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Watched the movie yesterday with my wife. Context; Dutch, two kids (boy 9, girl 6), live in a fairly big city. From reading on SA and Netflix' marketing, I expected a beauty pageant kind of movie. It's nothing like that and based on my experiences reading here I feel I need to point that out. The movie starts off fairly well, showing a male dominated environment where women are submissive to their man (culturally / religic infused). A young girl is followed and gets exposed to what impact this has on her mother. Especially when her husband takes another wife and she is forced to phone various people for the upcoming wedding. This was actually a strong part of the movie and well acted at that. The girl starts to get exposed at school to a different morality (lack of) and here it becomes a bit muddy. One of the girls is dancing like a girl in a rap video or something, wearing skinny leather pants. The camera deliberately lingers here and there and it adds nothing whatsoever. The movie obviously wants to make an impact by hiding the girls face just long enough so anyone stupidly thinking it is "hot" gets a big reveal. It's a stupid scene and we start to disconnect. From here on, we got both bored and angry with the movie. Yes, there are points to be made about social media, a lack of parenting and a child's mind, but the movie fails to portray this in any meaningful way. The main girl clashes more and more with her culture and starts to lie, steal and run away. The dances and moves become more and more explicit. This just happens and doesn't add anything meaningful. I find myself looking at the edges of our screen more and more, because it's just gross and pointless. The girls watch porn, discuss dicks and try to film a boy's penis in a toilet. It all comes together in their dance competition, where they preform a routine they themselves came up with through their phones and watching older girls. Nowhere in the movie is there any supervision, correction, parenting or guidance when they are together. The dance is awful; the kids twerk, put fingers in their mouth, bounce their butts off the floor, you name it. Probably the scene people see bits of. The audience starts to boo them because of it. A small event triggers the lead to run off back to her family where she slips in a, seemingly, healthy balance. (I like the mother / daughter moment here) Some random thoughts; - We never felt this movie was a critique on pageants, dance-offs or whatever. The last dance off seems to precisely show a crowd boo'ing their overt sexual portrayal. The scene certainly doesn't seem to exist to show pervs lusting at them, unless we missed something. Please do tell if we did! - The complaint that the movie goes too far in their portrayal I def agree on. The camera lingers, the kids are being put in extremely sexual poses and it harms the message. Doing this with 11 y/o actors makes it awful and wrong. - Netflix really didn't market this properly. It's a foreign movie about culture clashes, education, parenting and conflicting morality. They deserve every bit of critique they get for it. - The culture clash from a young girl, combined with social media exposure and peer pressure is fairly interesting. The movie messes it up, ultimately creating a boring, cheap movie. The director deserves critique for that. The sexual issue it tries to tackle would be far more impactful with showing less. I might edit this post and my wording. I found it difficult to write about this in English instead of Dutch.
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Sep 18, 2020 07:57
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:50 |
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