Have a midweek linkspam. (Alas a blog? This post is video heavy)
I went to see Whip It a few weeks ago. It was absolutely wonderful! The Roller Derby scenes in particular left me cheering and full of adrenaline, and the fact that the movie made the love story a secondary plot and focused on her sporting evolution was the icing on the cake! And it got me thinking, of course. Sport movies featuring men are a dime a dozen. Sports movies featuring women? Not so much. So I went looking and came up with these. Note ye the overwhelming whiteness on the list. If I have missed some, let me know in the comments?
Whip it Roller Derby
Bend it like Beckham Football
Stick it Gymnastics
A League of Their Own Baseball
Million Dollar Baby Boxing
Blue Crush Surfing
Ice Princess Ice Skating
Kansas City Bomber Roller Derby
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American Women Athletes: At the movies
Personal Best (track and field starring Mariel Hemingway)
For figure skating, there’s also Ice Castles and The Cutting Edge. There was a biopic about Nadia Comaneci that I used to watch endlessly when I was little. Love & Basketball.
Although it completely lacks for feminist creds: Pat and Mike with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy with a female lead based losely on Babe Didrickson. Does car racing count? Then Heart Like a Wheel.
Before there was Million Dollar Baby, there was Girlfight.
Incoming:
Hey there mods. There is a double post coming through the crossposter. Since peope are already responding to this post, can you delete repeat? Also, please amend the headline to add “Part Five” please? Thank you.
[Done! Thanks for the head’s up! –Amp]
How about Edge of America? It’s directed by Chris Eyre, and it’s about an African-American high school English teacher who takes a job on the Three Nations reservation, and the girls on the girls’ basketball team he’s coerced into coaching.
@ Anka: um. not really. I wanted a focus on the women athletes, not the male coach.
Now that I think about it, most of the movies that I can think of that have the usual sports movie plot (underdog trains hard and beats the arrogant champion, or something similar) and have female main characters are about dance competitions. And there’s also stuff like Center Stage, which isn’t exactly about a competition (at least not in the usual sense — they are competing for spots in the main ballet company, but it’s not something where just one person or one team wins), which uses a lot of the same tropes that sports movies do.
Looks like wikipedia has a category page for female sports films. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Female_sports_films Only 27 currently listed, though. They’ve got about half the ones that have been mentioned here.
If you count cheerleading (and it’s certainly portrayed as a sport in the movie) then Bring It On! That one does have a rival black cheerleading team (who ultimately win the championship), but their take on race issues is…let’s say simplistic.
When I was younger some of my favorite Disney Channel Movies featured female athletes: Right On Track (based on a true story), Motorcrossed, Double-Teamed, there is also one about a girl’s hockey team.