Following in his own footsteps from a few weeks ago when he tweeted out pictures of both Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry, X-Men: Days of Future Past director Bryan Singer has once again released a behind-the-scenes photo. This time, it’s of Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde.
The highly anticipated Days of Future Past will feature both original X-Men: Last Stand characters such as Wolverine and Storm, and also First Class favorites played Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence. In the Days of Future Past comic, Kitty is the character who brings the present and future X-Men storylines together. All in all, Page will be joined by (deep breath) Jackman, Lawrence, Berry, Fassbender, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, Peter Dinklage, Anna Paquin, and Shawn Ashmore.
Check out Singer’s photo of Page below: READ FULL STORY »
Roller derby chick flicks aren’t novel. I have fond memories from the ’70s of catching endless TV replays of The Kansas City Bomber, with its vaguely kinky girl-on-girl aggression (it starred Raquel Welch, who wasn’t quite an actress but knew how to get mad). So I was primed to see Whip It, the first movie directed by Drew Barrymore, with Ellen Page as a 17-year-old small-town Texas high school student (Page, with her elfin girlishness, will probably be playing 17-year-olds when she’s 37), who lies about her age in order to join the Hurl Scouts, a roller derby team based in Austin. Barrymore is such a nice, sweet person that you may wonder how she could possibly have directed a movie about demon women on wheels whose primary athletic activity consists of bashing each other’s bodies.
Here’s how. Whip It is a nice, sweet roller derby movie. There’s no edge to it, and not much originality — it’s like A League of Their Own with tattoos and knocked heads. Page plays Bliss Cavender, a milder, softer version of one of her alienated outsiders, who auditions for the Hurl Scouts in order to feel, you know, empowered. But the women she’s skating with — they have names like Bloody Holly and Eva Destruction; they’re played by (among others) Zoë Bell, Kristen Wiig, and Barrymore herelf — are beer-spitting bruisers in Dee Snider makeup who get off on bringing the pain. Ellen Page looks as if she’d be crushed, if not eaten, by these people. On a fundamental physical level, I never bought that she could survive for a minute inside their sadomasochistic sisterhood. 
