Film Night: Girls Rock! and Hell on Wheels

My friend, Bryndis, from Meow Records [best independent record shop in Canada, according to the CBC... and we believe them] wanted to have a movie night to raise funds for her local attempt to start a women's rollerderby league. We hosted the event at Cinema CNC... the turnout was a little light, but the films were a lot of fun. Bryndis chose them, and I must say, I approve.

Girls Rock! follows the exploits of participants at a form-a-band camp for young women [8 to 18] that takes place annually in Portland, Oregon, and is hosted by a number of top-flight members of indie bands from around the Pacific Northwest of the USA. We closely follow four of the campers: Laura, a death-metal-loving, well-spoken, adopted, 15-year-old Korean-American with some serious self-loathing issues; Misty, a 18-year-old recent inmate of a secure, lock-down facility [for drugs and gang activities,it seems], who is also homeless and in need of a place to fit in; Palace, an 8-year-old already experiencing conflict between worrying about how she looks versus having self-knowledge and self-worth [she also possesses heavy metal chops, both her sneer and her howl are worthy of the genre]; and Amelia, a 10-year-old geek-girl with a strong sense of her musical identity [anarchic], but who has serious self-image issues [and is currently writing a 14 installment musical cycle about her chihuahua, Pippi].

The girls form bands [each of our subjects is in a different band], write songs, learn instruments [Misty had never touched a bass before, for instance], and perform for an audience of 750... after five days together! This is quite the experiment and quite the movie, too.

The core message of Girls Rock! is inspiring... the girls are surprisingly successful [no, not because they are girls, but because they have 5 days to do something that most of us would find pretty near impossible... don't get me into trouble, here], but the cruel realities of growing up female in North America come screaming through the narrative. One criticism I would have of this film is that some of this is pointed out a little too obviously in unnecessary statistical intertitling... let the women tell their stories; they are vitally interesting enough to carry the movie... also, let's hear a little from some of the cousellors... they seem really interesting and have almost no voice, here. A little bit of back-story about how some of these strong women succeeded in an environment hostile to women's success would serve to give modelling for the audience that the campers are, obviously given the results, privy to. One telling scene has power-punk, jazzy-rocker, LKN [she's a little hard to describe] giving a lunch-time concert, modelling for the campers the stance of a strong, loud woman who takes no shit from nobody... the looks on the young women's faces is priceless, and the influence that is shown in subsequent performances demonstrates how inspiring she is. It would be valuable to share more of this inspiration with the viewing audience. The bands involved are Sleater Kinney The Gossip Nun Factory Pocket Parade LKN Swan Island Pom Pom Meltdown The Wind Up Birds Backbone

Rather than have me prattle on about this film, I will just say, watch Girls Rock! ... it will educate you, entertain you, and convince you... let's start a camp around here...


The second film of the Rollergirls double-feature was Hell on Wheels. This film follows the development of a women-only rollerderby league in Austin, Texas. For those of you who weren't born long enough ago to have experienced the rollerderby on TV [we only had two channels where I grew up... and it was 40 below in the winter... you had to watch!... besides, it was a lot of fun: Skinny Minny and Rupert the Bear and all the characters], this was a chaotic pseudo-sport that grew up earlier in the 20th century and eventually died out in the mid-seventies. Its resurection might have begun in a somewhat exploitive fashion, but it quickly turned into something else. A collosal weasel named Dan got the ball rolling, but when he failed to follow through, the captains of the four teams carried the ball forward and rollerderby is re-born.

Beside the trip down memory lane for this reviewer, this film is fascinating for a couple of other reasons: human dynamics and politics... and it is hard to divide these two. The story arc follows some documentary conventions, but things get really interesting when things fall apart. What I particularly enjoyed was how much of the story was straight from the participants... including some dramatically ironic utterences. The audience gets to know significant information about some of the principals, including messages that I am pretty sure they aren't aware they are transmitting.

As with most earnestly-begun amateur enterprises, problems errupt, chiefly because of good old-fashioned power politics. The captains try to maintain control of all aspects of the rollerderby, seemingly exploiting the goodwill and pocketbooks of the skaters. There are a number of rancorous meetings, resulting, eventually, in a break-away league [I don't want to ruin the movie for you by describing all the interludes leading up to this... see for yourself].

What is particularly telling for this viewer is that two distinct models for the leagues emerge: one modelled on capitalistic principles; and one modelled on socialistic principles. As a real-life experiment in power dynamics, this is fascinating... and much more realistic for an audience made jaded by an abundance of so-called "reality" on television. And the message that comes from this experiment is, hopefully, obvious: socialism wins, socialism wins, socialism wins. I don't think that this is the intention of the filmmakers, but the model with the flatter management structure and more buy-in from the participants is more fun, more fun to watch, and more successful! Take that, Donald Trump, you bastard!

Watch this film; its a lot of fun... who knows, next thing, you'll be strapping on the skates, putting on the helmet, and jamming like a mad fiend.