Whip It - (not Whippet)

A young and bright-eyed girl in boring town with dull family yearns to get out. Girl discovers by chance something she loves doing and is good at. After much perceverence and conflict with parental figures, girl learns about life through her newly-found passion and comes of age.

Don't worry dear reader, I'm not talking about 'Dirty Dancing' - although the format for such films is so ingrained that often I barely even realise I'm seeing it these days - I'm talking about Drew Barrymore's directorial debut 'Whip It'. Cards on the table time - I was drawn to this film after I saw a trailer last year that consisted mostly of roller-chicks skating around in fishnets to Weezer's 'Pork and Beans'. Sometimes making an effective trailer isn't rocket science.

'Whip It' stars Ellen Page as Bliss, a young 17 year old with a stuffy mother and a football-obsessed father who yearns desperately to get out of her hometown. After seeing a flyer for a roller derby in the bright lights of Austin Texas she persuades her best friend to take them there. She's suddenly in love with the sport, tries out for a failing team and - well you can probably fill in the rest of the plot for yourself.

Watching the film last week made me feel like I assume many women must feel when watching many Holywood movies of any genre. The standard convention is for most female characters to be foils to the male leads. Films where this isn't the case are notable mainly because of it. The main characters in 'Whip It' are exclusive women, with the male characters interacting with Bliss in a peripheral way (and never with each other). I think I'm a pretty liberal guy, but this made me feel a bit uneasy. Perhaps I'm so liberal that I was uneasy with this inversion of sexism as much as I would be with sexism in the traditional sense? More likely I'm so indoctrinated with film convention that this inversion of it freaked me out. Or possibly I felt subconciously cheated by the film - wasn't this meant to be about girls skating around in slutty clothes rather than being some kind of 'who needs men anyway' coming of age tale?

If it wasn't for the subversion of convention in 'Whip It', the film would be pretty bland. As is it though, it's a kind of alright bit of fun movie that you can enjoy after a long day's work without having to turn your brain on. Ellen Page is solid in the role but needs to break out of the habit of being cast as teenagers. She was good but underused in Inception last year, I don't want to see her getting stuck in an acting rut.