"... it is the business of enticing Turks to violate a tenant of their religion ..."

Public/pubic one expects, but this is a nasty business indeed!

Also, I watched Bring It On: All or Nothing (Hayden Panettiere! Cheerleading! What could go wrong?) and I am sorry to say that I had no idea how much could go wrong. There were several scenes that just rewrote scenes in Bring It On, managing to lose their freshness and replace it with crassness -- on direct to video I guess you get to say "shit" and ramp up the sexuality. But that wasn't the bad part, not really; the bad part was the plot, in which Britney (Panettiere) has to leave her rich lily-white (with token Asian-American) high school, where she was team captain, and attend the poor brown high school down the road. The set dressing was plausible -- the stuff on the walls was not that different from the stuff on the walls of my 99% black middle school in DC -- but beyond that things got bad fast.

See, Britney has to convince the team captain to incorporate "crunking" and other "ghetto" styles (the quote marks are in the dialogue, I assure you) into their routine in order to impress Rihanna at the big audition to be in Rihanna's new video. Because the team captain couldn't figure that out herself, even though we're told she routinely includes moves that are banned in official competition rules for being too sexy. The skanky race and gender politics are so tangled here, I can't sort them out.

So, okay, what these people need is a honky. To release the power of their own culture! Which they did not fully appreciate until she unlocked it for them!

But it's not over, because Britney then returns to her homecoming dance and, in a cheer-off, defeats her evil blonde replacement by incorporating these aggressively sexual "ghetto" moves she's learned into her routine. Panettiere has charisma, but not enough to make this look good; it's more Weird Al's White and Nerdy persona than Eminem on the cultural appropriation scale, except without the self-mockery. Self-mockery sets in by the time Britney shows up before the big meet with her hair in braids, wearing big pink sweats with one leg rolled up to the knee, but by then it just made me cringe more.

I remember Bring It On as being a lot better on the race/class issues, with a plot that refused the white star's attempts to rescue the black team, but then I was exercising my privilege not to notice much more aggressively when I saw it. I hope I can rewatch it and still enjoy it.
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From: [identity profile] rivkat.livejournal.com


Hee! It's hilarious that you ask, but no. The source of my cheer love is my teamwork fetish, which I picked up as a policy debater. The idea of people working together and really needing each other to win -- really being only as strong as the weakest link, without stars who can save the day as in most team sports -- gets me in my gut. (Though I will watch a training montage for any sport; the Bring It On training montage is thus the best part of the movie for me. And this sequel denied me even that! How can you have a sports movie without a training montage?) Relatedly, I really like the visual effect of synchronization.

Z's school has a nationally ranked college team, and someday I hope to go watch them in person.

From: [identity profile] shelbyg.livejournal.com


I strongly recomend "Rocket Science" as movie about policy debate (though that is just a frame work), though not so much for teamwork.

: )

Shelby
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