Stick It

dir. Jessica Bendinger

The thing about the summer-of-2000 hit Bring It On is that its greatness was utterly improbable. A fluffy subject (cheerleading), an unknown writer and director (Jessica Bendinger and Peyton Reed), and a star (Kirsten Dunst) who could offer at most a smidgen of credibility, made the movie's snapback brilliance a genuine surprise. Who knew you could fit feminism and race issues and a cute/sexy tooth-brushing scene and a quarter-second shot of a Sleater-Kinney poster into one 90-minute teenybopper package? Now, one straight-to-DVD, non-Bendinger-scripted sequel later, and just ahead of another round of sequels and rip-offs (including MTV's Catholic-Latina-volleyball confection All You've Got), Jessica Bendinger has written and directed a new movie that seems to follow her debut's winning formula.

A defiant teen with a taste for extreme sports, Haley (a smokin' if not particularly complex performance from Missy Peregrym) is, like her predecessor in Bring It On, much more hardcore than the pantywaist sport she's forced to take up. The rationale in Stick It is a little hazy—something involving a spectacular dirt-bike crash, an easily influenced judge, and a hefty cash prize in an amateur sport—but it does the trick. Haley has to train at Vickerman Gymnastics Academy with a coach from hell.

(The fictional VGA is winkingly located in Houston, but don't fall for the parallel—Jeff Bridges' gentle reverse psychology has nothing on Bela Karolyi. As for the stunts, by former collegiate athletes and the French gymnast Isabelle Severino as Haley, they're quite good, though hardly the work of the tiny, muscle-bound species known as top-shelf Elite competitive gymnasts. When an actual champion, Nastia Liukin, shows up for her cameo, the difference is dramatic.)

What follows is a bunch of alternately withering and sassy exchanges between Haley and her coach ("You warmed up?"/"To you? No."), Haley and a prissy teammate ("Stop being so nasty to her."/"It's not called gym-nice-stics!"), and so on. But then, Stick It veers off the sports-movie formula. The run-up to the big meet deemphasizes sweat and competition, opting instead for a delirious Busby Berkeley–style stretching circle against a bright red background (many things in this movie are an assaulting shade of red). Routines on the uneven parallel bars are superimposed in one time-delayed sequence full of giants and releases and dismounts. And the climax isn't so much about perfect execution as it is about one ex-gymnast (Bendinger, natch) and her contradictory feelings about the alien psychology of the sport. I was a competitive gymnast from the age of 3 until I was 12, so I can affirm that the ending of Stick It is quite therapeutic. For a sports movie, it's also pretty inventive. ANNIE WAGNER

Akeelah and the Bee

dir. Doug Atchison

Akeelah and the Bee is the first Hollywood film (surely there are more coming) to get a huge push from a new entertainment arm of Starbucks—ads for Akeelah and the Bee are stuck to the door at the Starbucks closest to The Stranger's offices—and so it should come as no surprise that the multinational corporation that produces creamy, inspirational, supposedly virtuous blended drinks has chosen to back this creamy, inspirational, supposedly virtuous movie. It is so crammed with sticky-sweet virtue that the stuff is practically coming out through the straw hole and sliding down the side.

Akeelah, although she is young and black and living in a bad part of Los Angeles, is (can you believe this?) quite intelligent and sweet-natured and something of a word prodigy (although sometimes she talks "ghetto"). After she wins the school spelling bee (even though her mom is too busy to care!), Akeelah starts seeing a coach (a man whose daughter would be Akeelah's age... if she hadn't died), and advances all the way to nationals, in spite of the protestations of her exhausted mom (who doesn't understand her own daughter's dreams!). I don't want to give away the ending, but triumph over adversity is involved.

Keke Palmer, who is 11 years old and plays Akeelah, is a charming, promising actress who is constantly made to do sappy things you pretty much only find in afterschool TV specials. Angela Bassett tries her damnedest to make Akeelah's mother resemble a real human being grappling with real problems, but the characters that writer/director Doug Atchison has dreamed up are pure foam. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

The Beauty Academy of Kabul

dir. Liz Mermin

In this painfully fascinating documentary, a group of hairdressers (three vapid Americans and three Afghan émigrés) travel to Kabul to open the first post-Taliban beauty school, giving Afghanistan's women a chance at stylish perms and economic independence. The beauty students are candid, matter-of-fact, and even funny in recounting the horrors of their recent past. And their Afghan instructors, returning home for the first time in decades, tell heartbreaking tales of longing and guilt. But the Americans, unsurprisingly, take idiotic self-congratulation to almost unwatchable heights.

"I'm a pioneer," says Debbie, with a noble nod. "I saw [the Taliban] cut off hands. And feet," says Debbie's Afghan pupil.

"I forget what they've been through, and that's good, because that means that they're moving on and not dwelling on the past," Terri earnestly explains. "I am the last one with a memory," mutters one pupil's cousin, staring at the ruins of his ancestral home.

Should the women of Kabul have the right to wax each others' eyebrows without being burned alive? Of course. Is it still icky to watch a woman receive "The Anna Wintour Award for Outstanding Excellence" in the name of female liberation? God, yes. LINDY WEST