Last night, like everyone else, I stayed up late to watch the All-Around Finals in Olympic Women’s Gymnastics. The thrill of cheering for our good, wholesome, corn syrup-fed girls to take their massive muscled thighs and (metaphorically, of course) break the necks of foreign competitors who are apparently ten years under the minimum age can’t be denied. But where even my beloved Bela Karolyi said from the start that Shawn Johnson was probably the American girl to beat, I had my money on Nastia Liukin.
There’s just something about Nastia. She’s like part ballerina, and part assassin. From the moment I saw her, I had visions of her dressed up like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Then, as last night’s competition went on, I kind of revised the fantasy: I imagined all of the competing gymnasts in a reform school exploitation flick, with Shawn as the good girl who doesn’t really belong there, and Nastia as the leader of the pack who teaches her it’s better to be bad.
(It should maybe be here noted that last night, for purely non-recreational reasons, I was under the influence of vicodin).
Anyway, after Nastia won the gold and my sympathy for the bad ass proved prescient, I checked it out, and it turns out Nastia does have an IMDb profile and a bit of acting experience! Well, sort of: she played herself in that cheesy tween-targeted gymnastics flick, Stick It! Apparently, I’m not the only one obsessed with seeing Nastia on screen: last night, this clip from the movie had less than 4,000 views on YouTube; about eight hours later, that count has tripled. Somebody get this girl an agent! But a really, really terrible agent, who will only cast her in schlock, please.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth