Opening Day: 15 November 2007

OUR REVIEW OF THE OFFICIAL "BRATZ" SOUNDTRACK

Synopsis:

Based on the best-selling dolls.The exciting and glamorous lives of Cloe, Jade, Sasha, and Yasmin; the teenage girls with a "passion for fashion"! Four teenage girls who come from different social and economic backgrounds empower themselves by rejecting their respective high school cliques and band together, calling themselves Bratz.

Movie Review:

“Bratz” is not just the most atrocious film this year but it’s a horrifying indictment of obnoxious American teenage narcissism. While I fully understand that I'm clearly ‘like soooo’ not in their demographic (sticking out like a sore thumb in the process, flanked by a handful of empty seats) but what is plainly opposable is its toxic value system that prioritises superficiality and pop music over its sledgehammer lessons of friendships and inclusiveness. Sprung from a line of fashion dolls that make Barbie look like an Amish housewife, the film tones down its creepy sexualised tone for quickie moral lessons and puerile considerations of racial identities.

These Bratz consist of freshmen high schoolers in Hispanic Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos), African-American Sasha (Logan Browning), Caucasian Cloe (Skyler Shaye) and Pan-Asian Jade (Janel Parrish). Preaching individualism through materialism and in a haze of noxiously pandering stereotypes (Yasmin’s represented through food and music, Sasha teaches everyone a thing or two about dancing, Cloe’s a pretty go-getter at soccer and Jade’s a science whiz under all that face-paint!), the thing that’s even more egregious is its condescension of young femininity under the guise of appreciating the gender. Considering its impressionable core audience, it commits such a cinematic sin when it is caught attempting to traffic in post-feminism while at the same time, disparaging it completely.

Consciously cavalier and ironically insular, its entirely manufactured theme of abolishing cliques and embracing individuality is a tougher merchandise to flog than the titular skanky dolls when all it ends up affirming is the sorry state of materialism that is allowed to pervade even the most tenuous of idealisms. “Bratz”, while never once approaching the subversion of “Mean Girls”, would have been a fantastic satire if they had proceeded to cast the chasms of mainstream pop culture like Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, that and if it wasn't so hands-over-eyes blind about its consumerist schlock peddling.

Movie Rating:



(Vapid and insidious, “Bratz” will gnaw at your conscience)

Review by Justin Deimen