#surely not ALL cheerleaders are vapid bullies right

[sergeant-angels-trashcan]

i don’t know how to explain this right but cheerleading is such a female/feminine/femme coded thing and it’s derided a lot but it’s also like. one of the LEAST feminine things ever. yeah there’s skirts and makeup but the skirts are like. not actually sexy if you’ve worn one. they’re thick stiff fabric meant to hold a shape and you are like. constantly doing things to kick that skirt up but you’re not doing it to be sexy. 

and half the point of being a cheerleader is to yell really loud and just. generally be loud. which is something girls and women aren’t really allowed to do

and like. physically lifting someone over your head. or doing freakin backbends. that’s physically taxing. 

i’m not sure what i’m trying to get at here, but like, cheerleading is partly VERY AGGRESSIVE FEMININTY masking plain aggression/competitiveness and i think it’s interesting how often cheerleading is disparaged but also fetishized, as if it’s threatening enough to require being smacked down all the time. like we are threatened by a 16 year old girl who can fling another teenager into the air. and how cheerleaders are often portrayed as unintelligent and cruel, and how this probably has something to do with how incredibly gendered the sport is seen. and this isn’t even getting into male cheerleaders. 

#gender #queer stuff #cheerleading #i was a cheerleader in high school. not because i was good. #but because my school was so small we couldn't have tryouts #and i loved it #yeah we had the bitchy girls but we also had the quiet nerds #like highest gpas in the school girls #surely not ALL cheerleaders are vapid bullies right? #i just. i feel like there's some sort of madonna/whore thing that happens with cheerleaders #and im talking about. school cheerleaders because i know nothing about professional cheerleaders #but anyway #i have no idea what prompted this i'm just as confused as you are

[bronsonthurman]

Review: Netflix’s Death Note

Recently Netflix released its version of Death Note, one of several anime adaptations in the works by major American studio. While it credits the Weekly Shonen Jump manga series as its source, it likely benefits far more from awareness of the 2006 anime adaptation. American viewers of that series surely featured prominently in the calculus of producing this movie, providing a ready made market. Unfortunately this movie is a vapid attempt to exploit the premise as American teen horror and just looks that much worse for its comparison to the unique psychological thriller that was the anime.

Aside from the requisite spoiler alert, I would advise readers who haven’t seen either of these productions to immediately watch the anime. The Netflix adaptation will spoil its surprises without delivering any rewards. The anime is only 37 episodes in self-contained entirely and though it occasionally detours into the ridiculous and convoluted, as anime is wont to do, its characters and plot are fresh, engaging, and thought provoking..

If it were not for the superior source material the movie might have seemed like just more mediocre teen targeted commercialism instead of an outright dumpster fire. Protagonist Light Turner (Nat Wolff) is a troubled, brilliant teen making extra cash by selling homework and creepily staring--oops, I mean longing for--beautiful cheerleader Mia Sutton (Margaret Qualley). We are supposed to believe he is good at heart because he tries to defend her against a generic male bully, but the audience can’t help but notice he only gets involved after she has the courage to intervene; Light butts in with an outburst of machismo he tries to back up by being a ineffectual smart ass. All in all the introduction brings to mind school shooting tragedies in a manner that only adds ick, not substance. It preps the viewer to feel wary of what they’ve gotten into, and rightfully so.

Into the hands of this unfortunate protagonist falls the titular premise, the Death Note, really a Death Notebook wherein owners can write names, dates, and manners of death for people they wish to kill. Hot on its heels Light is visited by the prickly, hunched demon Ryuk, who is served well by darkly lit computer animation and proves that Willem Dafoe is enjoyable even when he’s taking it easy, if not exactly just phoning it in. Ryuk serves as an unpersuasive argument that the devil made Light do it. Luckily for the viewer there is only one bully ready to be a target of Light’s wrath, who is decapitated gruesomely. The two-dimensional cruelty presented as justification does nothing to avoid the disturbing appearance of a shitty person in desperate need of psychological help getting bloodily murdered instead.

In better hands Death Note could have been a shocking and significant co-option of the property to explore a decent-at-heart kid pushed to the edge of good and evil by youthful callousness and falling into an abyss of high school violence. Director Adam Windgard, perhaps recognizing his own limitations, giving us instead exactly what we should expect from a director of mediocre horror like the Blair Witch reboot, V/H/S, and You’re Next: more flimsy, forgettable horror. Windgard tries to make Death Note into Final Destination with a few improbable and modestly gory set pieces, strung together with music videos with terrible soundtracks, in between trying to establish conflict between mysterious FBI consultant L and a cringe inducing loser-gets-the-girl teen romance. Sad to say this sub-plot’s only redeeming quality is being perfunctory and it only gets worse when Mia’s motives take a sinister turn.

