Worth Watching: Whip It (2009)

Title: Whip It
Director: Drew Barrymore
Language: English
Rating: PG-13



Whip It is a funny, energetic and heartfelt movie about Bliss Cavender (Ellen Page), an awkward teen who comes to feel most at home in a giant warehouse in Austin, Texas where she skates in a roller derby league. Roller derby is an aggressive contact sport on quad skates, explained nicely in the movie; the league Bliss joins is made up of amateur teams and all the skaters are women, which is what most roller derby leagues look like. She gets recruited to the Hurl Scouts, the underachieving underdogs of the league, and skates alongside the likes of Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), Smashley Simpson (Drew Barrymore), Rosa Sparks (Eve), and Bloody Holly (Zoe Bell), who become a second family to her. (Bliss's roller derby name is Babe Ruthless.)



When watching Whip It I sometimes knew what was coming, but other times my expectations were overturned. The movie is character-driven; it isn't chained to a generic coming-of-age or underdog athletes plot. It feels like a labor of love, with characters who are loved. The story is really about Bliss's character development, how roller derby gives her a new comfortableness in her own skin and a growing assertiveness that changes her relationships with other people.



The movie doesn't have any villains. Bliss butts heads most often with her mom, Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden), who in a lesser movie might have been portrayed as a shrill over-the-top tyrant, but here is human and understandable; Marcia Gay Harden softens her, gives her vulnerability, and she and Bliss actually have conversations, confront each other with love and pain. Bliss's arguments with her mom aren't about mindless rebellion or not caring anymore what her parents think, because she does care, and after getting a sensible perspective from Maggie Mayhem (her mentor/closest friend/"cool aunt" from her team) she also hopes for a truce. In part she and her mom argue because their temperaments are similar - both stubborn and tough, with a tendency to feel insecure about themselves.

The one character who comes closest to being villainous is Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis), a scarily intense skater who is Bliss's biggest rival in the league. Juliette Lewis plays her in such a way that when she smiles you don't know whether she's going to slap you on the back or slam your face into a wall. But Iron Maven isn't psychotic, and there's in fact a strange respect that springs up between her and Bliss. She's like a mentor from the dark side, pushing Bliss to be as competitive as she can be and live up to her derby name, Babe Ruthless.



It's great watching the actresses roller-skating and pulling off cool moves on the track. One of them, Zoe Bell, is an actual stunt double in film and television (she was Uma Thurman's double in the Kill Bill movies), but all of the actresses get to show off their athleticism and just have fun skating.



The movie also has a romance between Bliss and a musician, Oliver (Landon Pigg), which starts off sweetly enough but by the end feels a little tacked-on, the obligatory romance in a coming-of-age story. The men I liked watching in this movie were the Hurl Scouts' coach, Razor (Andrew Wilson), who achieves a state of supreme well-being when his team finally decides to study his playbook, and "Hot Tub" Johnny Rocket (Jimmy Fallon), the announcer/commentator in the league, who's just happy to be there, hungover and enthusiastic, trying and failing to score with the women. Also Bliss's dad, Earl (Daniel Stern), is pretty sweet, especially when he and the mom make eyes at each other.

Given how Whip It turned out I hope that Drew Barrymore keeps directing movies. The acting is good all around, especially from Ellen Page, Marcia Gay Harden, and Kristen Wiig. The movie has humanity and is centered on the characters; it also does something relatively rare in movies - portray friendship among many women, who discuss topics that have nothing to do with guys and clothes (though they talk about that too). And it's full of life and spirit. It should be better known.

*All images link back to their sources (Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster Community).

Week in Seven Words #123

buskers
Music waits for us at the subway platforms too - xylophone Disney and Broadway melodies, a guitarist smiling through his performance of The House of the Rising Sun.

incredulous
Being menaced by a sword made out of construction paper.

laboriously
The whine and sigh of taxis, cars, and trucks on the street below, muffled by window glass.

multiprocessing
I sit with my laptop outdoors in front of a dark rectangular pool. When looking up from my work I picture images flickering across the pool, as if it's become a computer screen too, full of scrolling text and pop-up ads.

saccharine
I'm reminded of why I don't like most non-fat frozen yogurts. They taste like sharply sweet coldness.

transport
What an unreal day, floating around on buses and trains.

willful
The child objects to the stroller. As he's folded into it he screams that he wants to walk. When his hollering turns into frustrated tears I can't help feeling bad for him.

Introducing Bright Across the Lifespan

Another blog?

Yes, I have another blog. It's called Bright Across the Lifespan and is focused on the psychology and neuroscience of having a well-developed healthy mind at any age.

I started it recently, and figured that if I get past 10 posts, it means I'm committed to it.

