The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 165 Days to go: 116
Movie #273: Sugar & Spice
Okay, so Sugar & Spice isn’t going to win any awards, and it’s not going to convey some universal message of the human spirit or proffer some kind of life lesson or anything like that. It’s silly and dumb and … weird, in parts. And I just like it.
The movie is narrated by Lisa (Marla Sokoloff), a B-squad cheerleader at Lincoln High, bitter she’s not on the A-squad. The A-squad girls are all pretty and popular and super good friends and Lisa hates that, except for how she totally wants to be part of it. Members of the A-squad include Diane (Marley Shelton), the perky blonde captain of the cheerleaders, who always has a positive affirmation up her sleeve. “Nobody ever got ahead by sitting on their behinds!” Then there’s Kansas (Mena Suvari), a “white-trash” girl who lives with her grandparents because her mom (Sean Young, almost unrecognizable in a mullet, no makeup and a godawful redneck accent) is serving a life sentence for killing Kansas’s dad while in labor with Kansas. Pretty standard stuff. We also have brainy cheerleader Lucy (Sara Marsh), virgin uber-Christian Hannah (Rachel Blanchard), and Cleo (Melissa George), who has an unhealthy obsession with Conan O’Brien. Criminal underbelly offspring Fern (Alexandra Holden) also joins the squad, but that’s later, in exchange for some mix and match assault rifles.
See, when Diane gets knocked up by star quarterback and aspiring Senator Jack Bartlett (James Marsden), she finds their limited means aren’t enough to support them and their impending twin babies. So she decides to rob the grocery store bank branch where she works. And the whole squad is in. And they’re doing it dressed like pregnant Betty dolls.
That’s the gist of it. The girls research bank robberies by watching movies, plan a heist, and pull it off. There might be a little problem of being arrested and needing an alibi, but that might work itself out. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
In the end, the girls each accomplish what they set out to do, and Diane makes sure no pregnant cheerleader will ever have to rob a bank again. It’s like the feel-good movie of the new millennium.
Viable Option 