Vegetative state

In the weird haze of being sick, sometimes you just veg out. So aside from watching episodes of TV shows on DVD, I also vegged out on movies.

Little Miss Sunshine was cute. It takes the American family vacation/road trip to a different level: the family drives to California from Albuquerque for little Olive's competition in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. In the van are the corporate slogan-laden dad, the supportive mother, the suicidal uncle, the silent and sullen teenage brother, and the grandfather who doesn't give a fuck anymore. The road trip genre always has bad stuff happen that challenges the bond of The Family or The Friends, and the bad stuff in this one happens to each family member, one at a time. Each of them has some dream taken away. Except the mother, who keeps telling everyone to remember that they're above all, still a family.

The double standard of Olive's routine at the pageant had me irate. Why were all the beauty pageant mothers and judges all up in arms because a little girl did a dance to "Superfreak," for her family???? They were indignant, as if she'd crossed some line. As if the other JonBenet/Barbie girls weren't perpetuating horribly contrived beauty standards. I wanted Olive to win, to make a point. But then I don't think beauty pageants are like regimes or things you can infiltrate and topple from within.... To win, you have to buy into it at some level.

It weirdly reminded me of Lilo and Stitch, which I really loved (except for Hawaii Five-O, where else in popular culture are Hawaiians normalized?) And throughout Little Miss Sunshine, especially the moments where the characters automatically do stuff because they're family, and that's what they do, I had Stitch's little commentary running in my head: "This is my family.... It's little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good."

Ohana means...

Then, I fell off my pilates ball laughing at Ali G Indahouse. I'd seen the old BBC TV show, but nothing more recent than 8 years old.

The plethora of sex jokes got really old really quickly, but the overall premise was funny: local idiot with good heart is set up to humiliate old fogey politician, but ends up being popular. The irony of Ali G's "Keep It Real" ghetto campaign is that he's a kid from a middle-class suburb who pretends he's a tough guy in a Westside gang. I mentioned infiltrating before, and could argue that Sacha Baron Cohen does it here, in "ghettoface," which can often be blackface, except that here it has the added component of taking place in Britain with fantasy scenes and a soundtrack taken largely out of American hip hop videos (NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" opens it up). So there's the triple-cultural clash, and the lines between parody (of hip hop, but mainly of hip-hop wannabes and imitators), cultural appropriation, and cultural domination are pretty blurred. Personally, I think it's intentional. Here the "turf wars," central to any combat genre ranging from the western to the war film, are over West Staines, East Staines, Parliament, and the local community center is the battleground. (Why are these films are always about bringing art to the youth?) In its own weird and irreverent way, the film was about community.

Or maybe it's just the NyQuil.

Westsiiiiiide...