Friday Night Lifts: Small Town Texas Sports Uplift in All She Can

Details

All She Can
Directed by Amy Wendel
Maya Indie Film Series
July 29 through August 4, Quad Cinema

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More About

• Amy Wendel
• Luz Garcia
• Corina Calderon
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Weightlifting

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In the dusty small-town Texas of Amy Wendel's All She Can—the centerpiece movie of the week-long Latino-themed Maya Indie Film Series—the options are predictably bleak for high school grads: Join the army, work on an oil rig, or enroll at a local community college. And for Luz Garcia (Corina Calderon), teenage weightlifting champion, there's the off chance of a scholarship to the University of Texas, provided she pumps the most iron at the state competition. There's no question that Wendel's movie treads familiar sports-as-the-way-out territory. But in its attention to the details of the lifters' routines (hanging upside down or starving oneself to make weight) and its evocation of both the desolate beauty of the scrubby Texas countryside and the sense of quiet desperation it engenders, the film proves that closely sketched specificity can trump pedestrian plotting. At least, that is, until steroids rears its ugly and inevitable head and the film veers into morality play and, finally, inspirational uplift.