I watched 'Cuties"

[Music] hey guys what's up and welcome back to my channel so today is a fun little sunday special i'm gonna be talking about the movie cuties now just to be clear as a disclaimer i will not be showing any clips i will show screenshots just to get the idea across but that is it so you're not gonna see footage i made a video about the cuties marketing and trailer a while back and i got a little bit of feedback there that i do want to address because it's important and relevant to this video if you want to skip that which i don't suggest i'll put a timestamp but up to you one of the first things that people were commenting on that video was that i'd have to find a fluent french speaker because you know translation blah blah blah i am a fluent french speaker i did watch the movie in french i lived in france for eight years and i actually went to public school for part of the time i lived in france so there was quite a bit of the movie that i could relate to in some ways obviously to some extent aside from that another thing that people were commenting is that if you're not european you won't get it which i don't agree with that i don't think that's a valid argument but i'm an italian immigrant i only moved to the u.s five years ago six years ago so italian's my first language aside from that there's also the fact that people are bringing up that the director is a senegalese woman and some people were kind of implying that you can't critique a director because she's a woman what you identify as and where you're from has no real bearing on the concept of pedophilia in my opinion apparently this movie was supposed to be about her experiences i'm not discrediting any of that what i'm talking about is this movie i'm not talking about her experiences what she's gone through absolutely not because that's not my place at all and lastly people are also mentioning the fact that she was kind of run off the internet like she was getting death threats and crazy [ __ ] like that we're not doing that here i'm not about death threat this is my second time filming because in the first version of this video i talked a lot about the actual plot but i don't really think many people care about my entire analysis of the plot because i have like notes upon notes so i'm just gonna say this and then we're gonna get to the whole pedophilia issue so for about the first 35 to 40 minutes this film is actually very much a stereotypical coming of age film and i don't mean that in a shady way it's just like very sad a lot of emotion we see that the main character i mean her family is going through it her parents seem to not exactly be together like they're still married but the father decides to take a second wife we see ami going to mass but she doesn't seem to identify with her religion we see that at school she feels left out hence why she ends up learning a dance routine to try to fit in with the cuties which is the dance little gang of girls that's really it aside from the pedophilia which we'll get into it a second it was an extremely slow film extremely slow like i kept thinking i was at least halfway through and most the time i'd look and it'd be like 15 minutes or 20 minutes in i personally was not a fan of the pacing of the film but that is not our biggest problem sadly there is also debate about this just being art and having a message now i completely address and understand the fact that the message was sexualizing young girls especially young black girls is an issue and we need to discuss this issue but no discussion in the film was had and that is one of my main points of contention is that in this film a lot of [ __ ] was thrown in and never fully explained like they don't delve into religion they don't delve into what it's like being in a single parent household they don't delve into what it's like to be bullied because there is bullying there's no discussion so i find a lot of it very gratuitous so it's kind of like saying oh yeah sexualizing children bad and that's pretty much the movie and it's like okay well you could have said that in two seconds just tweet it like i don't need a film to say that we know i think we all know if you saw the clip that's circulating on twitter of one of the very last scenes where they're dancing extremely provocatively and they're zoom in on their genitalia rip your brain because i saw a couple seconds of that and i swear to god i thought the fbi was going to knock down my door because i was like i don't want to be seeing this i don't think anybody should be seeing this i just want to also say if you look at the reviews a lot of the people who are enjoying it say very inappropriate things about these young girls so i'm going to let that speak for itself but i do want to talk about a couple of instances that i thought were extremely inappropriate that you probably haven't seen on twitter or heard of online so there's one point where the cuties are watching a dance routine by this like other dance little gang or whatever who is like their direct competitor because they're trying to get into a dance competition and in that there are equivalently young girls who look to be about the same age so like i think they're between 11 and 14. one of them shows her full ass boob in the dance video it was kind of like the equivalent of a tick tock dance and she shows her boob that rubbed me the wrong way because it was like what like what is this for like did we have to go to this extent to make the point what point are you making can we talk about it more rather than just show it and be like okay bye so eventually what ends up happening is that the main character i mean ends up being part of the cuties and because she's consumed so much online she's like showing them how to twerk and how to like thrust their pelvis area i'm trying to say this in a way that doesn't make me want to vomit but it's not working she's showing them how to do essentially sexy dances in that scene there are like zoom ins of her putting like her hands on like the other cuties and showing them how to move and that didn't sit right with me i don't want to see young children twerking in little shorts with sexualized music too i never want to see that let alone seeing zoomed in low-key almost slow-mo versions of that like who who who's benefiting from that because surely it's not us non-pedophiles just saying so that was already the first point where i was like okay we went from coming of age story to pedobate real quick and those scenes to me should never be in the film period but those scenes to me seemed to linger for no reason other than to linger so you start wondering some people were saying and this is a valid claim that they think the point of the movie is to make you uncomfortable so we