in the last six months, i started to write this post some twenty times, nineteen of them in my head. today the pony and i went to see stick it and the post finally materialized in my mind. this is not the kind of movie i would normally see, but i am happy i went, though it is a far from perfect movie, or even a good movie. it is, however, a very interesting movie, especially if you like daring aesthetics and girl power movies. there are three genres of movies i’m an all-round sucker for: heist, con, and girl power. two films that belong in my all-time-best movie olympus are girls town (1996) and girlfight (2000). the former marks a key point in my life. i had just left L.A. and moved to sleepy san luis obispo. i wasn’t a particularly committed feminist when i was in L.A.. i think (i should know, but i just don’t remember) that i even rejected the label “feminist.” i really don’t know why. strange blanks in my memory. watching girls town, which stars lili taylor (taylor did i shot andy warhal that same year, thus earning permanent radical feminist credentials) alongside two others really cool female actors, was a tide-turning experience for me. maybe it was just the right time. maybe it had been brewing all along. anyway, there was something in the violence the girls unleash towards one abusive, older male towards the end of the film that really captured my imagination and stuck with me. it’s been ten years but i remember the scene well: the girls moving towards the man on the sidewalk; the man’s slow realization that they mean business; their rage; their violence. i am strongly committed to non-violence in my real life, but i have no problem at all with intelligent and right-minded representational violence. we need places to express our rage, and the movie house is a better place than most, if the movie is good, intelligent, and non-manipulative. and if the violence serves a purpose. (i know this sentence goes against the inane screen violence the contributors to this blog — especially arnab — like so much, but hey, this is me).
in girls town the director, jim mckay, worked closely with his female actors in directing the film. it was a truly collaborative effort. they had these huge brainstorming sessions, and then the actors would try out a scene, and if they didn’t like it they would do it again. i like this. i think it truly comes out in the movie.
girlfight is a magnificent movie from so many points of view. like girls town it uses race as well as gender as signposts of difference and powerlessness. like girls town, it has a cathartic and empowering girl-on-man violent scene. unlike girls town, it is a romantic film, albeit one that brilliantly turns romantic conventions on their heads while preserving the main rules of the heterosexual love story (the girl is very much a girl, the boy is very much a boy). i heard a great interview with the director, karyn kusama, on fresh air, and i was struck by her intelligence and thoughtfulness.
stick it is nowhere near these masterpieces in quality and depth, but it has something that makes watching it worthwhile. the shooting is great. in her first directorial effort, jessica bendinger does a great job of giving the film a music video/tv commercial/hip-hoppish feel. the opening sequence is just great: fast-paced, dynamic, thrilling. the images are a bit grainy, and that works well because of the documentaristic style. in the middle, the plot sags and the dialogue is atrocious. at the end, the irrepressible haley graham (hilary swank look-alike missy peregrym) rediscovers that adults can be decent, girls not insufferable, and, most of all, that rules can be broken in a constructive rather than destructive way. this goes from a movie about an ill-adapted, angry teenager to a movie about collective action.
the transition is far from seamless — i won’t bore you with the details. here’s why you should give this movie a chance:
a) the filming, the colors, the music-video-like acrobatic sequences, the body crashes;
b) because it exposes the incredibly grueling, incredibly unfair world of women’s competitive gymnastics;
c) because i know know know that bendinger had an air-tight script which the studio forced her to pad with inane teenage-girls-audience-pleasing subplots, and the original idea, which is about re-directing rage towards (a kind of) civil disobedience, toh-tah-lly rocks.
Gio,
perhaps you have seen them already but I think you should run out and see Set It Off (black woman heisting armored cars in LA), House of Games (a woman confronting the self-contained world of male con artists) and The Addiction (where Lili Taylor kicks some ass, and, best of all, devours her professors).
Michael’s suggestions are good ones; I’m interested, too, in Gio’s rec for Stick It, which I’d seen as a cousin to the also-somewhat-effective Bring It On. I thought Girlfight was pretty damn good, too.
Lili Taylor’s got lots of cred here. Her work in Nancy Savoca’s great, underrated Dogfight and Household Saints also stands out… as do the films themselves. But their approach to empowerment is a little different than the films Gio notes, and maybe more like the latter two films Michael brings up. Savoca’s films reveal the subversions and resistances possible for (or even more, oft-used by)women to combat sexism embedded in traditionally-patriarchal institutions (whether the literalized brutality of hetero competition in Dog or the allegorized oppressions of religion and spirituality in Saints). (I really like her first flick, too–True Love, with the fantastic Annabella Sciorra, caustically examines marriage rituals.)
Savoca, like Allison Anders, got kind of displaced–seemingly influential and up-and-coming in the ’90s “indie” wave, then … almost gone from the scene.
michael,
saw set it off and house of games. they didn’t seem to me, at the time, to carry the same direct, explicit, well-thought-out feminist power of the films i mention in my post (minus stick it). i haven’t seen the addiction or the movies mike reynolds mentions, including dogfight, which gets great kudos from t. modleski and was highly recommended to me by amy g. when we were all a happy bunch in grad school. confession time: i only acquired a VCR in 1997 and a DVD player in 2004; we haven’t had cable for the last 10 years, give or take a month or two during the world cups. also, a year ago we moved from coral gables to south miami, thus leaving behind our wonderful independent video rental, and we haven’t made the move to netflix yet. as you see, we are in a truly sorry situation, which clearly needs to be remedied ASAP.