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GIRL
Review by Michael Jacobson
Stars:
Dominique Swain, Sean Patrick Flanery, Summer Phoenix, Tara Reid, Selma
Blair
Director: Jonathan Kahn
Audio: Dolby Surround 2.0
Video: Widescreen 1.85:1 Anamorphic
Transfer, Standard 1.33:1
Studio: Columbia Tri Star
Features: Commentary Track,
Featurette, Trailer, Talent Files
Length: 99 Minutes
Release Date: August 29, 2000
Film *1/2
When I first opened the envelope and the DVD for Girl
slid out, I looked at the cover and groaned.
It shows Dominique Swain looking all goo-goo eyed up at Sean Patrick
Flanery, who, with his unkempt hair, five o’clock shadow and microphone looked
like second runner up in the national Kurt Cobain look-alike contest.
Now, here comes the part where I say, “but then I put the disc on and
was surprised at how good the movie really was," right?
But life doesn’t always follow the script.
Girl is yet
another coming-of-age teenage story that reeks of being made by people who are
too old to really remember what being a kid was like. Correction—a LOT of people who are too old:
there are no less than eleven producers credited!
Though it tries, it’s not very funny, and that’s not even counting
when it tries to milk cheap laughs out of tragic things like bulimia (one of the
characters stares at the decrepit, skeletal figure of a boy in an anti-heroin
poster and ponders, “Do I look fat?”). The
acting, for the most part, is painfully thin.
Ms. Swain, who’s been in at least two movies I loved, Adrian Lyne’s Lolita
and John Woo’s Face/Off, has
always come across on screen as decidedly bland to me.
It’s a little worse when she has to carry the entire film on her
shoulders as she does here. This
time, there’s no capable veteran like Jeremy Irons to help her along.
She plays Andrea, a typical teenage girl for these kinds of
films. She’s an A student with a
bright future, but her obsession with losing her virginity leads her to
temporarily embrace the life of a groupie when she falls for Todd (Flanery).
Todd is a singer in a popular local band.
He’s got some talent and looks, but no personality whatsoever.
Naturally, why wouldn’t a girl who’s just been accepted to an Ivy
League school risk throwing it all away to get a little bit of attention from
him? He can even inspire her to say
lines like, “his soul condensed in the air above me and poured down into my
hands”. (The movie is funniest
when it tries to be serious).
I’m always a little wary of films with a lot of
voiceover—it always strikes me like the filmmakers didn’t really know how to
get their story across in the action and the dialogue—and this movie is about
90% voiceover. Most of it is used
for cheap comedic effect, as what Andrea does is often in direct contradiction
with what she says. Which is true
enough sometimes, but come ON, we got the point the first ten times.
Or, her voiceover is used in setting up jokes we can see coming a mile
away. She goes shopping for a dress
to wear to the club, and comes out with this outrageous looking cow-patterned
one. “I felt like an
individual”, she informs us. Have you guessed already that the next shot shows her at the
club with women all around her wearing the same dress?
To make matters even worse, the film fumbles along looking
for comedy until it plummets into a huge black hole at the end:
the suicide of one of the main characters.
I guess this was meant to put everything that happened before into some
kind of perspective. It didn’t
quite work, especially when the filmmakers tried to parlay THAT into another
cheap laugh.
There are just too many films out there about teenagers
that don’t have a clue, and it makes me wonder who they’re supposed to be
for. I personally think the movie
that got it most right was Welcome to the
Dollhouse, but even some of the more recent raunch comedies like Can’t Hardly Wait or American
Pie had a little more truth in the margins than this one.
Films like Girl focus on and revel in the awkwardness of being a teenager, as
though there was nothing more to it than that.
It makes for a rather squirmy viewing experience.
There were a couple of aspects of the film that I liked.
Most of the film’s original songs were penned by the director, Jonathan
Kahn (I wonder if that’s why he signed on for the project?), and they are
actually quite good. So much so,
that had I been in the executive in charge, I would have pushed the soundtrack a
little more. The film’s two
‘singers’, Flanery and Tara Reid, both do an excellent job of lip-synching,
even though the voices seem a little mismatched (Flanery’s character in
particular sounds like just another Eddie Vedder clone).
Most of the supporting cast, including Reid and Selma Blair do an
admirable job without a lot of material to work with.
And, despite the tediousness of the voiceovers, there was one line I
found clever and memorable: “You
can always tell your good friends by how much they resent you.”
But the real highlight of the picture for me was Summer
Phoenix, whom I’d first seen in a small but admirable acting job in SLC
Punk!. I thought she showed
amazing promise then, and I think so even more here, as she gives a wonderful
comic performance in a supporting role. She
may be no more than one good picture away from stardom.
In the end, however, we’re supposed to view the whole
movie as a kind of rites-of-passage learning experience for Andrea.
But nothing helps it along: not
the script, which lacks substance and insight, not the bland performances by the
two leads, not the half-hearted attempts at making one or two serious points,
and certainly not the failed attempts at humor.
Life and love CAN be scary and funny when you’re a teenager, but these
filmmakers have failed to really delve in and discover what makes it so,
settling instead for line after line that must have gotten snickers during the
production meetings, but certainly not from any audience.
This is one Girl that SHOULD
have been interrupted.
Video ****
Poorer films don’t mean lesser quality transfers where
Columbia Tri Star is concerned, and I have to give them credit:
this disc looks great. No
image complaints at all: no
compression evidence, no softness, no grain, and no dirt or debris on the print.
The color schemes are excellent throughout, from some of the more subdued
outdoors made to look cooler with higher concentrations of blues and grays, to
the many club scenes which feature dynamic, loud, and widely contrasting bright
colors against often dark backgrounds. These
come across with no bleeding or image compromising.
Detail is strong throughout, even from front to back in deeper angled
shots. Being that the director is a
musician himself, he seemed to instinctively understand how to create and
capture the nightclub image on film, and this first rate transfer preserved his
work.
Audio **
Surprisingly, the audio is not as good as I would have
hoped. For a film featuring music
as a key element, this Dolby Surround mix completely lacks any sense of dynamic
range. When a band rocks out on
stage, for example, it comes across at the same audio level as simple spoken
dialogue. The mono signal to the
rear speakers is a little more active than some straight surround tracks,
particularly in club scenes where crowd noises, and sometimes the music itself,
finds their way to the back of the scenery and rests comfortably behind you.
There’s no problems with the soundtrack in terms of clarity or noise,
and is a perfectly adequate listening experience, but the lack of range compels
me to only rate it as only a fair one.
Features **1/2
There is a theatrical trailer for starters, followed by a
VERY short making-of featurette. It
gets around to the major cast members, but I don’t think anybody but Ms. Swain
gets to say more than a sentence or two. Then
there is a commentary track by director Kahn along with Dominique Swain, which
is not a particularly good one. Swain has so little to say, you’ll forget she’s there for
long periods of time, and Kahn offers little more than “this is this” and
“that person is so-and-so”, and “hey, there’s my old frat house”.
Either through modesty or boredom, he didn’t comment on his own music
as much as I would have liked—as I mentioned, I thought the songs were one of
the film’s strong points. Overall,
the track is sparse, with too many gaps, and not a lot said in the way of
quality information.
Summary:
Girl is just another teenage coming-of-age story that fails to get it really right, and as such, fails to provide much in the way of entertainment as well. I’d recommend it only if you’re a die hard fan of one of the lead actors, or if you’d just like to hear some cool music that you’re not likely to hear anywhere else.