During a recent vacation, I became strangely
addicted to the slow-motion train wreck that is A&E;'s The Two Coreys. In my favorite episode, Corey
Feldman, concerned that his tragicomic bud Corey Haim has become a hopeless
pill-popper, convinces Todd Bridges and Pauly Shore to confront the lesser
Corey about his substance abuse. As Bridges and Shore contemplate the task at
hand, they're overcome with a profound sense of life's ridiculousness. How on
Earth did they get there? What unspeakable crime did they commit in a past life
to merit this karmic mind-fuck? I'm pretty sure at least one of them was
Hitler, or at least a high-level Nazi. Even Pauly Shore, Todd Bridges, and
Corey Feldman found the prospect of a semi-intervention featuring Pauly Shore,
Todd Bridges, and Corey Feldman mind-boggingly insane. You know your life has
spun out of control when Pauly fucking Shore is lecturing you about
responsibility.
I know the feeling. There are times in
everyone's life when the randomness of fate smacks you dead in the face. Don
DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace are/were masters at
chronicling the often ugly, sometimes sublime preposterousness of the way we
live. They allow readers to take a step back and see the things we all take for
granted in a new, disorientingly foreign light, to see the bizarre in the
familiar and the familiar in the bizarre.
I experienced a similarly uncanny sense of
life's absurdity when I sat down in a small, cold room on the 16th floor of a
nondescript building in downtown Chicago with a platoon of pasty, middle-aged
men to watch a series of flickering images and shiny, happy noise called Bratz: The Movie, a movie designed to sell a
popular line of skanky plastic dolls. Here's what the American Psychological
Association had to say about these plastic pop-tarts:
Bratz
dolls come dressed in sexualized clothing such as miniskirts, fishnet
stockings, and feather boas. Although these dolls may present no more
sexualization of girls or women than is seen in MTV videos, it is worrisome
when dolls designed specifically for 4- to 8-year-olds are associated with an
objectified adult sexuality.
Alas, those spoilsport eggheads in the APA
were no match for the Bratz spokesman (you gotta wonder who he killed in a previous life)
who defended the dolls with the withering retort, "The Bratz brand, which has
remained number one in the UK market for 23 consecutive months, focuses core
values on friendship, hair play, and a 'passion for fashion'."
Bruno Bettelheim argued persuasively that a
proper appreciation of "hair play" is a vital component of every child's
emotional development. And Abraham Maslow made a "passion for fashion" a
cornerstone of his hierarchy of needs. But The Bratz's inspiring message of hair
play, cultivating a passion for fashion, and friendship is largely wasted on
killjoys in the APA and film critics.
At the risk of being angrily
tossed out of the Fraternal Order Of Film Criticky-Type Folks, I willingly
confess that film critics, as a group, tend to look as if they just crawled out
of a sewer after engaging in spirited fisticuffs with an angry aggregation of
C.H.U.D.s. Though TV critics are invariably dandified fops who dress in the
latest fashions, print critics generally look like their ensembles were
purloined from the donation box at Salvation Army and thrown together by a
drunken blind man with a twisted sense of humor.
There's an evolutionary
explanation for the slovenly, vaguely feral appearance of the average film
critic. As a genus, they live and work in conditions of extreme darkness, not
unlike the similar but more aesthetically pleasing sewer rat. Like vampires,
critics shun the harsh light of the day. This is both because sunlight is new,
strange, jarring, and potentially fatal to them, and because it has an
unfortunate way of exposing to the world wardrobes composed largely of stained,
hole-ridden T-shirts promoting Pure Luck or The Air Up There, and sweatpants with elastic waists. Incidentally,
when I deride the fashion sense and hygiene of the average film critic, I'm
mainly, if not exclusively, talking about myself.
So to say that the folks at
the screening room were not the ideal audience for a movie about
clothing-obsessed teenaged girls would be a little bit of an understatement. When
the lights went down and the magic of cinema began, I had to wonder why Bratz was being screened for
critics at all. Did the Bratzketeers really expect us to
respond to their plastic product with anything other than snorts of disdain?