There is a meaningful discussion overdue on female capacity for vengeful judgmentalness, violence by proxy, and vileness typically relegated to men. These subjects are hinted at, but this film is no place for something so nuanced, so the betrayals and come uppance we are subjected to feel like the cinematic equivalent of a basic bro screaming “that’s what you get bitch!” Whether coming from the screenplay by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides or from director Wingard one of them should have realized how it would reflect on the men behind the film. It just feels gross.

Efforts to weave plots around the endless rules included in the Death Note may appeal to some devoted hobbyist geeks, but even a casual hobbyist geek like me was underwhelmed. The only respite comes from the fact that Dafoe has a great voice and Lakeith Stanfield gives a competent performance as L that seems aware of what made the anime equivalent of his character interesting. Mentioning the acting in this movie feels spiteful--the actors are hardly to blame, going through motions as they were surely expected and giving basically the appropriate emotional cues to support the dialog, such as it is. That Qualley’s flat performance as Mia seemed fitting is not so much a complement to her, but rather another strike for the subtle stink of chauvinism exuded by her role and plots.

Eventually there are confrontations, a chase action sequence that doesn’t contribute anything or know when to quit, something like a climax, and an attempt at a twist ending. Attempts to redeem Light Turner ring hollow and false. None of it matters or convinces, none of it draws the viewer in. Even the guilty pleasure of really tearing apart something awful wouldn’t have kept the movie on for its full running time if I weren’t penning an article--I walked away only minutes in before deciding I couldn’t suitably insult it if I hadn’t sat through it all.

The degree of animosity here is not entirely due to the film in isolation. Alone it wouldn’t merit a full viewing and I would have left feeling mildly resentful that I had wasted 15 minutes on a teen horror movie that really was intended for teens. It speaks to its target audience in a cynical, exploitative way, not in a Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-will-appeal-to-your-inner-adolescent way. Sometimes that’s still passable, pressing the intended viewer’s buttons just how they want them to be pressed by a particular genre. But this movie takes deeply interesting source material and uses it to compel me and countless others to sit through it for 101 minutes. That it was free with my subscription makes it worse, not better, because if I had to pay for a theater ticket to see it, I wouldn’t have, just as I didn’t see Ghost in the Shell, an adaptation of a franchise I am much more personally attached to. This pops up on Netflix as if to say “you liked Death Note, right? We have more Death Note for you,” only to insult me by abusing its source so badly.

This is the cause of angry reddits, comment section tirades, bad user reviews, and poor returns. Hollywood doesn’t understand the genre. Whitewashing it a big part of it; stories are products of cultures, infused with those experiences and values. Its not just the race of the actor that matters, though racism under the guise as marketability is truly an ugly reality that deprives many fine actors of work and us of their performances. In the case of anime adaptations the whole story is being whitewashed to force it to fit Hollywood’s limited realm of cinematic experience. This robs of us of fine stories that are highly original, at least from our cultural norm.

This adaptation robs us of Light Yagami, a model Japanese youth with a bright future ahead of him, diligent, conscientious of his responsibilities in a distinctly Asian way. When this fine young man becomes convinced that he should use the Death Note to make the world better by eliminating criminals, we believe him, at least at first. He matches wits against his opposite, the misanthropic but just L, sacrificing his rationales of justness bit by bit along the way. The audience takes a gripping psychological trip to the realization that our protagonist is the villain. His crazy girlfriend isn’t just a bitch, she’s an outright obsessive who is perversely the subject of obsession herself as a teen idol. The police are bastions of mundanity, trying to bring sanity back to a world split by public knowledge that this grim god of vengeance exists. The chase alternates between methodical procedure and inspired drama. The series is anything but a formulaic rehash of a genre which American audiences already have in excess.

Ultimately that’s all Netflix’s Death Note is. It adds nothing, and it sacrifices much. It wastes the viewers time and insults fans drawn in by the licensed property. It subjects the viewer to some of the tackiest songs I’ve ever heard in a soundtrack. It’s sure to disappear from Netflix suggestions soon, in line with their strategy of producing as many things as possible by scatter shot and just being quiet about the failures. Don’t bother searching for it.

#film review #netflix #anime #critique