Flak Magazine: Review of New York Minute, 05.27.04

The opening scene of New York Minute is Ashley Olsen dreaming that she's giving a big speech. Naked. As the crowd roars with laughter, the camera pans back so that we see Olsen's bare back behind the podium — scapula jutting through her skin, the bones of her shoulders sickeningly defined.

Much feminist scholarship has been devoted to the deconstruction of Barbie, much of it as legitimately disturbing as it is overreaching. But with the Olsen twins and the recent crop of teen actresses, we are seeing the extension of those ideas embodied in humans, not plastic.

And it's grotesque. The Olsen twins are too skinny to be healthy, their eyes ghoulishly caked with eyeshadow and their hair so full it seems too heavy for their heads. In this movie — their first "grown-up" movie to coincide with them becoming 18 (and "legal" as per the concerns of a whole bunch of Maxim perverts) — they are forced to run around Manhattan for about 20 minutes (a quarter of the total running time) wearing towels or being observed through opaque glass while taking a shower. It's as inhumane to the actresses as it is to the audience that's supposed to receive it as "family entertainment." Most disturbing is that the Olsens' works have been received as such, to the tunes of a billion-dollar franchise targeting overbearing mothers all too willing to thrust this image of "perfection" onto their own girls.

New York Minute takes the Olsen "family" movie template, subs in some name-brand comic relief (Andy Richter and Eugene Levy), sexes it up and goes about its business of glorifying the superficiality of the American upper-middle class and those who aspire to it. Ashley is the ambitious one; Mary-Kate is the drummer in a rock band managed by Jack Osbourne — the yin and yang of teenage girl "types." The conflict in the movie is that since their mom died, the Olsens have "problems," like giving speeches for really big Ivy League scholarships, or that their dad is too nice and understanding and won't just let them "rock." New York Minute gives the Olsens "problems" to create the illusion that they are "strong" because they "overcome." But because their problems are totally contrived and unimportant to any little girl who's not an Olsen twin, they're really just celebrating their own inanity. Of course, they're selling this dream to little girls who do have problems, and complicating matters with impossible expectations and body images. That's the real problem, not that the Olsen's dad is too sensitive (so sensitive, in fact, that he's played by Dr. Drew Pinsky).

Other than the parading of eating disorders, the most distressing aspect of New York Minute is how aggressively racist it is. This celebration of upper-middle-class whiteness mocks Asians, blacks and midwestern white people with snobby contempt. Richter, in a character more at home in a Happy Madison production than this, plays the adopted son of a Chinese mafia lady. So Andy Richter spends the whole movie chasing the Olsen twins around Manhattan, speaking in a caricatured "Chinese" accent. Because he wants to fit in with his adoptive Chinese mafia family. The Olsens tangle with the Chinese mafia because of a mix-up with a computer chip (of course, because those wacky Asians are just so good with computers and stuff), who stalk and even kidnap them a couple of times.

Later, the Olsens end up in what looks like a rundown part of Brooklyn outside someplace called "Big Shirl's House of Bling." Bling, as a part of the pop culture vocabulary, is less than five years old, but Big Shirl's sign comes right out of the '70s. The Olsens go inside to get "blinged," if you will, and all the kindly black folks inside recognize immediately that these little rich white girls have "soul," so Gay Black Stereotype and Soul Sister Stereotype highlight their hair and give them makeovers. The only explanation for this is to make the Olsens not seem so soulless and, well, "white." But don't go too far with this, notes the image-savvy Ashley: "Just so we're clear, I'd like a more corporate bling." Noted, girlfriend — we must differentiate between your sophisticated, metro-cool whiteness with the fat, middle-aged, dopey-smiling tourist couple trucking around Manhattan in an old beat-up Winnebago that becomes the butt of jokes in the last 20 minutes of the movie. They just love being in the big city, and everything's so big here, honey!

There's also a disturbing conservative subtext to the Olsens' movie that makes even less sense. Ashley is the uptight go-getter; the camera tours her room while she's taking her morning shower (which means, of course, we get a small glimpse of through a foggy shower door), revealing hero photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Bush — later in the movie, Ashley is distressed about a hotel prank gone bad because "that's what happened to Nixon." The random hot guy she hooks up with is the son of the pantsuit-clad junior senator from New York (Andrea Martin), who is apparently divorced, lives out of a hotel and travels around all day to elitist NYC functions. Later, Ashley gives a homeless man a dollar, distressing poor Mary-Kate ("You're only feeding his habits," she reasons). Then the homeless man gets honked at by a car, and because he's drunk, spills whatever bright, Slushy-type substance that was in his paper bag all over Ashley, thus ruining her outfit — that's what you get for charity, kids.

The Olsens are such artificial creations that you wonder what the internal life of Mary-Kate and Ashley must be like. How aware are they of the billions of dollars surrounding them? How much introspection can there be in a life which has been played out on camera almost literally since the cradle? Just as the flash of a camera captures the soul from the body, as some African cultures believe, the cameras of the media focused so intently on these young lives must shrink them in very profound ways. When the twins finally have their big "We're sisters and we need to love each other to survive this life" talk at the end of New York Minute, they do so among the overbearing sounds of Times Square — filmed with neon advertisements in the background, drawing our attention partially away from the faces, where the "acting" is supposed to occur. The camera pulls away into an overhead shot, the two lonely girls stranded, as if a storm cloud of advertising images rains down on them, reducing them to little specks as the camera fades out. Whether intentional or not, it seems like the most revealing statement about the Olsen twins themselves.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)