Couldn't Bratz:
The Movie just
as easily be titled Not
Screened For Critics: The Movie?
Bratz: The Movie's first sequence immediately
establishes a tone of psychotic peppiness, as the bratz (they spell it with a Z
cause they're from zee streets) approach choosing outfits for the first day of
high school with disconcertingly orgasmic glee. Ah, but Bratz: The Movie isn't afraid to delve into
deep issues as well. One of the girl's totally has divorced parents. š
Another, like, left her turquoise shirt at her friend's house.
Bratz veers into
after-school-special territory when one of the girls literally runs into a boy
who's cute but also totally deaf, and they have the following exchange:
Brat: "What are you, blind?"
Totally Hot Deaf Guy: "No, but I'm deaf."
Brat: "What?"
Totally Hot Deaf Guy: "I'm deaf."
Brat: "You don't sound deaf."
Totally: "Well, you don't look
ignorant, but I guess you can't judge a book, right?"
Ah, but Bratz isn't done teaching valuable
life lessons about how the deaf are just like you and me, only hotter, and way
better DJs. In the below clip, the hot hearing-impaired dude learns that being
deaf and def are not mutually exclusive when a sensitive Mr. Chizips type
teaches him how to fuck shit up old school on the turntables:
See, so he isn't just a
brooding, telegenic deaf guy: He's a deaf jock who loves playing the piano, and
is also an awesome DJ. He's got five minutes of screen time and 18 different
facets to his personality. I half expected the deleted scenes to reveal that
he's also an orphan, a Jehovah's Witness, a Monarchist, double-jointed,
telekinetic, and an illegal immigrant.
The four bratz enter high
school totally psyched and intent on ruling the school in their respective
niches. "I'm owning the science!" enthuses the hot Asian science geek with rad
cotton-candy-blue hair extensions. That line is followed by the record-skipping
sound effect that serves as bad-movie shorthand for "Oh snap, something
seriously zany just happened!"
This vexes the hot black
cheerleader, who frets, "Okay! Work the I.Q., girl, but please don't lose your
passion for fashion!" The message is clear: learning about science and stuff is
all well and good, as long as it doesn't interfere with the superficial things
that really matter.
Despite their oft-repeated
promises to remain Best Friends Forever, the girls are pulled in opposite
direction by their overriding passions. The jock abandons her friends to hang
out with the jocks. The cheerleader kicks it with the cheerleaders, the hot
geek blends in with the brains, and the girl with little discernible
personality but a gift for making bitchin' clothes presumably hangs out with
other girls with little discernible personality.
We then flash-forward two years. The girls'
utopia of shared clothes and daily video-IMing chitchats has died an unmourned
death at the hands of cliques and the narrow-minded tyranny of the school's
most popular student. In a moment of haunting sadness and visceral emotional
power, two of the Bratz reconnect briefly over their shared love of Peach Party
lip gloss, only to watch their fragile bond dissipate just as quickly.
Then, with the help of some
shopping-and-trying-on-makeup montages, the Bratz's friendship is restored.
These montages contain the film's defining sequence, in which a gaggle of
prepubescent girls gaze adoringly at the Bratz. In their infinite kindness, the
Bratz decide to provide makeovers for these 8-year-old representatives of the
film and toy line's target audience. The moppets begin as ordinary girls, a
little awkward and ungainly. Then the Bratz slather on the whore makeup and
transform their pint-sized protégés into creepily sexualized JonBenét Ramsey
doppelgängers. Oh, if only they could reach through the screen and do the same
for all the 8-year-olds in the audience! In spite of such blatant pandering, Bratz mercifully bombed at the box
office, grossing less than $10 million in its domestic run, thereby sparing the
world an endless procession of Bratz sequels and knock-offs.
