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Sunday, October 14, 2007

I Don't Miss Film School - Part Three

A sports movie? Really? I didn't believe it when Chris told me he caught Stick It! on Encore one night and loved it. Yes, I'm talking about the gymnastics movie written and directed by the same woman who brought us Bring It On. I happened to stumble upon it my own self late on Friday night after too much caffeine and no desire to sleep. It surprised me.

It's a simple story. A teenage girl gets busted for various delinquencies - one of which occurs after an impressive series of tricks involving a roof, a ladder, a slide, an empty swimming pool and a BMX bike. Awesome. Apparently, she's a retired gymnast - a good girl turned bad. The judge decides that sending her back to training would be a good last chance before resorting to juvenile detention. Formulaic, yes. Still satisfying. Haley's a convincing rebel, and she clearly has some issues to work out.

If the bad girl/girl power thing isn't compelling enough, check out the effects. Gymnastics is pretty fun to watch, normally (did I mention that this movie's full of cute half naked girls?), but the simple effects applied during some of the montages just made me feel warm and fuzzy:

You think you figure a movie like this out, clever effects aside, and then things get even weirder:

If you follow the formula for a movie like this, you expect the suspenseful competition at the end in which our heroines win the gold by the skin of their teeth. Well, that's partly right. It turns out to be even more satisfying than that. If you are like me, you probably have mixed feelings about a sport like this - a sport that requires an incredible amount of talent and discipline but also subjects athletes to severe and often archaic rules of judgement. When one girl lands a perfect vault but gets deducted .5 points because her bra strap was showing, the competitors rebel. Every girl intentionally scratches the event so that the girl who was robbed of a perfect score automatically wins the event. The girls decide to do this for all events, giving them the power to choose which one of them would win the gold. Of course, this resulted in some of the best performances from the competitors.