i've fought it for long enough

I fought it for a long time, this whole Ellen Page craze. You're probably thinking--What Ellen Page craze? Well, semantics aside, I've fought Ellen Page. Too contrived, I thought. Too hip, I intoned. She's a one trick pony! She has no range!

I was wrong and I'm not afraid to admit it. (Cuz no one reads this blog and I'm writing under an assumed name.) She's great. I wanna go get french fries with her and gossip about pop culture.

It's Christmas morning and I just finished watching "Whip It." To be fair, I watched the last third of it but I could tell what was going on based on the falling action. The denouement is where it's at. It was so good. Drew Barrymore directed and Ellen Page starred. It's fairly predictable, but a pleasure to watch anyways. Small town Texas girl discovers roller derby in big, liberal Austin. Becomes part of scene. Parents don't know about it. In the end she must choose between a pageant and the roller derby championship game. I could've described the movie in about 30 fewer words. This is no knock on the film; I think many great stories are really really simple and formulaic. When the form is set the substance can get juicy. Marcia Gay Harden is good as the well intentioned pageant mom and Daniel Stern plays his role of supportive father well. But this is a movie that knows its audience and the audience knows that the real action between a teenage girl and her parents is really all about the mom/daughter relationship. When you're sixteen your mom's opinion means so much to you but you cloak that importance in this robe of indifference. It's a weird tension and I think that Barrymore captures it quite well. All you want is her approval but at the same time you don't care at all just not one bit what your mother thinks. This is the life of a teenage girl. Page and Harden have a good dynamic. There's one scene that is especially good. It's when solipsistic Page realizes that her mother is a person. You know, she had a life before her daughter was born, she has thoughts that resonate outside of the home. It's good.

The love story is not the central focus of the film. She likes a boy, she gives herself to boy. Boy acts like, well, boy. She decides she doesn't want boy. I think teenage girls need to be shown more movies like this. It reminds me of one scene in Roseanne (best show ever, please see past entries) when David, Darlene's boyfriend is pressuring her to have sex. They're in high school and David is horny and impatient. Darlene says something to the effect of : "We'll have sex when I'm ready so until then cool it." I squealed when I heard this. I know not all girls are in the position to say these things. There are pressures to have sex. Girls feel ready at different times. Girls can be the aggressors. I know I know. But it's important to have these characters in mainstream media who assert themselves without shame or artifice. There's not really an equivalent scene in Freaks and Geeks but I like Lindsay Weir so I put her up there.

So, I had a point. My point is that I like Ellen Page. "Whip It" was fun to watch. Kick ass teenage girls are important to my emotional well being.

Untamed Heart

At the end of the movie, Stand By Me (made from Stephen King's short story, The Body), the writer writes on his computer screen something like, "I never again had friends like I did when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" Well, that's sometimes how I feel about movies. The movies I saw between the ages of 11 and, say, 14 were (and remain) the most profound of my life. I guess it's because I was asserting my real identity that was some-what independent of the role my family had given me. My favorite movies at that time always had a female lead character in her twenties. And, inevitably, I identified with her. Like, I WAS her. It sounds like my ego was gigantic, but, really, I was just looking for someone with whom to identify as I was coming into my own.

That age was really lonely for me because my parents were divorcing and, really, my whole life was changing. I had no control over it. Looking back, I held tight to some principles (such as women's rights and pro-protest, Joan Baez music). I thought that by latching on to a movement or a cause, I could feel a part of something while giving myself an identity that seemed to be slowly slipping away. Well, one of those characters that I really loved was Caroline from Untamed Heart.

Marisa Tomei played Caroline, a waitress/beauty school student, in winter-time Minnesota. She was in her twenties and lived at home with her mom and step-dad. Her family used to buy a real Christmas tree every year. They stopped doing that. Caroline and I were so much alike--both female, both living in snowy places, both living with our divorced moms, both uncomfortable with all the change in our lives, both not knowing how to go forward, but both coasting okay. Yes, Caroline was a cigarette-smoking waitress who could barely afford a car, and I was a 12 year old who swam two hours per day just to calm her racing, sad mind. But, I understood her. I understood that she was a person just trying to find her way in this world that kept on disappointing her.

I know. I know. I'm not talking anything at all about the plot. Sometimes, one performance really makes a movie, and the rest is just filler. Well, she meets Christian Slater. I guess he represents a sort of fragility that was lacking in Caroline's world. She responds to his goodness. She loves him; he loves her. He teaches her that she does deserve such care and love. It was a nice lesson--a lesson a 12 year old girl really appreciates, especially when the world seemed kind of cruel to her.