Nice little feel-good movie with all the right cliches (for most of the movie, I felt like I was watching Bend it Like Beckham) – but it nicely jettisons the not-so-nice cliches. This is a girl power movie, and it doesn’t mistake itself for a rom-com (thank god). It may be the only movie I know where the girl tells the guy to shove it (and he’s not explicitly a bad person) and her consolation prize isn’t another guy… it’s to just keep living her life on her terms. It’s a movie about a woman finding her voice, her confidence, and reveling in her own physical strength while forming strong friendships with other women. You don’t see that often… usually it’s “I found a man and it solved my life!” Not so, here.
What I really came away with was just how physical these women get to be. When you watch them knocking each other over, wrestling, hitting each other on the back, jumping around, horsing around, what you realize is how meek and soft and non-threatening women are trained to be, and how rare it is to see this. It was cool to see how things could be really different, and what women’s culture could be like if we moved just one step to the left.
