GIRL 6 (63)

Directed by: Spike Lee

Starring: Theresa Randle, Isaiah Washington, Spike Lee

The Pitch: A struggling actress finds work as a phone-sex girl.

Theo Sez: The protean Lee makes his NATURAL BORN KILLERS, throwing in pretty much everything he can think of - jump-cuts and alternating stock, fisheye lenses and actor-on-the-dolly shots, Prince songs and celebrity cameos, fantasy parodies of blaxploitation and THE JEFFERSONS. Since he is not (unlike Oliver Stone) a psychotic personality, the result is playful rather than scary, a grab-bag of goodies that aren't particularly nutritious but go down easily enough, and are so abundant and snazzily-presented you could easily imagine the result to be a feast of cinema. It isn't quite that, partly because the various tricks leave little room for story, partly because what little there is doesn't particularly hang together. It's possible (if you're charitable) that what Lee intended wasn't so much a straight expose of the phone-sex business - which is why the detail doesn't feel particularly convincing - as a wider statement on the kind of dissociative world that phone-sex represents, gratification without emotional connection - hence the decision to use this flashy, disconnected style ; then again, maybe he just knew he was working from a weak script and decided to try and plug the gaps with flair. Less than the sum of its parts, but those parts are often a lot of fun ; and, just in terms of film-making, it confirms Lee as the only current black-American director whose movies manage to transcend the baggage of his skin-colour.