MK&A, GOP, CRAP

I have now seen New York Minute, one of many psychic blows I’ve collected for Team Mercury in my four years of servitude; I haven’t felt this traumatized since that rave documentary in ’00, the one with DJ Keoki blathering on about The Oneness to a proscenium of sparkly, slobbery dosed masses. I was not particularly opposed to the Olsen Twins as an entity, apart from thinking their “Let’s Visit the Day Spa” dolls are creepy, and my inherent distrust of any two people making $300 mill off hawking tie-dyed bikini skorts at Wal-Mart. Based on the full spread in People, and the fashion blurb in Teen Vogue, tho, mostly I just felt sorry for them; anyone raised as they were is statistically bound for Baby Jane moments midlife. It is cool that Ashley’s NYU app essay compared their lives to a Jackson Pollock painting, but dudes. Wealth. Beauty. Pain. They didn’t even reap the full impact/ deep emotional ditch-digging of their parents’ divorce, cause they were too busy working to notice. And you thought ole Crunky had it bad.
NYM makes near-obligitory Hilton sisters jokes—winky ones, supposedly funny ’cause the OTs are so light-years NOT the H-squad—but they’re just two sides of the same busted neo-con Benjamin. Hiltons flash the dirty glitterati, the sloppy riche; Olsens got crosshairs on Xtian values for the Schwarznegger social grinches. Needless to say, the film includes an underdeveloped yet firm sub-plot regarding downloaders, and the evils of music piracy.
Mid-filmic antics, which are discernable by varying levels of Olsen twin surprise-face (learned, presumably, from Kimmy Gibler), the twins ACCIDENTaLLY come up from a sewer on East 152nd street, which NYmaps.assist tells me is somewhere Harlem-ish, in the direction of Washington Heights. They miraculously ingratiate themselves to “Bling Palace,” or some hair salon of a similar title (definitely with “Bling”). After charming the place’s denizens, including the stereotypical gay black hairdresser, they are allowed to fashion-show a barrage of ghetto-fabulous costumes, from rainbow zebra Donna Summer dresses to so-not-Juicy-Couture tracksuits and fake afro puffs, while the Bling Palace’s owner sagely advises to keep their pretty heads up, the day will start anew. Then she lets them leave without paying—a gift for just being them ?—and borrow her son’s cab. Freshly BLINGED, they run into stalking antagonist Eugene LEvy; when he flashes his truant-officer badge, all the black men around them, simultaneously, put their hands up.
Never meant to join the ranks of wanton MK&A-hatertude, but I saw this movie with a theater-full of mostly preteen ladies age 6-15; the lack of imagination/plot/neo-con message was horrifying enough, but here’s hoping tween internalization stops after the Olsens iron out their little caper.