Movie Review: Fired Up

Noncommercially, all I have to announce is two more of the library's showings of the Academy Award nominated shorts and another in the Tuesday night Japanese film series at the Blank Page Gallery at 917 West Douglas. The Oscar shorts are the live actions and animations at the Rockwell branch, 5939 East 9th, tonight at 5 and the whole series, live actions, animations, and documentaries, at Warren Old Town at 10 Saturday. The series at the Blank Page shows Death By Hanging, by Oshima Nagisa, from 1968, which has been called "the most fantastic scenario in the history of cinema ? a masterpiece" by Luc Moullet. It shows at 7:30 in the Blank Page Gallery, 917 West Douglas. And commercially, we have a pretty enjoyable time-waster in Fired Up!, a somewhat more masculine entry in the same school as House Bunny, but nowhere near as enjoyable. There is nobody with the comic touch that Ana Faris had as the house bunny, or even that Isla Fisher has in the somewhat comparable Confessions of a Shopaholic. And since the prime attraction of Fired Up! Is the bevy of appropriately clad young cheerleaders at the cheerleading camp, that lack reduces Fired Up! to a physical level somewhat below the other two. The stars are Eric Christian Olsen as the motor mouthed guy who is hard to convert to less randy values and Nicholas D'Agosto as his more nerdy buddy who is easier, with Sarah Roemer in the thankless role of heroine and chief of the nice cheerleaders, competing as eye candy with the coach's wife and the chief of the nasty cheerleaders, plus a number of other female decorations that don't get to show much of their acting talents, either. Fired Up! is basically a visual hymn of praise to female buttocks, which suggests the level of thought and humor on which it dwells. So does the unnecessary repetition of uses of the initials of the words "fired up," although the level is really a little higher than that. If there is any acting promise, it is shown by Eric Christian Olsen, who suggests a cruder and louder Thomas Haden Church from Sideways. But if you make Church louder and cruder, do you really have him at all? The rest of the cast are up to what they are asked to do, which is most impressive in the physical realm. The cheerleaders' acrobatics are really impressive, especially in the final bit, called the Fountain of Troy, which is so dangerous that I hope it is outlawed except for professional Chinese acrobats and the Cirque de Soleil, who are always doing things you know are flat out impossible. Except that they appear live in the flesh, I'd swear they were digitally composed. Nobody in Fired Up! is as good as that, but they're impressive, athletically. There is no point in going into the ancient plot about the underdogs facing their traditional rivals with everything riding on the big final match, or the dubious morality of the leads' deserting the football team so they won't be called deserters for deserting the cheerleaders, or the innumerable chains of clichés and obvious jokes and plot complications. And it might be best not to remember that there are more injuries in cheerleading than in practically any other athletic activity, whether they try the Fountain of Troy or not. Don't think about serious things while watching this one. Fired Up! makes Confessions of a Shopaholic and House Bunny look like intellectual exercises. Don't think at all. Just look, and you might enjoy it. I did.