[pagebreak]
The girls' bond and commitment to subverting
the dominant paradigm threatens the school's most popular and ruthless student,
a pretty blonde tyrant that Chelsea Staub plays as a cross between Josef
Stalin, Paris Hilton, and Tracy Flick from Election. Staub's father, incidentally, is played by Jon Voight, though to be fair, he
probably only took the role to pay back Bratz producer Steven Paul for giving Voight his career-making role in Superbabies: Baby
Geniuses 2,
as an ascot-wearing, smoking-jacket-and-Hitler-mustache-sporting German
businessman engaged in a decades-long, multi-continent struggle with a
super-scamp who travels around in a flying car and never ages. Voight is, after all, loyal. And
completely insane. (For further proof, check him out in David Zucker's
far-right-wing Christmas
Carol spoof An American Carol. On second thought, don't.
You'd only be encouraging him.)
To thwart the Bratz's sinister campaign to
spread fashion, friendship, and montages set to peppy pop songs across clique
divides, Staub decides to throw herself a second Sweet Sixteen Party. The
catch? In order to attend her chichi soirée, attendees are forced to agree to
only associate with their cliques. Even worse, Staub hires one of the Bratz's
mothers to cater the affair. In Bratz's dizzy fantasy world, even the girl without
money has money. The film's idea of poverty is a mom who owns a catering
business, and a computer-owning teenager who scoots around on a moped instead
of in a sports car.
At said party, Staub humiliates the singing,
personality-devoid Brat by showing a video of her singing "La Cucaracha" with
mom/all-purpose ethnic Lainie Kazan. Ha! That girl totally has a mother! And
she doesn't always look like a runway model! Could she be any lamer? Tragedy turns to
triumph, however, when a sympathetic DJ fucks up the mix, and soon everyone is
boogying to a totes hip-hopified version of "La Cucaracha." But triumph soon
morphs back into tragedy when a party elephant kicks Staub into the pool. An
apoplectic Staub blames the Bratz for ruining her party.
Suddenly, the same classmates who embraced the
Bratz as liberators from the tyranny of cliques and popular girls shun the
fashion-forward foursome for costing them sweet-ass Sweet Sixteen gift bags.
Clearly, only a climactic performance of a song espousing the values of "Brattitude"
at the big talent show can set things right and put Staub in her place. Staub
and her nemeses are all about clothes, glamour, and performing forgettable
synth-pop ditties. The crucial difference is that Staub uses clothes and
generic dance-pop to destroy; the Bratz use it to uplift and edutain.
"This is why the terrorists hate us," I wrote
in the concluding line to my original Bratz review. I also wrote, "It would be hard to
find another film that so nakedly, unambiguously celebrates the cancers of
contemporary culture, from rampant consumerism to new-technology mania to the
tarting-up of teen girls to bubblegum pop to My Super Sweet 16." Yet I gave the film a C-.
This puzzled readers. How could a film embodying so much that's wrong in our
culture receive a grade higher than a D-?
That's a valid question, but I try to reserve
the F—and the D-, which readers have charmingly dubbed the gentleman's
F—for movies that fill me with a visceral sense of hate. But watching Bratz, I was filled with a sense of
profound amusement, albeit not with the film so much as the culture that would
produce such a tacky, preposterous little trifle. Bratz is far too stupid to be legitimately
hateful or worthy of hate. It simply doesn't merit an emotion that strong or
personal.
Nonetheless Bratz: The Movie inspired some very strong,
very batshit emotions from the usually calm and collected Paula Abdul, who had
a televised, highly public breakdown after learning that the makers of Bratz wouldn't be needing her
services as executive producer/choreographer/costume and doll designer/key
grip/best boy/caterer after all. Because it's fun to laugh at the misfortune of
horrible people, here's a clip:
I was less amused by Bratz the second time around, in
part because the insane incongruity of watching such an instantly dated piece
of disposable pop-culture ephemera while surrounded by middle-aged
men—including one very auspicious, beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning
household name who nobly/unnecessarily got out of bed to watch a 10 a.m.
screening of Bratz even though
he was battling cancer—was gone. I was amused, however, by the DVD's
coming attractions for animated adventures starring Bratz: Kids and Bratz: Babies. Can Bratz: Fetuses (when your womb needs a
makeover, these style-conscious pre-humans take over!) and Bratz: Spermatozoa (you will not believe how
they accessorize their flagella!) be far behind?
Failure, Fiasco or Secret
Success?:
Failure