Bring It On: In It To Win It
I love all the terrible straight-to-DVD Bring It On sequels. This one came out in December but I just saw it a couple weeks ago. This one features two competing teams at cheer camp, the East Coast Jets and the West Coast Sharks. They have a cheer rumble. It must be pretty exciting to be on a teen cheerleading team for an entire coast. They end up having to join up to create one team, the East-West Shets. Seriously. The Shets.
In It To Win It wasn't as offensive as the third one, All Or Nothing. But it was still pretty offensive. There's a big scene where everyone "confesses" their secrets (very Foucault). The gay character, Ruben, turns out not to be gay. He was just pretending. Aeysha, the main character's black best friend, admits that she has been faking her "ghetto" accent all along. Turns out she wasn't involved in drive-by shootings as a child. She says, "I'm just a black girl who enunciates." The blonde head cheerleader of the other team says, "If you want respect that much, you should just be a bitch. That's what I do. Twice the respect, half the effort." What? Also, the goth girl, who previously revealed that she's on the squad because her parents make her? It turns out that she was lying, she loves cheerleading after all! What I learned from this scene: when someone is different from you, it turns out they're just pretending.
Pussycat Dolls - "When I Grow Up"
I've watched this music video kind of a lot of time. Reasons I'm fascinated:
1. Hair decisions. Jessica's new red hair makes her look like Carmit, the one who left the group. Did they need to have one redhead? Like, contractually? You can tell Jessica isn't Carmit though because of her lack of too much plastic surgery on her face. Melody's ponytail, I think, was a really bad decision. I do like Kimberly's new short haircut, though, because now I can tell her and Ashley apart.
2. So campy! Mostly how they lipsync along to the laughing. Especially at 1:32, sitting on the bench, when Ashley and Kimberly lean in to laugh.
3. Every Pussycat Doll song is about being watched by men. At least this song is about how they always wanted to be watched by men. And the "Be careful what you wish for cause you just might get it" is the first time they ever seemed ambivalent about it at all. The part most like earlier Pussycat Dolls is when Nicole sings, "I see you watching me, watching me, and I know you want it," which breaks the song! After that, she just sort of scream-sings for a couple seconds while someone (her, but she's not lipsyncing to it) says the chorus, then she punches the screen and it shatters! And then it goes into a dance breakdown which is only in the video. The song ends with, "Be careful what you wish for cause you just might get it, get it?" So that's the big point and they want to make sure we know it. Be careful when you wish to be famous and have people watching you all the time.
4. I think also that the video is kind of about the end of the world. I mean, gas prices keep going up, and there they are dancing on top of cars in gridlocked traffic. Then they climb up and dance on scaffolding (i.e. new construction) while singing "when I grow up ..." There's a prominent shot of an airplane flying over a car. What are they trying to say?
Sarah Schulman's My American History
I got My American History in the mail yesterday, the only Sarah Schulman book I haven't read. After reading the introduction, I skipped right ahead to the section on the Lesbian Avengers, a direct action political group that Schulman helped found in the early 90s. They're really great. They always make me think of The Avengers, a comic book superhero team. Marvel is always putting adjectives in front of super hero teams in order to make spin-off books. Right now, there's The New Avengers and The Mighty Avengers. In the past, there's been the Young Avengers and the West Coast Avengers. So why couldn't there be the Lesbian Avengers? A team of superheros who use their amazing powers for direct action. For example, one could have the power to make photocopies without having to get a corporate job in order to access a xerox machine. I think that Multiple Man, from X-Factor, has powers that would be really great for direct action. He can create up to 40 copies of himself. If a Lesbian Avenger had those powers, it would be really helpful for preparing mailings, doing door-to-door outreach, and making sure there were plenty of people at a demonstration.
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