Whip It!

Ok, I love Ellen Page. I’ve seen her in four movies and I liked every one of them. The most recent one I saw was a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Whip It! In this movie, she is Bliss Calendar, a 17-year old misfit in the small town of Bodeen, Texas [for those who are checking, Bodeen is a fictitious place]. She works at the local diner called The Oink Joint [complete with a giant pig on the roof]. Her best friend is Pash, who has dreams of getting out of the soul-stomping hellhole that is Bodeen by going to an Ivy League college. Her mom Brooke [Marcia Gay Harden] thinks Bliss’ ticket to a better way of life is to enter and win beauty pageants. Bliss isn’t too crazy about beauty pageants. She doesn’t know what to do with her life, but she knows she wants to get out of Bodeen in the worst way, and for her beauty pageants in definitely NOT the answer. In the opening scene we see Bliss dyeing her hair blue at one of these pageants. When she is introduced to the judges, she walks on-stage with blue hair, shocking the judges and horrifying her mother. Yes, it’s that kind of movie…

One day Bliss and Pash go on a shopping to the Austin for some retail therapy. While there they run into a bunch of women who belong to the local roller derby league. For Bliss, this is a revelation. She decides she wants to go check it out. Bliss and Pash go back to Austin to watch roller derby under the pretense of going to a football game. Bliss’ dad Earl [Daniel Stern] is cool with it. He’s a big college football fan. I think he wears a Texas Longhorns shirt in every scene he’s in, which makes sense because he seems to spend every waking moment of his life watching football on TV to get away from his overbearing wife. After seeing roller derby up close and personal, Bliss decides that roller derby is what she wants to do, even if it’s just for now. She lies about her age [needed to be 21], tries out for the “Hurl Scouts,” finds she’s the fastest skater and makes the team. She adopts the name Babe Ruthless. She fits right in with Maggie Mayhem [Kristen Wiig], Smashley Simpson [Drew Barrymore], Rosa Sparks [Eve], and Eva Destruction [Ari Graynor]. Iron Maven [Juliette Lewis] is the über-competitve leader of another team. All of these women love kicking the crap out of one another.

Roller derby is every Thursday night. In order to get out of the house, she tells her parents she enrolled in a SAT tutoring class to prepare for the exam. She doesn’t have a car, so she rides a senior citizen bus to Austin every week. She improves her game, falls for a guy in a band, learns life lessons and bonds with her new “family” of rollergirls. All the while the “Hurl Scouts” [who wear Girl Scout uniforms when they play] find out that they want to actually start winning their games. They aren’t satisfied with just kicking ass every Thursday night. They have a coach named Blaze who actually came up with a roller derby playbook. When the Hurl Scouts start running Blaze’s plays, they start winning. All is good until Pash is busted for under-age drinking at the roller derby. Pash’s parents find out, they call Bliss’ parents about it, and Bliss is busted. They aren’t quite sure if they’re more pissed because Bliss is doing the roller derby thing or because she lied to them about the SAT class. At any rate, there is a definite difference in opinion. Bliss doesn’t want her mother to cram her “1950s vision of womanhood” down her throat.

There is the inevitable championship game, which happens to be on the same day as another beauty pageant which Bliss said she’d do to get her mom off her back. Earl is sympathetic, maybe because all of his neighbors post signs of their football-playing sons in their front yards [Earl doesn’t have any sons]. Bliss’ mom is disappointed when Bliss chooses the roller derby over the beauty pageant, but she ends up going to watch Bliss at the roller derby championship anyway. Bliss redeems herself when she gives the pageant gown her mother had been slaving over to another contestant that didn’t have as pretty a gown [she ends up winning the pageant]. At the end of the movie, Earl posts a sign of his own in his yard because now his girl is a roller derby legend.

This is Drew Barrymore’s debut as a director. Ellen Page proves that her highly-acclaimed-performance in Juno was no fluke. This is a fun film to watch.