‪How had I not seen this? Suzan-Lori Parks script, Prince soundtrack (largely drawn from Hits/B-Sides and Sign O the Times), Quentin Tarantino cameo (which I knew about), Madonna and Naomi Campbell cameos (which I didn’t), Jenifer Lewis, Richard Belzer, a baby John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Imperioli — and it’s a sensitive study of the sexual exploitation of black women in the film industry, and media industries broadly, to boot. 

I wasn’t sure about the stagy recreations of Carmen Jones, The Jeffersons, etc., but an essential point starts to emerge: that a black woman might find more heroes in past roles for black women than she’d find opportunities in future ones. I think that’s powerful, interesting—she can only assemble a dream career from a…

suzan-lori parks and spike lee muse on the idea of erotic film as an elaborate recreation of private fantasy and of hollywood as a place that attempts to claim and drain women’s bodies, and then as a response to the damning opening sequences create a film which is erotic but mapped around a sexual world free of bodies, just disembodied words making a journey to each other. phone sex is acting; it has the exact same roles you play as when in front of a camera, it requires the exact same fluidity of identity, but it’s a little easier when nobody has to see your body or know your name, when calls dissipate into the night and don’t linger and…

NO TABOOS

This has its problematic elements, like its depiction of sex work (of the telephonic variety) that veers on inherently demeaning, but even that downward spiral doesn't really kick in until the last act, and is arguably consistent with this idea of phone sex being a much more dramatic and emotionally stimulating profession for Judy than I imagine it actually is - she's so overflowing with creative energy that she can't help but throw herself into her work and her clients' fantasies, and the real emphasis is on that rather than any statement about phone sex, or showbiz, or whatever. And anyway, God, that shot of the phones raining (or snowing in April, I guess) down from above is…

Spike Lee's megaphone to the dismissal of black women in mainstream popular entertainment gets off to a rocky start in Girl 6 by having Quentin Tarantino cameo as himself, a white mechanical arm within the claw game of black culture, requesting the actress to take off her top and show her breasts; it's obviously uncomfortable and shows the low level that she's going up against in an attempt to get in a filmmaker's movie in which a black woman is reduced to QT's fascination with blaxploitation. However Lee is no better than QT by showing her breasts in the same scene that he's set up to critique. So goes Girl 6 a movie with many great points about representation and…

Synopsis:
Spike Lee directs and co-writes, Girl 6. Theresa Randle stars as a girl that is aspiring to be an actress. She beings the film with an audition for Quentin Tarantino, but feels very uncomfortable when she gets asked to take off her top. She is unable to find jobs as an actress and does one off job to make ends meet. She finally meets her calling as a phone sex girl for a company. She becomes highly requested and popular. It is not long before she is one of the most requested girls in the company, but she starts to get addicted. The deeper and deeper she gets involved she starts even losing interest in real relationships with her…

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN 1996

Spike Lee's new comedy is a disjointed disaster that starts bad and stays there. Theresa Randle (BAD BOYS) plays an aspiring New York actress who takes a phone-sex job as a way to make ends meet. Soon, the job becomes an adventure that, I think, is supposed to go something like this: girl excels at job, girl gets addicted to job, girl goes cold turkey from job, and girl grows from having job. Lee, who continues to beat to a very different drummer, never makes this progression very clear. He's too busy inserting extraneous dream sequences and grainy footage of the various male callers. (One of the few funny bits has Randle imagining herself as blaxploitation…

I felt more positive about Girl 6 this time, having seen it originally about 2 years ago. Spike Lee is working with weaker material than usual; I just don't know that this premise or this character can sustain a full movie, and Lee's ideas about female sexuality, exploitation, depictions of black women in the media, etc., all feel a little unformed. On the other hand, he's working at near-full creative powers, really going for it, and unfiltered, bold gesture Spike Lee is my favorite Spike Lee.

It's the kind of movie where every scene seems to try something new stylistically, or riff on a new idea, or go on a tangent, or focus on a different minor character, or strike…