SnoopyStyle
Leah (Morgan Saylor) is a cute white college girl living with her roommate in New York City. She gets hit on all the time. She works for Kelly (Justin Bartha) and they have a fling. After meeting Blue (Brian Marc) on the subway, they have sex on the roof of her apartment. She suggests that he can get a better price for his drugs at Kelly's party. Blue gets arrested while trying to make a buy. She needs money to hire defense lawyer George (Chris Noth).It's not surprising that no good would come out of this movie. In fact, a happy ending would have been a great surprising twist. This reminds me a bit of Kids. It has some of the grimy street level energy although the Hollywood stars bring one back to fiction. The story does stray into standard melodrama with her obsessive love but it always injects her raw uncontrolled sexuality. It does play with the edge of the envelop until it stops noticing where the edge is. The most surprising aspect is Bartha playing a douche in this indie. I've never seen him in anything with an edge. This may work better with another actor. The most memorable ends up as the final scene. It's jarring to see her as a college student for the first time.
shawnblackman
A young woman falls for a small time drug dealer who ends up in jail facing a long sentence. She has no money but needs 17 000 dollars to get a decent lawyer and pay a dealer back. How far will she go to get it?
You have to go long along with the idea that she loves this man (that she just met) so much she'll do however many people it takes to get him out. Most of the film she is snorting coke and having sex but it is necessary for the context of the plot.This film is gritty and down right depressing but entertaining at the same time. Try and catch this one but be warned (or notified) that there are a few explicit scenes.
Michael Jones
Thematically, White Girl is exactly what it says on the tin, it's about race, and about gender. It's an attempt at outlining the main character's naivety and her ability to come out of it unscathed as a result of her privilege. An idea that, if it wasn't already obvious enough, Elizabeth Wood beats us over the head with in the scene where Leah has dinner with the lawyer.White Girl is unapologetically feminist, and being directed by a woman, it gets a lot of this right, Leah isn't a trope, she's not a stereotype, she's a naive young girl who makes a lot of really, really terrible decisions. But while this is the basis of her character, the protagonist, as well as the rest of the people in this film, are only explored on a surface level. Meaning that it's difficult to care about what they do, or what happens to them. Especially Leah, who knows that as a pretty white girl, there's a lot that she can get away with, and come out unharmed. And we know that too.Not only is White Girl difficult to get pulled in to as a result of its lack of a real sense of consequence, it also seems to push us away with its sloppy attempt at shock cinema. Every other scene is someone snorting coke, getting their tits out, or puking their guts up (is there anyone in this movie who doesn't do drugs?) Some of the comments on sexuality, especially female sexuality are interesting, and there's clearly a lot to say here about the male gaze and the danger of that towards young women, but then the gratuitous sex scenes never stop in an attempt to shock us, and we lose interest.As a drug dealer drama, and a comment on race, Wood hits all of the tropes that we'd expect. Many of the characters are stereotypes, and the writing for the male drug dealers sounds like it was written by my dad, guessing how he things a drug dealer probably talks. The attempts at making the love interest more of a love interest and less of a sex interest were hilarious at times, this movie just couldn't get the dialogue right for those characters at all, it was awkward as hell.White Girl was summed up for me when Doug from The Hangover got cocaine snorted off his dick.4.5/10
