Sugar & Spice (2001)

A popular high-school cheerleader becomes pregnant by the star quarterback and turns to crime to support her desired lifestyle.

Director:

Francine McDougall

Writer:

Mandy Nelson

Stars:

Marla Sokoloff, Marley Shelton, Melissa George

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Marla Sokoloff	...	Lisa Janusch
Marley Shelton	...	Diane Weston
Melissa George	...	Cleo Miller
Mena Suvari	...	Kansas Hill
Rachel Blanchard	...	Hannah Wald
Alexandra Holden	...	Fern Rogers
Sara Marsh	...	Lucy Whitman
James Marsden	...	Jack Bartlett
Sean Young	...	Mrs. Hill
W. Earl Brown	...	Hank 'Terminator' Rogers
Adam Busch	...	Geeky Guy
Jake Hoffman	...	Ted
Nate Maher	...	Chris
David Belenky	...	Bruce
Kevin Kling	...	Factory Worker

Storyline

Jack and Diane were lovers, two crazy kids living in the heartlands. Airheaded Diane captains the cheerleading squad, who follow her through whatever she does. Jack is, of course, the football team's star quarterback. When Diane becomes pregnant, the two are thrown out of their homes and move into an apartment where they try to live on Jack's part-time salary from clerking at a video store. Meanwhile both continue in school - cheerleading and quarterbacking. When Diane realizes that they're not making it financially, she recruits the other cheerleaders to help her rob a bank. Their cheerleader oath of all for one commits them to helping her. A local hood gives them guns in exchange for their promise to put his homely daughter on the cheerleading squad.

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Plot Keywords:

generation y | seductive behavior | attempted seduction | cheerleader | quarterback | 

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Taglines:

Why would the most popular girl in school wear a mask?

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Genres:

Comedy | Crime

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for language, sex-related humor and some thematic elements

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

26 January 2001 (USA)

Also Known As:

Sugar and Spice and Semiautomatics

Filming Locations:

Webster Street & Randolph Avenue, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$11,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$5,891,176, 28 January 2001, Wide Release

Gross USA:

$13,276,953, 4 March 2001

Company Credits

Production Co:

New Line Cinema

Technical Specs

Runtime:

81 min 84 min (extended)

Sound Mix:

DTS Dolby Digital SDDS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.39 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The characters of Jack and Diane seem to be named after the fictional characters of John Mellencamp's song: "Jack and Diane".

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Goofs

When the girls are in the bathroom before the pep rally, the bow in Diane's hair is blue. When we see the girls doing their cheer at the pep rally, the bow in Diane's hair is red.

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Quotes

Diane: [from the trailer:] Is this going to take long? It's game night.

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Connections

Features Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

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Soundtracks

Girls
Written by Ken Livingston, Dennis Hill, Scott Somers and Giovanni Lorenzo
Performed by Lefty
Courtesy of Interscope Records
Under license from Universal Music Enterprises

User Reviews

All the nice that's fit to print

A high school cheerleading squad robs a bank in order to support the burgeoning family of one of their own. They get the idea watching the Keanu Reeves movie Point Break and then watch movies like Reservoir Dogs and Dog Day Afternoon to figure out how exactly to pull the caper off.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Sounds like a cutesy family movie, right? The kind that warms the cockles, wherever they are. Well, almost. It's a dead-on, surprisingly hilarious comedy, with perfect off-center performances and a crisp, honest script.

The last cheerleading movie I saw (and quick, can you name more than a couple anyway? Didn't think so) was the Kirsten Dunst comedy Bring It On. This one blows that out of the water, out of the atmosphere, and out of the solar system. There's no moralizing. There's no good-girls-are-right, bad-girls-are-wrong lesson. Heck, we're talking about teenage girls pulling off a robbery! And one thing that could have sunk this movie early on was a character change. You've seen movies in which a character, faced with a new set of circumstances, does a 180-degree turnaround on how they've behaved up to that point. In this movie, you'd expect the girls to suddenly become flawless professional robbers. Not so. And while their plan has its faults, it's still a plan, buoyed by the vacant aphorisms of their leader, the pregnant and chipper Diane (Marley Shelton). Sing-songy and ebullient, the kids squabble among themselves but, in the true spirit of cheerleading and gosh-darn Girl Scout-like togetherness, they pull together as a team. Hip! Hip! Hooray!

Decent cheerleading movies are hard to come by. Come to think of it, so are any cheerleading movies. Oh, not that I'm looking, but I can name only two off the top of my head: Bring It On and the legendary, overlooked (okay, just kidding) 1977 opus Satan's Cheerleaders. But the latter's pep squad was in college, so it's different. But I digress.

Truth be told, there's not a dull moment in the movie. Diane's knocked up before the prom by her dimwit football-hero boyfriend. This guy's so stupid he gets himself fired from such seemingly unfireable jobs as fast-food employee and other glamorous retail employment opportunities. See, in the real world, he'd be upset that the luster had worn off his diamond of an image, having to work with geeks at the video store. But he's a dope, blissfully ignorant. He knows but one thing - that he loves Diane - and being such a dullard is supremely helpful to the film (and isn't easy to do; kudos goes to James Marsden in the role).

In short, a real hoot. We've seen many bank robbery movies with their own twists and idiosyncrasies; this one's one of the better ones to come down the pike. Go team go!