As I walked into the theater knowing what it is I’ve gotten myself into, I began to question my own motives. I’ve hated the Bratz toy line for years, for so many reasons, and surely I had no high hopes that this movie could surpass its damned origins? Yet I knew that I had to see the movie, regardless. Partly for morbid curiosity, and partly for a slight glimmer of hope in the back of my brain that something decent may sludge its way out of this. After all, it can’t be worse than the dolls, which are single-handedly inspiring a legion of pre-pubescent girls to dress up as back-alley whores and build a resume on cucumber-moistening.
Surely, the filmmakers dared not translate those dolls accurately, as that would pretty much be child pornography?
Thank god, they didn’t go down that route, which is a good start. They did, however, decide to make this movie as innocently racist as possible. Let’s run through the multi-ethnic cast of characters here. Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos) is the Latino. You know because her mother and her converse in Spanglish that would make Carlos Mencia sound sophisticated. There’s also a band of mariachis living in her kitchen, for reasons sadly never explained in the movie and haunted me since. Do rich Mexicans really hire mariachis to play songs in their kitchen during breakfast? Because that is fascinating. Jade (Janel Parrish) is the Asian. She’s possibly the most stereotypical one, as she is the smart science whiz of the group, and her mother talks like the Vietnamese hooker in Full Metal Jacket. No, she doesn’t know kung fu, but her boyfriend does. Then there’s Cloe (Skylet Shaye), the klutzy blonde who has no dad and whose mom has no steady job. All she’s really good for is playing sports, like all poor white trash. Making four is Sasha (Logan Browning), the black one. Naturally, she redefines the cheerleading team with hip-hop, and she sometimes slips into ghetto rat attitude, despite living in a big house in the ‘burbs. Her parents are divorced, which is not as offensive as it could be, but knowing better, they probably tried to cast Fred Willard in blackface as the dad, and was stopped.
Standing in the way of these “bratz” is Meredith (Chelsea Staub), the rich and cunning princess who suckles up to her daddy the principal—played by Jon Voight wearing a ridiculously large prosthetic nose, which I believe is their way of telling us that they’re supposed to be Jewish. Who am I kidding? One cannot afford a huge mansion and a jet-setter lifestyle on the salary of a public school principal without being Jewish.
Most of the plot is all-too-familiar territory, with added idiocy. It’s Clueless without the irony, Mean Girls without the wit. The one thing I’ve never encountered in any teen film before is Yasmin’s love interest—a deaf kid who learns how to masterfully spin a turntable by feeling the vibration of the amps—which is a shame that they’re in short supply. Every teen movie could use a good hard-of-hearing musician. There’s a lesson there somewhere too, if you would like to figure it out. I really don’t.
I kept trying to tell myself that I simply do not have the brattitude required to enjoy this. The film is aimed at children, at six-year-olds who don’t know any better and are just playing into the hands of capitalist franchise marketers. Yet that only makes it worse. Bratz: The Movie is so full of backwards moral that screws up children’s priorities that it’s disheartening to see parents letting their babies lap it up. Who needs education when you’ve got BFFs and super-hot clothes, yeah? You’ll never be as smart as the Asian chick anyway.
Furthermore, I knew that the English language is devolving with the MySpace generation, but if you had asked me three months prior, I wouldn’t have guessed that this form of speech—a hybrid between Valley Girl speak and internet 1337 5p34k—would be prominently displayed in a movie trailer, much less spoken phonetically in dialogue, 4realz.
One good thing I can say about this experiment is that during the screening, the projector puttered and died three times; once during the climactic talent show where the Bratz prove that their song ‘n’ dance number is better than Meredith’s song ‘n’ dance number. If I were a more religious man, I’d call it divine intervention. God was giving me the opportune window to get the f-ck out of there. My misguided professionalism kept me sitting—Sorry, G. More likely though, it was probably a disgruntled projectionist who drew the short straw and ended up taking a baseball bat to the reels.
"Bratz: The Movie" opens August 3, 2007 and is rated PG. Comedy. Directed by Sean McNamara. Written by Susan Estelle Jansen (screenplay), Adam de la Pena & David Eilenberg (story). Starring Chelsea Staub, Janel Parrish, Jon Voight, Logan Browning, Nathalia Ramos, Skyler Shaye.