start this discussion and i can agree to an extent but at the same time we have to recall that these actresses are child actors like they're not 18 year olds pretending to be younger or 18 year olds who look like 11 year olds like these are children doing these things and they're gonna get a very particular type of attention from that and i don't even know what what that's going to do to their psyche i'm afraid to think about it frankly as much as i see where this film was trying to go in reality i just don't think it translated like i really think it's not me trying to be a contrarian [ __ ] or anything but really i just don't think it translated i think the message got lost somewhere it just did not translate and i think that's also why so many people are even afraid to watch the film because they feel so uncomfortable it feels like you're seeing something you shouldn't be seeing your message is already lost if people feel that way so there's a point in the movie where they pull down emmy's pants and her underwear is exposed and they make fun of her for the underwear she's wearing which in and of itself seems like another gratuitous scene because it doesn't add anything to the plot and her friends the cuties are like oh my god like we're so embarrassed everyone keeps mentioning it blah blah so what does ami do to kind of try to repair this she takes a picture of her vagina and posts it online even the choice of her doing that to me was suspicious because it really did not add anything to the plot so i was like what what was this for thankfully you don't see any of that i mean you see her taking the picture but you're from an angle where you don't see anything thank god so that also was alarming so then at one point this is by far one of the scenes that troubled me the most so at one point they creep into a place that looks like a laser tag a place and it's like dark and they're like black lights whatever they get caught for creeping in and they're two guards now one of the guards is i call him hamster you know how if you hold a hamster sometimes it looks like their eyes are about to roll out of their heads this guard had that vibe like it looked like his eyes were about to just [ __ ] roll down his face like tears it was truly troubling so when they get caught to get out of trouble i think it was at me she decides to start twerking as kind of a way to get out of trouble for sneaking in because the guards were like oh we're gonna call your parents and she's like no and then she starts dancing like that almost like her dancing was a kind of payment to be like okay look at me be sexual like this now let us go the way the guard looks at her when she does that had i been there he would be strangled as much as that was troubling that is probably one of the only moments that actually involved some kind of commentary because the way i read it anyway was like some people are just so okay with wanting to see children in sexual positions that they don't even hide it and this guard was a living embodiment of that so i thought that that was probably the only moment where i saw what they were trying to do but i still don't think it was executed properly in the least and they end up getting away with it they you know leave the laser tag place their parents aren't called so then towards the end i think this is probably the most popular scene this one's circulating on twitter there's the infamous dance routine on stage where they're all dressed up in their getup this i think is really the straw that broke the camel's back for me because i was deeply uncomfortable watching it the whole time in fact it's such an uncomfortable film that my husband didn't want to watch it with me and i was wearing headphones and sometimes he'd just look over and be like what the [ __ ] and i'm like dude who knows so this last scene they're doing the dance routine and there is extreme focus on their genital areas and it zooms in and they're wearing small shorts and it zooms into such an uncomfortable level that it feels like it reminds me of a concept i learned when i was taking a film class and it's just kind of like the whole void vibe you know how when you watch horror movies a lot of the times at the beginning or at some point there's like a girl taking off her clothes about to shower and you're from the perspective of someone who's like looking from outside her window like a creepy ass peeping tom that's the vibe i got here it very much felt like you are seeing something you shouldn't be seeing it makes you feel disgusting and again had it been put in another way had it been filmed in a different way i think the message could have come through but the reality is did you need to use actual children to portray this and discuss this no did you actually have to have them dance in super sexualized ways and zoom in no and on top of that it's like if you're gonna comment on this i think this is the type of thing where you want to be very clear on where you stand because leaving it up to interpretation in this way because obviously everything's up to interpretation but it's like if there's not a very clear trajectory and you're just throwing something out there and not saying anything people are gonna come to conclusions so i think the film should have been a lot clearer with that and i think the focus should have been on that but like i said because there's so many things thrown in there's the religion aspect there's her being essentially bullied there's her being alone there's a single parent household like all of these things are just thrown in and never really analyzed or discussed it's almost like a sensory overload of what am i supposed to be paying attention to here because they're all these different things but none of them are really none is really gone too in depth does that make sense so overall do i think this film was as bad as twitter said honestly i have not been that uncomfortable watching a film in a very long time and when i was a kid i did watch the human centipede so like i think i have enough of a gut to usually take things but this was not this was very uncomfortable and i just don't think the message translated of course other people might see it differently i personally don't see it that way and i am concerned for what's gonna happen mentally to these young actresses let me know what you think should be done should netflix remove it what do you think i personally think it should be removed anyways thank you guys so much for watching thank you to my patrons as always and i'll catch you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: READY TO GLARE

Views: 656,212

Rating: 4.9656963 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 1Fg_X1-e3zI

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020