Just to get the obvious comment out of the way first … shyeah, like I needed a movie to tell me this This is a documentary I’ve been looking forward to seeing for over a year now. The short form of this review, sadly, is: plenty of girls … not a lot of rockin’. I’m trying to think if I even saw a single male face in the movie … there may have been a dubious character glimpsed in one of the older girl’s bands at home but I’m pretty sure the whole thing is XX which makes sense. I won’t get into an argument over, “what about transgenders, or just plain old equality,” because I know nobody’s allowed to even think anything like that in these situations.

But I will say I find something in creating an “anything goes” haven for girls like this with no boys allowed just as much a problem as the one it’s trying to solve. There is something about the place, too, that calls to mind a movie like Jesus Camp, like these girls are somehow being recruited to fight some kind of undeclared war. There’s a point where you realise a lot of these girls aren’t gonna live up to what the rock camp teachers want from them anymore than they are to the things society at large supposedly wants from them. Facts are inserted scatter-dash onscreen, with innocuous statistics like “70% of 11-17 year olds watch MTV” given equal weight to sadder ones like the number of girls who vomit to lose weight or have been “sexually harrassed” by classmates. And for all the desire to get these girls to break the mould and really “rock“, when they actually make anything that sounds like music (aside from the rather noisy ending where I’ll admit, some of them do kinda rock), it sounds a lot like the girl pop they claim to be trying to avoid.

Like in another documentary about kids, Mad Hot Ballroom, there’s another point where you realise the camp is probably as much for the teachers as it is for the girls; one of the camp staff even admits this to camera. In short, I think everybody’s heart is in the right place here, but I think it’d be nice if people would just focus on teaching kids the simple act of being themselves and fearless. The self-defence stuff here truly made me gag … at least until Palace made me giggle.

It’s not a bad doc, don’t get me wrong … I was just kinda disappointed by the way a place like this functions. You’d think an offbeat anti-status-quo camp for a creative medium, full of the most interesting creatures on earth, would be much more interesting … much more different. Aside from the simply adorable Palace, I’d really rather watch a double bill of Mad Hot Ballroom and Rock School / School of Rock. Then truly rock out to a Smoosh CD

Tags: camp, cuties, documentary, empowerment, feminism, music

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 8:03 pm and is filed under 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.