Stick It Movie
Category Shopping | Saturday, July 31st, 2010
The writer of cheerleader classic Bring It On makes her directing debut with another movie built around a classic sport for girls: gymnastics. No one knows why Haley Graham (Missy Peregrym, Life As We Know It) walked away in the middle of a high-profile gymnastics competition–but after given a choice between returning to gymnastics or going to juvenile detention, Haley finds herself under the tutelage of Burt Vickerman (Jeff Bridges, The Big Lebowski, Fearless), a trainer with a tough-love approach and a dubious reputation for getting his students injured. As they learn to work together, they discover they share a hatred for the narrow, unbending rules by which gymnastic routines are judged. Almost all sports movies are fables of wild talent getting harnessed by discipline. In Stick It, wild talent bites back with a little political awakening–in fact, the movie’s main weakness is that it doesn’t get political enough; the rebellion at the end happens too quickly, too easily. But what you’ll remember from the movie are sequences that revel in the sheer beauty of gymnastics, montages that fuse the visual styles of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl into a dizzying adulation of grace and athleticism.