If you'd like, you can visit and sign-up to get updates by email (or join me on Twitter - this is my first Twitter account, and it's been interesting so far. I've discovered great people and articles through it.)

The Sill of the World will of course continue as it is (a Week in Seven Words post is scheduled for later today).

Brassy voices and mass tap-dancing

If I need a five minute break from work, one thing I'll do is watch one of the many Youtube clips showing musical numbers from older movies or shows. But sometimes I also watch more recent performances.

This is a 2011 Tony Award show clip highlighting the final song-and-tapdance number in Anything Goes (Sutton Foster, the lead singer in the show, did win a Tony that evening.)

Anyway, I loved the group tapdance, and the note Foster belts out at the end.

Week in Seven Words #122

atmospheric
At the cafe we sit right by the huge open windows, and cool air rolls over us as the storm starts up. We breathe deeply and peacefully until I wonder aloud if lightning can come in through open windows. (Chances of that are small, very small, but it's not impossible...)

exhale
It's lovely when a subway car suddenly disgorges all if its passengers, and you're no longer standing with your nose in someone's hair line.

indolent
Turtles loll in the shallows nom-nom-nomming on leaves.

inviting
Tulips on a table laid out in rich blue paper.

lightened
Springtime in the synagogue, flowers twined around the room.

preschool
They sing "Baby Beluga" with looks of rapt innocent concentration. They're little people who can barely sit still, love to give hugs, and know the words to songs about donkeys, wheels on buses, saying good-bye and the deep blue sea.

venturesome
The bug making its slow patient way across my ceiling is an explorer of sorts, mapping out an ocean of space. Even as I stand there waiting for it with an old textbook and a bottle of Windex, I can respect its intrepid spirit.

Good Short Fiction: The Pedestrian (by Ray Bradbury)

Title: The Pedestrian
Author: Ray Bradbury
Where I read it: Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories (ed. John Joseph Adams)

Imagine living in a society where going for a walk alone at night can land you in a mental hospital. Not a far-fetched idea. Walking alone is a subversive act. Your mind is going in any direction you want it to take. You don't always have a destination or a clear purpose for your walk, so your actions aren't easily accounted for. And you aren't going along with the majority of people, who drive, stick together in groups, share similar tastes, and spend their spare time plugged into mass entertainment. The pedestrian of Bradbury's story, Leonard Mead, is also a writer and unmarried, so his deviancy is off the charts. Who knows what he'll do, roaming the neighborhoods after dark?

He listened to the faint push of his soft shoes through autumn leaves with satisfaction, and whistled a cold quiet whistle between his teeth, occasionally picking up a leaf as he passed, examining its skeletal pattern in the infrequent lamplights as he went on, smelling its rusty smell.

The Pedestrian isn't a story with an involved plot, but a snapshot of a society where every harmless aberration from the norm is treated as a dangerous mental illness. It's written effectively and hits close to home. It's also exactly what you'd expect from such a story: an artistic individual gently violating the unspoken rules of society while his faceless neighbors stare at T.V. shows. The authorities, when they swoop in, are also faceless. If there's some heavy-handedness in how the story's told I can overlook it, because it's a short piece and the image of the solitary walker pinned by the light of a patrol car is chilling.

Week in Seven Words #121

constructive
They're given random scraps and told to build whatever they can imagine. Cars with plastic bottle cap wheels, a walkie-talkie with a straw antenna, a castle made out of cups and toilet paper rolls.

decibel
The music at the frozen yogurt shop is so loud, the place so packed and noisy, that you can't think or talk to the person next to you. You just stare into your cup and eat and eat before it all melts.

fathom
We've gone so deep into the park we can pretend we're no longer in the city. At the pond we find a bench. Though it looks a little wilted in the heat, the pond is a nice spot I think. He sees it as stagnant. I can understand why, but I can't agree. There's always something alive in there. A mix of fish, turtles, plants and microbes. It's a quiet place, and promises whatever you can find in it; the closer you look the more there is. After our conversation, which has kept returning to life's disappointments, to uninformed choices that can't be undone, I want to be in a place like this, out-of-the-way and quietly overflowing with life.

jib
The tiny sailboats have ventured onto the water again.

raw
The cookie dough has already been prepared; now it's only a matter of cutting it and flattening it into cookie-shaped pieces before it goes into the miniature oven. Of the four residents at the table, one can wield a knife quite well. Another tries but can barely manage. A third pops a piece of raw dough in his mouth then resumes staring silently at the rest of it. The fourth curses when you get too near her. "I wouldn't feed that to my cat," she mutters.

trail
Forget the subway and bus; I'll find a new way home. And I do, on land rising steeply over a lake, where the inlets are coated in a vivid green scum, and the path curves beneath low-hanging branches.

wretchedness
The howl of a dog that doesn't know what she did wrong.