Whip It!

When I saw that a movie titled Whip It! was coming out I figured it was a movie about the 1980's band Devo who was known as one of the one-hit wonders known for their song Whip It!. However, this movie had nothing to do with Devo. Nor did anyone in the movie have a red plastic flower pot on their head.

Whip It! stars Ellen Page, the young girl who seems to be type-cast as the disenfranchised teenager of her generation, though she's actually 23 years old. You'll remember her as the pregnant girl from Juno, the one that you wondered why in the hell she had sex with Michael Cera. But I digress.

In Whip It! (let me add that typing the name of this movie is driving me crazy because it ends in a punctuation mark and the auto correct wants to capitalize the next letter), Bliss is a young high schooler whose mother (Marcia Gay Harden) is living vicariously through her and pushing her to be in beauty contests, which Bliss could not care less about. Bliss finds a flyer about joining a roller derby in nearby Austin, Texas. She sneaks out of town and joins the roller derby despite being too young. And to her surprise, she's really good. What happens when her disingenuous commitment to beauty pageantry and her secret life as a roller derby collide?

Whip It! Is directed by Drew Barrymore, who also stars in the movie, along with Kristen Wiig, Juliette Lewis (sorry, that woman is getting nasty looking!), and Jimmy Fallon. Lower on the billing is Daniel Stern who plays Bliss' father. You'll remember him as the narrator of The Wonder Years.

Whip It! is 2 hours long and is rated PG-13 for some mild sexual content, crude dialog, language, drug use, and some violence (it is a roller-derby!).

I really enjoyed the movie, though I thought the middle was a bit long. It could have been a better movie if it was about 20 minutes shorter. However, the movie made me laugh and that's important. I liked it enough to give it 4 stars.