WHITE GIRL is so visually well made that some early reviews seemed as if the reviewers had been under the influence of a Rorschach experiment and that they wrote about their visceral responses to a compelling piece of erotica, while ignoring or being temporarily blinded to an unconvincing and tepid script a few rewrites away from real significance.<\/p>\n Millennials Leah (Morgan Saylor) and Katie (India Salvor Menuez) move into a Bushwick, Brooklyn, walk-up and Leah spots drug dealers \u2013 millenials like themselves (but of a different socioeconomic pedigree, obviously) \u2013 across the street from her building, and she seeks them out to score. She almost seems attracted to them but it’s unclear why. Is she merely slumming?<\/p>\n This reviewer isn’t sure about the ethnicity of the light brown skin, millennial drug dealers who could be Latin or Black or Latin\/Black or even Italians posing as ethnic drug dealers.\u00a0That’s been known to happen \u2013 New York City, if you believe in a higher power, is a divinity’s\u00a0cross-cultural, biracial Garden of Eden \u2013 \u00a0but was that what the director-writer intended? Or did this reviewer miss the point?<\/p>\n Leah locks on to\u00a0their light brown skin leader, Blue, (Brian Marc), whose constant “my n*ggers” \u2013 not “my n*ggas” \u2013 in several\u00a0scenes caused this reviewer to be willing to believe Blue was Black. A Times reviewer said\u00a0Blue\u00a0was Puerto Rican. So it goes.\u00a0This writer has\u00a0mistaken Dominican born and raise folks as African American more than once.<\/p>\n At their first encounter, Blue tells Leah something like, quotation marks for effect, “Hey, white girls like you don’t come to score on this block, so you best\u00a0be careful.”\u00a0Me Tarzan, You Jane,<\/em> immediately popped into this reviewer’s mind, the\u00a0repartee of the two soon-to-be lovers at the level of\u00a0Johnny Weissmuller-Maureen O’Sullivan repartee. Leah, in an unrealistic rapprochement and to the chagrin of her roommate (who later changes her mind about mixing it up with the Bushwick homies)\u00a0eventually invites Blue\u00a0and his crew up to their apartment.<\/p>\n We know little about the background of the fetchin’ and smokin’ hot Leah but I believe she and her roommate are suppose to be transplants from Small Town USA, not metro New York City\u00a0suburbs. Eventually, let’s say in a New York Minute, she and Blue get it on.<\/p>\n And Leah eventually helps\u00a0him and his crew of “n*ggers,” “n*ggas”, whatever, score big bucks with affluent contacts, white of course, whom Leah has met\u00a0at her gig in what looks like some kind of SoHo startup. Some of the Bushwick drug-selling homies start making big bucks\u00a0from the\u00a0extravagant fees for the drugs they had been peddling on their home turf at a reduce rate.<\/p>\n Blue eventually gets busted, his third, by an undercover narc, setting him up as a three-strikes candidate,<\/a> and Leah embarks on a mission to get him out of jail \u00ad\u2013 at any cost, regardless of the perils to her sanity and, at times, her life. Often stoned out of her mind, she seems unrealistically stoic and indomitable in the face of lecherous and rapacious debauchery from dangerous predators on her mission to help Blue. It is very\u00a0unclear\u00a0the source of her\u00a0inner strength.<\/p>\n Earlier in the movie, she gave head to her amoral boss (Justin Bartha) in his SoHo office (while the rest of his staff, pretty much white, is hard at work at their computer consoles). That took place on what looked like her first day on the job after he offered her two snorts of coke. Later on at a downtown club soiree, she snorts coke off his penis. She later does it in the alley with Blue. Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera.<\/p>\n Audiences won’t see genitalic acrobatics but swells of scenic orgasmic verisimilitude are evident and will not let eyes stray form the screen. The Bushwick, Brooklyn, landscape of the lead protagonists’ turfs as well as the downtown New York City party club scenes and hangouts aren\u2019t lacking for verisimilitude either and are good for atmosphere. The Variety reviewer that \u00a0wrote that Director\u00a0Wood should have been considered one of 10 directors with must-see films at an earlier Sundance Film Fest<\/a>\u00a0was absolutely right.<\/p>\n But his comment that the film “offers an unflinching look at the juxtapositions and frictions of race and class that happen every day in contemporary New York” is so hokey that I snarl with contempt.\u00a0A New York Times review headlined yesterday, August 2, “White Girl, a Tale of Cocaine, Sex and Privilege”: To what degree has hard partying with sex and drugs become entrenched as a hazardous rite of passage for bored millennials? Leah (Morgan Saylor), the doll-faced blond protagonist … is an ebullient New York City college student with an appetite for marijuana, cocaine and casual sex.”<\/em><\/p>\n After a night of hard partying, Leah nods off on a Brooklyn-bound train.<\/p><\/div>\n This reviewer can imagine affluent or privileged millennials being bored and engaging in lecherous debauchery. He can’t imagine that description applying to the millenials enrolled in his classes at Hunter College, City University of New York. Working more than one part-time job to pay their way through College or working full time\u00a0with a part-time gig, and dealing with family responsibilities, showing up in class after a night or nights of profligate binging? No way.<\/p>\n According to some reviews, WHITE GIRL is autobiographical – or somewhat biographical. Hmmm? The articles by writers whom this reviewer imagines were able to interview the director, however, were very vague about the boundaries between fiction and reality – as if the reviewers weren’t as daring with their questions as Wood as she is\u00a0with her movie. The performances overall with young actors and veterans \u2013 the latter being Christopher North as lawyer George Fratelli, Justin Bartha as Leah’s Soho boss and\u00a0Adrian Martinez<\/span><\/a> as a menacing drug thug \u2013\u00a0 range from okay to very good, especially\u00a0Morgan Saylor as Leah.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n New York Release Date: Yesterday, September 2. <\/p>\n![\"wg-wide\"](\"http:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/wg-wide.jpg\")
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\nLos Angeles Release Date: September 9, 2016
\nNationwide Release Date: September 16, 2016
\nRunning Time: 88 Minutes
\nMPAA Rating: TBD (Ha Ha Ha)
\nPromo blurb: Summer, New York City. A college girl falls hard for a guy she just met. After a night of partying goes wrong, she goes to wild extremes to get him back.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n