Whip-It - Robbie Culpepper (Not Worth Seeing)

Let it be said from the start that I only half-watched this movie, and by that I mean: I was on an airplane. The screens were not in the backs of the headrest but about 6 rows ahead of me. I was reading a book. And they served dinner (pasta) with drinks (ginger ale). Also, I didn't bother to put in the headphones because I figured that even without sound I could understand what was happening, between bits of spaghetti and Zorba the Greek.

Whip It exactly follows your typical, run-of-the-mill, predictable, and completely boring teen-movie storyline. The main character (Ellen Page) is a badass who wants tattoos and wears Poison t-shirts, but her overbearing parents want her to be a pageant girl. Actually, only her mom is overbearing. Her father is a shell of a man who lost his will to act for himself long ago. After showing up to a pageant with blue hair, Ellen has a fallout with her folks. Somehow she sees a roller derby match...I think she went with her friend who wants to be a badass but is only a supporting character. Anyhow, Ellen decides she wants to become a derby girl because those girls have attitude and do what they want, etc. So she tries out, and because she's really fast, she makes the team.

They do make roller derby look cool, and the cast of derby girls is great: Drew Barrymore, Kristen Wiig, Eve, et. al. And Jimmy Fallon is the announcer, if that makes it any cooler (I honestly don't know). And the tricks they do to generate speed are neat enough. But that's where it stops.

So Ellen gets in with these older girls and they teach her how to party and have fun but also not be a total hussy, which you can tell is what they all were. The best scene, as far as I could tell, was when they all went to this party--a classic, hollywood-typical where everybody is good-looking and drinking tons of beer and sitting in hot tubs hooking up--and Ellen meets this guy who is in a band. And the band rocks, blah blah blah.

So they start hooking up, the derby team does well, she gets in tons of fights with her parents (who don't know about the derby), and all the teenage girls in the audience are getting pumped.

You can probably guess what happens: Ellen and the dude get into some rough waters, the roller derby team makes it to the finals, Ellen's parents find out and forbid her to compete, etc. What's going to happen?

You guessed it. Ellen is backstage at a beauty pageant, totally pissed and depressed. Dad, who finally gets some balls, picks up the whole derby team in his decidedly creepy van, and rescues Ellen from the blasted pageant and delivers her just in time for the big match. Dad, with kid sister, nestles in among some rough-looking dudes and watches the match, which is intense and involves some slow motion crashes. Mom, at some point, wanders in looking completely lost. You know the look if you ever seen a disney movie.

Anyhow, SPOILER ALERT, Ellen crashes at the end, the good gals lose, but they keep their pride and Ellen is popular and she gets back with the dude and her parents decide that they can support what she's doing.

I've heard it said that a movie is really good visually speaking if you can watch it without sound and still get what's happening. Because then the cinematography is doing its fair share of the work of storytelling. But this movie succeeded on those grounds because it was so freaking cliché.

That said, if I had a daughter and she and her 13 year old friends wanted to go see this, I'd probably sit a couple rows behind them and let them feel empowered for a bit. I'm sure my mom felt the same way about Last Action Hero and Three Ninjas, which I rented relentlessly for about 3 years in my early teens. But God help me if I ever become such a pusillanimous kind of man as that father. Eeesh.