Controlling A Movie Clip inside another Movie clip?

I’ve had my share of problems with this one…I hope someone knows what the hell I’m doing right/wrong and could help me out:(

Okay, I made a movieclip to put the blocks(which are movieclips too) in a breakout clone.

lets give the container movieclip the instance name “container”…the blocks are preset in that container with their own instance names…what I want to do is a hittest with those blocks but I found out that…

(this.hitTest(_root.container.block1)) doesn’t work…any ideas why?

even changing the x and y properties of the blocks doesn’t work…
(_root.container.block1._x = 5)