Drew Barrymore...surprised?

A film about a rebellious teen who is
forced by her mother to participate in
beauty pageants, but finds her true passion
on the roller derby rink.

While she is known mainly for her acting career, Drew Barrymore has taken a dabble at directing with her most-known film being Whip It. After seeing this film for the first time several years ago, I was disappointed that it has never received much hype, even in the indie film world. Not only does it pass the bechdel test with flying colors, it also has a larger female cast than most films I've seen--with only a few male parts in the entire film. It's refreshing to see a complete flip-flop of these numbers in casting in comparison to how Hollywood casts most of their films.


The film also just rocks in general. As a 16-year-old girl watching this for the first time, it was one of the most relatable films I had seen in my adolescent years. And I wasn't even phased by the female-dominated cast. It wasn't until years later that I saw how few films have casts made up of that many women. At the time of first viewing Whip It, I was more disappointed that there weren't more films looking at the teenage years in realistic ways. A plot as simple as a girl not fitting into the mold her family wants for her and finding something she's passionate about, is so rare to find. But these are the stories that should be told the most. For a girl, or a boy, to see someone in a film struggling with a family conflict, is something true to their lives, yet it's something that isn't mentioned greatly in the media.

"I wanted to be a person who could have taken all the emotional experiences, the cultures I’ve learned,
the music I’ve loved, the films I’ve studied, the nature of learning how a film works through being a
producer for 15 years, and really just apply that to something that could be something that was not just a
movie to me, but really my heart."

Maybe it's because Drew Barrymore did not have the best teenage years of her life that she was inspired to make a film that would be influential for teenagers to know that life does get better. But whatever the reason, I'm glad a film like this is in existence. And what makes it even better is that it covers a sport--roller derby. Not only does Drew Barrymore show the familiarity of mother-daughter conflict on screen, but she also shows how girls are total badasses. It's obvious that Drew Barrymore did her research when making this film, from portraying realistic beauty pageants (without the parodied aspect) to avoiding classic controlling mother archetypes, and it is what separates it from other films in feeling so real and relatable. I can only hope that Drew Barrymore decides to make more films, so that one day maybe her film style will be the norm that everyone enjoys to watch.