Bring It On

Ah, the classic tale of cheerleader revenge. How many times have we seen urban black girls pilfered by their Rancho Relaxo cornstarch counterparts? Time, you intransigent whore! Why will you not allow Compton to cheer?

Seriously, though, if Robert de Niro can direct a bloodless epic on the birth of the CIA, it's only fair that Kirsten Dunst can jump around and look cute for ninety minutes. I don't know what this movie is about, exactly, but I can tell you that when the choreographer whom our snowy girls hire as a ringer scolds them for being pretty little airheads instead of scarf-wearing superhomo friends of Fosse, film forever changed:

"Cheerleaders are dancers who have gone retarded."

In his desperate wisdom, clutching the final handful of moral sense before delivering it, in his disappearance, to the void of logical necessity, Ivan Karamazov declares, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Then, overwhelmed by his revelation, Ivan goes crazy and convinces his friend to kill himself.

What would Dostoevsky think of Bring It On? Would his despairing journeyman look into the soul of Kirsten Dunst and see only the devil mocking him? Yes, he would, and then he would conclude, for a second time, that in a world without God, everything is permitted. So go, you wicked blond fairies, strut your fiendish bodies. We have no means by which to deny your terrible truth. In this world, which is the only world, where only the brutish laws of causality rule our conduct, life is unhappily relative. Ivan, the mad Russian, tells us so:

"Philosophers are priests who have plagiarized their love,"

Which is why he went nuts. . . which is why, probably, I rented and watched, and enjoyed, this ditzy extravagance.