The redeeming feminist content I was hoping to find only serves as bookends. The beginning of the film shows Anne Marie, hereafter known as White Girl, running and doing situps. She's obviously strong, and she's obviously training. Since it's dark, it's not just an opportunity to watch her boobs bounce. The end of the film is also positive. A woman who is competing against White Girl sees her struggling during the competition and decides to encourage and push her to excel. And in the very last scene, White Girl celebrates her accomplishments with other women. If I had just watched the beginning and the end, I would have thought "aw, how sweet, sisterhood is powerful."

But alas, I watched everything in between.

You want scenes of female incompetence? Check. White Girl struggles mightily to overcome the fact that she just can't manage to stay on her surfboard for more than a minute or two. She's supposed to be the chosen one, but all she does is fail, over and over. We have to take other people's word for it that she's talented.

You want her to blow off what's important for a guy who isn't worth it? Check. White Girl ditches her training, her friends, and her little sister for White Man, who admits (almost proudly) that he's scared of women. He buys her a dress cut down to her waist, and when she wears it he greets her with the comment "You look obscene." She asks him what to do with her life, and even after he tells her she's "a girl who'd never ask a guy what to do," he gives her the inspirational speech anyway - and that's what makes it possible for her to go on. Her victory even plays out exactly like the one he shares with her for inspiration. After all the work she's done and all the support she gets from her best friends, she wouldn't have made it without White Man.

You want women kept in their place? Check. White Girl's ex-boyfriend grabs her and manhandles her like she's a toy.

You want white people to be the center of the universe? Check. All the other serious competitors are white women, while White Girl's two BFFs (Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake) just stand by as spectators. Do we really need another anointed white girl with women of color as sidekicks?

And here's another question: do we really need another movie where all the black men are portrayed as fat [please see note below], jolly, dumb, and sexually promiscuous? White Man's football player buddies were among the worst caricatures I've ever seen. (One of actors was Faizon Love, who is of Afro-Cuban descent. The other I can't figure out from IMDB.) Their hotel room is littered with vomit and discarded condoms. At a "luau" party, they jump up on stage to play the fool. White Man even says something to the effect of "Yeah, they're gross, but they have my back during the football games." There is such a contrast between these two characters and White Man, a quarterback who is well mannered and tidy, that no one working on this script could have missed the message it sent.

Yuck, yuck, yuck. No stars. And if I meet the people who made it, I'm likely to slap them. Should that occur and I end up in jail on assault charges, hopefully Grace will take up a collection to bail me out.

Note: I don't think I phrased this well at all. My point was not that fat = bad. My point was that we have two men of color who are both portrayed a certain way, which includes characteristics historically used to stereotype and demean African-Americans, and then we have a white man who is portrayed as not being those things (except possibly promiscuous, although that's left unclear). I felt like the filmmakers were using a stereotypical shorthand for the two black men instead of making them real people, and the set of characteristics they used was immediately familiar. I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings, and I will try to do better in the future.