Girl 6 (1996)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

For having a relatively low budget, the film's style and overall art direction are immensely impressive.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Theresa Randle plays a failed African-American actress in New York City who turns to phone sex for a career change. This Spike Lee effort, which he produced and directed, from a maladroit script by Suzan-Lori Parks, opens with an excruciating scene which typifies the rest: Randle, auditioning for a movie role for a questionable filmmaker (Quentin Tarantino in a cameo), is asked to remove her blouse; she hesitates, but eventually strips under pressure. Once we get a good look at her bare breasts, Randle then has a change of heart, dresses and walks off. She's a struggling modern-day actress being exploited by the oldest con game in the annals of sleazy show business, but Lee seems to think he's showing us something new (didn't he see "Fame"?). If the sequence is supposed to be funny, the punchline is sadly missing--but, as long as we get to see the woman's breasts, I guess Lee figures he's making his point. NO STARS from ****

I'm really not sure what to make of this movie. Teresa Randle (Bad Boys, Bad Boys II) plays a struggling actress that takes a phone sex job and finds that she is good at it. Now, how can someone who got upset taking off her top for Quentin Tarantino want to do phone sex? Well, she did and was doing OK until she decided to get into the kinkier stuff. Then the job began taking over her. One thing that she did manage to do is gain enough confidence that , when she auditioned for that slime Ron Silver (I told you I hate that guy), she didn't even hesitate and just walked out when he asked her to do the same thing.What makes this movie hard to watch is that there are movies going on within the movie. I'm having a hard time figuring out what Director Spike Lee is trying to accomplish. Maybe that is why it didn't last very long in the theaters as no one else can figure out what he was trying to do either.The film featured others like Isaiah Washington (Grey's Anatomy), Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos), Richard Belzer (Law & Order SVU) Madonna, and Naomi Campbell (New York Sanitation Department).Of course, any movie that features Halle Berry, even briefly, is worth a look. I should have quit looking after her appearance.

I can't help but to be amused by the other comments/reviews on this movie. They (even the positive ones) completely enforce exactly what this movie is actively trying to point out about our society.Several people noted that the narrative was weak or nonexistent, that the film didn't "go" anywhere, and/or that there was too much extra "stuff" that distracted the story from the "real" plot line. I'm here to tell you that this is the whole point of Spike Lee's brilliant Girl 6. It's not a flaw in the movie, it is part of it's very construction.Every time an extradiegetic scene was placed within the overall plot (such as the Dorothy Dandridge, Foxy Brown, Jeffersons scenes as well as the recurring image of the elevator shaft) the audience is pulled away from the narrative of the film and forced to see it as such: a movie! And fictional movies have no basis in reality; the people and actions depicted are not real. This disrupts our normal expectations about what we expect to see in a film.The movie is also scattered with touches of reflexivity. For example, Naomi Campbell, wearing a shirt that says "Models Suck" and Quentin Tarantino, acting very ironically in a way he has been accused of. At the end, the movie theater in L.A. is showing a movie entitled "Girl 6" and a billboard proclaims that it's "The End." Absolutely all of this is purposeful and calculated. It does exactly what so many people were disappointed not to see, by subverting our expectations and implicitely pointing out that this is NOT a movie you can just "fall into" and become a passive spectator, that it actively engages the audience and breaks down our concepts of the master narrative by giving us an ending we did not expect.Girl 6 is not a movie about phone sex, as so many of you seem to believe. It is a feminist (if you know anything about Suzan-Lori Parks, you know she would never condone something sexist, let alone write it) film that deliberately references itself in order to subvert our expectations about films, society, and women.It's really a shame that so many people are, in fact, so hooked on "traditional" forms of narrative (taught by a sexist society) that they fail to see the value of this film.

I gave this movie a 4 for three reasons. 1 - Theresa Randle is excellent. She is one of the most talented actresses today. 2 - John Turturro is probably in this movie for less than 5 minutes. He simply takes over the screen and shows why he is one of the top 5 actors today.3 - spike lee. These three reasons brought this movie up from a 1 to a 4.