Girls Rock! The movie

I came across the trailer for this movie on the internet, and I babbled on about it like a tweaked out homeless person for three weeks before I surrendered to my unsuccessful search of torrent sites and local stores and bought it off Amazon.

Girls Rock! (note the exclamation point) is a documentary about a rock camp in Portland, Oregon where girls between the ages of eight and eighteen spend a week learning an instrument, writing a song within a band, and then performing that song in front of an audience.

Bear sat down and watched the documentary with me after spending the previous month enduring my incoherent babble about "GIRLS ROCK!", which usually involved a lot of air guitaring and riot grrrl growling.

"Are you sure you want to watch this?"

"Yes."

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

"You don't have to."

"UGH, I know. I want to."

"It's about girl empowerment and stuff."

"Babe, I don't pick up on half that stuff anyway."

"Aight then."

But about half an hour into the movie, Grizzly Man made a keen observation:

"Wow... girls are really fucked up."

The issues explored go much deeper than simple rock n' roll. The premise of the camp is to use music as a platform to help young girls develop their confidence, explore self esteem issues, and challenge the mold of traditional femininity. Witnessing a herd of young girls squirm within the confines of girl culture is a bit unsettling. Moderately heart breaking. Their preoccupation with the pressures of beauty ideals and social popularity is one thing, but their inhibitions in regards to breathing air, taking up space, being heard, speaking out, being individualistic-- themselves-- caused a lump in my throat. Apologies are abundant. Expressions are censored. Behaviour is uncomfortable and awkward. It made me want to hug them all and blubber in one of those nasal, hiccup, half cries, "it will be okay, IT WILL BE OKAY."

Girls Rock! is also really, really adorable, particularly the scene when little Palace overcomes her inhibitions and develops her own riot grrrl scream, as seen in the trailer above. However, my favorite camper depicted in the documentary is Amelia, an experimental, self proclaimed musician who writes songs about her dog, Pipi, and who very obviously would be classified as ADHD in a public school setting. She's the one in the trailer who is rocking out so passionately that she slumps down on the floor Jimi Hendrix style.

By the end of their rock camp experience, many of the girls documented come out of their shells. One of the older girls, Laura, verbalizes her realization that as a female she is equally as capable as males to write music, rock out, and be in the lime light rather than sit on the side lines and pine over rock stars-- could definitely be construed as a metaphor for many deeper gender issues that still, and in some ways, increasingly plague our culture.

For anyone who is interested in the subject matter and want to learn more about the documentary, I found a great review of Girls Rock! at KQED Arts.

In related news, has anyone watched that youtube video of the three year old girl crying over Justin Bieber (Canada's newest prepubescent pop star)? If you haven't already seen it, it's worth the watch if you hit the link above. You'll laugh. While cringing, of course. Do you think maybe, just maybe, we all need to collectively move on from celebrity culture? Re-focus? This shit makes me want to put a gun in my mouth.