a story this big, this important, this, dare I say it - epic - you need to find a director equal to the task. And so they turned to the one man able to bring these dolls' stories to life. Sean McNamara. The man who wowed us with Hilary Duff's timeless performance in Raise Your Voice. The man who managed to do what no one thought could be done by filming a sequel to the classic The Cutting Edge without either of the original leads in The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold. And the man who proved that Hulk Hogan's career was not quite yet over with 3
Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain.
Here McNamara takes big creative risks by eschewing the classic notions of story in exchange for a surreal, nonsensical series of music videos, montages and irrelevant plot points that hint at a story rather than simply delivering one. And why bother developing characters beyond simple stereotypes when there's little for them to do but pose and occasionally speak? What's important isn't what they have to say. It's what they have to do. And that's look good, have attitude and stand by your BFF, even when the only thing you share in common is your overdeveloped sense of rampant consumerism.
For those still unfamiliar with the vast Bratz mythology, it boils down to four incredible role models. There's Jade, the repressed Asian girl with a clear sense of style, attitude and she likes science. Then there's Cloe, the klutzy white girl with a clear sense of style, attitude and she likes Soccer. Then there's Sasha, the saucy black girl with a clear sense of style, attitude and she likes cheerleading. And last but not least, there's Yasmin, the shy Hispanic girl who likes to sing. Oh, with a clear sense of style and attitude. But what's more important than their individual skillsets is the message that they send to little girls. And that is that you too can roll out of bed looking beautiful, never having a pimple and always sporting perfect hair. And if you can't, maybe you'll be lucky enough to be friends with those girls.
Opposite them is their antithesis. The archetypal popular villain hell bent on ruling high school with an iron fist. The girl who hates the Bratz for just how cool and well dressed they are. Oh, and for some asinine reason she feels they violate her strict sense of clique organization (because one's a jock, ones a brain, one's a cheerleader and one's a singer) despite the fact that they all speak, act and dress exactly alike. And rather than simply classifying this as an as yet undiscovered clique and issuing them their much coveted Z, she sets out to destroy them. For three years. Or I'm pretty sure that's the plot. This thing is so enmeshed in symbolism and metaphor that I'll be dissecting it for ages.
Throw in a deaf kid who becomes a DJ, a sleazeball 7th grader who seems to have a thing for younger women, and Jon Voigt wearing a prosthetic nose and you have a director that seems to be reaching to be the David Lynch of the Myspace generation. If there is sense to be made of this thing, it is by smarter men than I. And before you ask yourself What the hell is Jon Voigt doing here?, ask yourself this. Isn't that what we always say when he shows up these days?
Look, odds are your daughters don't want to see something this heady and intellectual. They're most likely interested in some insipid, vapid entertainment geared more towards selling a soundtrack and toys than it is passing on positive wisdom to the youth of America. But if your daughter feels far too good about herself or has bought into all this It's what's on the inside that counts bullshit, then you not only owe it to your daughter to take her to this, but you owe it to the 20 or so guys that in ten years will be tagging her while she lies face first in a puddle of her own vomit. These girls don't make themselves. They need your help, Dad. They need Bratz.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
