Hot Docs - Boy Cheerleaders

Rating: ***1/2

The idea of seeing boys on cheerleading squads amongst the girls is hardly new or surprising. At this point, I’m not exactly sure how rare a thing it is to find squads made up entirely of boys. Of course, if boys being cheerleaders was the sole preoccupation of James Newton’s British-made documentary Boy Cheerleaders, it would be a terribly dull affair. What’s interesting is the film’s setting, a council estate in Leeds, and the main characters, a colourful cast of troubled boys, many of whom are being raised by single mothers, and all of whom are finding something challenging and redeeming in the sport of cheerleading.

What’s interesting about the film is not that so many of the boys take it on the chin from their school chums that they’re into cheerleading, or even the fact that they’re working class boys that like to dance while waving pom-poms. What’s interesting is that it seems that cheerleading is one of the only things that can reach them. These boys so often drift into fighting and other forms of acting out, they’re indifferent to authority of any kind, but absolutely live to dance. There’s a great scene where one of the boys is forced to take a time-out from cheerleading after some particularly unruly behaviour. His disappointment, and his penance, eventually allow him back in, but it’s interesting watching him try and deny that he’s really missing something by not being allowed to cheerlead.

The film flows very naturally. It follows Coach Ian Rodley as he tries to galvanize the boys to become the tops in their field, and not just as boy cheerleaders, but for all cheerleaders. There’s a stop on a popular British talk show along the way, and an important audition for one of the boys that could lead to a possible future as a professional dancer. Obviously, the film comes down to the championships and whether or not the boys will rank. Whether they do or do not is superfluous to the fact that you can just lean back and have a good time watching this documentary. It’s like Billy Elliot, but with a bunch of Billys and it’s a documentary. What’s not to love?

Che Part 1 & 2

Rating: Part 1 – ***

Part 2 – ***1/2

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was either the typical Communist war monger who threatened the stability of Latin America or a man so driven to secure the freedom of downtrodden people everywhere that he sacrificed his life in effort to secure it. Or maybe he’s was just destined to be a great t-shirt spokes model, who knows? The truth is probably somewhere in between, except for that whole thing with the t-shirts because he all know that that’s true. But wherever the truth lie, it’s probably not in Steven Soderbergh’s marathon, double-bill treatment to the Argentine revolutionary.

Che is smartly divided between the chronicling of the man’s greatest victory and his final, crushing defeat. Part One follows Guevara (played with typical gravitas by Benicio Del Toro) as he follows Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) and a small, dedicated group of Cuban revolutionaries back to the Caribbean island to lead an overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara’s acumens as a battlefield strategist sees him promoted from field medic to military commander, as well as being one of Castro’s top advisors. In Part 2, Guevara abandons his post was head of industry in the Cuban government to fight the good fight in Bolivia, with much more disastrous results.

Between the two, I prefer the second one both story-wise and thematically. Dramatically speaking, a story of a hero’s failure is always more compelling than his successes, and because Guevara put all his chips on spreading the revolution rather than consolidating his power in Cuba, you have to respect him all the more. Part 2 is also where Del Toro’s grit comes into play. He frequently manages to convey Guevara’s sheer force of will in some utterly non-verbal ways. I also enjoyed the contrast between the Guevara that’s struggling in Bolivia and the Guevara being interviewed in Part 1, confident in his message and in his revolution to the point of being cocky.

And that’s probably the reason why I’m a little more critical of Part 1 and its seeming mythologizing of Guevara. The history is more or less accurate in terms of action, but I’m not sure the character of Che is quite right, leaning a little more to the positive and not so much to his more borderline extremist tendencies. Guevara was a complex man, and it would have been nice to see some of that complexity as opposed to the great revolutionary warrior/philosopher. And while we’re being exhaustive in our examining of the man, why not look at his tremendous output as a writer and a scholar, or for that matter, the things that helped form his philosophy? In the end, nearly four and a half hours in a way seems like only scratching the surface.

