AND IN A DARK BROWN VOICE, SHE SAID: Movie reviews. Spoilers abound.

Bring It On: How can a cheerleading movie starring Eliza Dushku, and with “Oh Mickey” as end-credits music, be depressing?? Watch and learn.

First, Dushku is hotsauce, and although she isn’t Faith levels of awesome here, she’s still amazingly fun to watch. I’m not sure why I don’t like Kirsten Dunst, but I don’t–I find her really bland–but she isn’t the problem here.

The problem is that this is a feel-good movie about class war. It’s yet another movie where the white characters are morally compromised but never morally interesting, and the black characters are set dressing. I liked the idea behind the movie (almost entirely white cheer team learns that all its routines have been stolen–by an unlikeable, characterless villainess, because that’s so challenging–from an inner-city all-black team) but absolutely hated the execution. Why does no one even suggest that the privileged squad should be penalized for its years of ripping off the inner-city team? Why does Gabrielle Union’s character get approximately 1/20th of the depth given any white character? Why do I bother asking these questions?

Come Back, Little Sheba: Ratty noted that the title of the movie should have informed me that I was in for ’50s melodrama. Yeah, this didn’t work for me.

Picnic at Hanging Rock: I’m not sure what I would think of this movie if I’d known more about it beforehand. The music is brilliant.

But so much of the movie is predicated on the pretense that it depicts actual events. I only learned that the story was made-up when I google’d afterwards. And that knowledge left me with a weird, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” feeling.

The thing is… there are real events that can’t be explained. Making up fake events to demonstrate the inexplicability of life can easily feel very paint-by-numbers: Every time a possible explanation comes up, remove a necessary strut, so it collapses. I felt like Picnic did that. I also thought its emphasis on the sexual elements of its story became much, much less interesting when it turned out that someone made them up.

I don’t present this as a confident opinion. If people who liked the movie want to object, I’d definitely like to hear about it. But it stopped working for me once the curtain pulled back and I could see the Wizard of Oz.

Sullivan’s Travels: My first Veronica Lake picture! Oh, this was so pleasing. It’s fast and funny and poignant; and Miss Lake’s radiant beauty is matched by her unexpectedly deep, rich voice. That knockabout, ironic voice made the movie for me. But I’ll note that its take on class conflict managed to be sunny-side-up and yet harder and smarter than anything Bring It On even dreamed of.