Posts Tagged ‘female empowerment’

Short Take: A very solid tale of self discovery

Director: Drew Barrymore (debut)

Screenwriter: Shauna Cross (screenplay and novel)

Cast: Ellen Page (Juno), Drew Barrymore (He’s Just Not That Into You), Marcia Gay Harden (The Mist, Mystic River), Juliette Lewis (Starsky and Hutch), Kristen Wiig (Extract, Adventureland), Daniel Stern (Bushwhacked)

Length: 1h 51m

Synopsis: Bliss (Page), a 17 year old high school girl living in rural Texas, is just trying to get through life as uneventfully as possible, enduring the normal adolescent growing pains that everyone old enough to have had them knows stink. While normally trying to please her mother (Harden) and her obsession with beauty pageants, she one day becomes intrigued by the sport of roller derby. Supported by her ever-faithful best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat) she secretly earns a spot on a derby team in Austin, sneaking away at night to practice with 30 year old tough girls called Maggie Mayhem (Wiig), Smashley Simpson (Barrymore), and Iron Maven (Lewis). Her only obstacle becomes keeping these two lives separate, which proves more difficult than she had anticipated. Read the rest of this entry »