But in another way, it seriously feels like Che could have done with some prodigious editing. I found the first film kind of dragged, while maybe about half of the second suffered the same affliction. I don’t need to see every victory and political manoeuvre to get what made Che, Che. Other then that though, the film is a flawless technical achievement. The cinematography is crisp, the shots are well composed and the action is staged with startling realism without any over the top gore or violence. At the end of Part 2, I think Soderbergh goes a little overboard with Guevara’s point-of-view execution, but most of the rest of the film plays things pretty close to brilliance in terms of storytelling devices. Love him or hate him, I think this fact above all else remains: Che’s got style.

Fired Up!

Rating: ***

You walk into a movie like Fired Up and you’re not expecting much; maybe a few decent sight gags and a couple of good one liners. What you’re not expecting though is an actual fleshed-out script with numerous, hilarious lines and well thought out characters played by some fairly talented young actors. Just when you think that everything that can be done with cheerleaders and horny teens can be done, something like Fired Up manages to surprise because it doesn’t play to expectations. Instead of 90 minutes of jokes about bodily emanations and mistaken identities, we actually get a fairly respectable, well-rounded script. Not that I’m saying the movie’s perfect, but for what it is and what it could have, it’s hard to argue with results.

In Fired Up we get Shawn (Nicholas D'Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen), two football jocks that enjoy scoring off the field much more than scoring on the field. Staring down two weeks of female-less football camp in the middle of the scorching desert, Nick and Shawn hatch an alternative plan: join the cheerleading squad and head to cheer camp along with 300 other single ladies ripe for the plucking. If there’s one thing standing in their way, it’s the fact that they’ve never cheered in their lives, but if there’s two things than the other’s Carly (Sarah Roemer) the captain of the cheerleaders that can smell Nick and Shawn’s B.S. from a mile away. So, the boys do get there, and all goes according to plan except for the fact that they develop a taste for cheering.

That’s Fired Up in a nutshell, pure and simple. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but the success by in large comes from the two charismatic leads: D’Agosto and Olsen. They’re the Hawkeye and Trapper John of football jocks with cool quips and wisecracks, along with an inherent, natural ability to achieve the very best in their field. They’re not really bad guys, just a little overzealous when it comes to pursuing their sensual delights. And it’s not like they don’t learn anything along the way; what kind of movie would this be if they didn’t? Anyway, the reason you can’t help loving these two guys is because of the actors that play them. Olsen’s always been on the cusp of comedic leading man status, so I hope this puts him over in a better position career-wise. As for D’Agosto, his work here is infinitely more suiting to him than playing the emo flyboy in Heroes last season.

On the ladies’ side, Roemer makes for a good foil to Shawn and Nick’s antics, and the blossoming romance between Carly and Shawn is handled in a fairly believable way. That’s unlike, say, the relationship between Carly and her pre-existing boyfriend Dr Rick (David Walton), the arrogant blowhard that blasts the best of the 90s from his car stereo. Now Dr Rick makes for a tremendously hilarious punchline bag, but the character was too broadly drawn to truly be taken seriously. John Michael Higgins comes close to that point as head cheer coach, but he’s just such a winning comedic actor even though he always seems to get stuck playing these guys that are oblivious to their questioning sexuality. Philip Baker Hall also gets some screen time as Nick and Shawn’s expletive-filled coach (or at least as expletive filled as PG-13 allows.)

But the main show belongs to the kids, and not just Olsen, D’Agosto and Roemer either. Look for little Juliette Goglia later on. She steals the show as Shawn’s younger sister, Poppy who gives the boys the lowdown on how to finagle a ride to cheer camp in exchange for getting Shawn’s bedroom (the one with the private bathroom). Later on, she turns up with sugary snacks she’ll part with for a reasonable price, an oasis of relief from the leafy greens of the cheer camp diet. Fired Up itself feeds on zaniness, an irreverence that a lot of movies try too darn hard to achieve but are never able to reach. In this film, it seems so easy, and to the actors and filmmakers I offer my kudos. Sure, it’s just another horn dog teen movie, but sometimes doing the thing right makes all the difference.