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Brews We Can Use

By David Edelstein
Posted Thursday, Dec. 28, 2000, at 2:20 PM ET

Well, Tony, you were INVITED to my beer tasting but never showed. (Something about a 104-degree fever, wasn't it? Wimp!)

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And since you keep bringing the subject back to Kirsten Dunst, let me remind you that I liked Bring It On even better than you did. I wrote that it offered "something more than curvy young girls with long, toned legs in short skirts and colored panties and tight halter tops who swivel their torsos and cartwheel and land in these eye-popping wide splits and ... What was I just talking about?" There is, as you imply, a larger issue here. No one will think about Bring It On at awards time, because it's just a t-and-a picture, right? Well it's also in the tradition of exploitation pictures that dare to tackle more uncomfortable themes than mainstream movies--in this case the ways in which hip-hop culture has penetrated even the most blond-and-blue-eyed of bastions and the resentment within the African American community for the appropriation of its voice. (That's a theme that goes back to the early days of rock 'n' roll.) A great movie? No, but more important than Dancer in the Dark by a factor of a thousand.

Hey, Roger--congratulations on winning the Lincoln Award. What is it? And will it make you nervous to sit in dark theaters henceforth?

David

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