Eye Candy #50 - "Whip It!"

Whip It!: Ellen Page may be the greatest actress of her generation. I’m serious – she has an uncanny script-picking ability (with the exception of that stinker of an X-Men that Brett Ratner helmed) and has performed superbly in everything I’ve seen her in. Granted, she’s kind of pigeon-holed right now in high school/ingenue roles, hopefully it will just be a matter of time before she expands beyond that. This time around, Ellen is Bliss Cavender, a 17 year-old pageant girl from Bodean, Texas, going through the motions of the pageant circuit to keep her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) vicariously happy. On a shopping trip to Austin, she finds herself exposed to the local women’s roller derby leauge and decides to try out, unbeknownst to all but her closest friend Pasha (Alia Shawkat). She makes the team the Hurl Scouts and becomes something of a new star in the league, finding friendship, love, and family, as well as heartache, pain, and betrayal. Firmly in the comedy category, this is the directorial debut of Drew Barrymore. It has a solid as all-get-out supporting cast: Kristen Wiig, Daniel Stern as Bliss’ father (where the hell has he been), and Andrew Wilson, the “other” Wilson brother, in a movie-stealing role as Razor, the Hurl Scouts addled, fanny pack-wearing coach. As a fan of women’s roller derby already, I don’t know if my local league is quite as tattooed and counterculture as the league portrayed in the film and wish they would have gone to greater lengths to show that many players are just normal janes with jobs and families, that play for fun and sacrifice a lot to do so, both physically and financially. And at time, the matches in the movie seemed more like “Rollerball” than roller derby. Also, a large chunk of this film was shot with Detroit standing in for Austin, Texas. I had no idea both locations were so similar. All in all, good stuff. Solid 3 ½ starrer. Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”