Girls Will Be Girls
Picture:
B- Sound: B- Extras: C Film: C-
If the
fall from grace of Gays and Lesbians since the failure of the Gay new Wave was
not bad enough, here we get Richard Day’s very short (at 80 minutes) clichéd
and always obvious Girls Will Be Girls
(2002). The twist (no pun intended) is
that the film takes place in a world where the cross-dressers are the natural
inhabitants of the world they live in.
After that, instead of an exploration of identity, we get every visual
expectation, tired convention and caddy comment that can be squeezed in the
Day’s screenplay.
That
separates it from the likes of Pricilla,
Queen Of The Desert or To Wong Foo… and
other films from the other films
from the cross-dressing cycle a few years back.
I do not see how celebrating stereotypes and predictability is a good
thing, though it may be a standing joke in the community it celebrates, which
at least would make sense. This would
give this a very limited audience, if that.
A great comedy has yet to really be done on this subject, and the mixed Birdcage (and its French predecessors)
does not count. With an AIDS crisis and
the Bush Administration attacks on the lifestyle, this even feels like it
belongs to another time long past and gone.
The anamorphically
enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is not awful, but lacks detail. The colors are distinct to an extent, but
seem muted. As I watched cinematographer
Nicholas Hutak’s work, all I could think of was the Music Video for Aqua’s Barbie Girl, which was actually much
more amusing and visually interesting.
The camerawork here is static and too stage-like for its own good, but
with all the clichés, that is all one should have expected. The Dolby Digital 5.1 AC-3 mix is also
nothing to write home about and rarely kicks in. When it does, as on the title song for the
opening credits, it still lacks clarity and this is beyond my usual complains
about Dolby’s compression. The extras
include several MGM trailers (including one for this title), deleted scenes
montage, a featurette, menus that talk to you ala MGM’s bit for their UHF DVD with “Weird Al” Yankovic, and a
commentary by Day that is flat.
The
overall result is for cross-dressing fanatics only. But I believe that if this were reviewed on
The “Men On Films” skit from TV’s In
Living Color, they may have even “Hated it!” I will not go that far, as I was so bored,
that I almost fell asleep a few times.
That’s not protesting too much either.
You have to be awake to do that.
- Nicholas Sheffo
