Girls Will Be Girls (2003) Reviews

• Campy, trash humor at it's BEST!

  jamiam52005-02-11

  The last person that commented on this movie needs to LIGHTEN UP! The comments made about "women" are to be taken lightly and jokingly. First of all, they are all men playing the roles of women. There are no women in the cast...that's the joke behind the movie! Plus, the characters are making fun of themselves. It's a comedy, it's not reality...in fact, far from it. Jack Plotnick's character of Evie steals the show by far!! Her b*tchy, catty dialog had me rolling through the entire film. Maybe we can get the director to consider a Girls will be Girls 2???!!!! I found the movie HILARIOUS, not just because I'm gay, but because I know how to take a joke, and enjoy a good, funny movie!

• A campy and catty blend of melodrama and comedy

  johnnysugar2003-12-15

  Like the love child of "Absolutely Fabulous" and every novel Jacqueline Susann's ever written, "Girls Will Be Girls" is an 80-minute festival of campy trash, hilarious one-liners, and bitchy, catty women. The only catch this time is that the women are all played by men. Evie (Jack Plotnick) is a washed-up B-movie actress who is decidedly not aging gracefully. She lives with Coco (Clinton Leupp), her more grounded friend who functions mainly as Evie's maid and abuse magnet. Into their lives walks their new roommate Varla (Jeffery Roberson), an aspiring starlet whose late mother Marla (also Roberson in flashbacks) was also Evie's most hated acting rival. All of them have dreams, of course. Evie's dreams involve drinking as many martinis as she can and then having plenty of sex with anyone available. Coco still pines for the hunky abortion doctor that operated on her many years ago. Varla hopes to become the actress that her mother couldn't while dealing with the advances of Evie's gorgeous but microscopically-endowed son Stevie (Ron Mathews). Of course, there are hidden motives galore, and more than one mean-spirited one-liner. The gimmick of this film, that all the women are played by men, is never as overstated as you may think. After all, the characters are all female, and they are treated in the story as if they are female. It's only slightly different than young boys performing the female roles in Shakespeare's plays. The camp value of the movie focuses not on the drag spectacle, but on the unrelenting melodrama and silliness of the plot, taking the elements of ridiculous films like "Valley Of The Dolls" and upping them to a level so ludicrous, they can only be considered comedy. That the framework of the film makes all of these developments seem perfectly natural and realistic is a credit to director and writer Richard Day. The actors are all quite game and in on the absurdity of their surroundings. Plotnick is quite humorous, dropping the most mean-spirited one-liners you'll ever laugh at, and the clips of Evie performing in the 60's stinker "Asteroid" resemble nothing less than Morgan Fairchild on quaaludes. Leupp reprises the role of Coco from his scene-stealing moments in the movie "Trick", and he imbues the character both with a humorous sense of bad luck and an immediately sympathetic personality. Roberson is not quite as spectacular as his co-stars, but he gives the naive, trusting Varla a great heart and a hilarious scene involving opera and cheese in a can. Even Mathews is great, all melodramatic soap hunk and hair product. While the movie receives high marks for style, including efficient and effective set design and a very nice score, it's a very loud movie in the sense that every scene is turned up to 11. While this works most of the time, even at the film's short running time, it tends to strain. The ending veers sharply away from comedy into deep melodramatic territory, and even though it is diffused quite handily, the film almost drowns in TV-movie-of-the-week sap before the mood lightens again. Also, some may find the hostile attitudes of some of the characters, mainly Evie and to a degree Coco, to be too off-putting for comfort. Evie, especially, is one of the most unsympathetic characters you'll meet in a film this year. Regardless, the film is hilarious and immensely entertaining. A high recommendation for anyone who likes divas, camp, or catty fun. And don't forget to bring the cheese. 8 out of 10.

• More than you think.

  DameFlux2004-08-07

  My wife brought this home and we were both surprised how funny it was. Ok, it isn't Spielberg but the humor behind it is very sharp and entertaining. It is a drag (men dressed as women) movie but isn't trying to hide it . Infact it kind of plays on it. The story starts with out a driven but hopelessly burned out star who with the help of her long repressed secretary takes in a beautiful Hollywood hopeful , who by the way happens to be the daughter of her dead hollywood rival . A rival I might add that our grand dame earlier pushed to suicide out of jealousy. Now the burned out star is reliving that rivalry with the young starlet but conflict pops up when her son begins to fall for the beautiful hopeful. We found ourselves screaming laughing at this film as it is wonderfully written and acted. You will too. Lose you high expectations and just enjoy the sweet bitterness of Hollywood dreams gone bad. A+

• Lots of Campy Trampy fun!!

  electriclava2005-01-13

  One of the funniest movies I have seen in a long time!!!! Low budget b flick that was better that most million dollar films. These three actors were dead on most of the time forgot I was watching three men.Evie...funniest drunk I have ever seen very Debbie Renyolds like Great one liners!!!!!! Miss Coco who I had fallen in love with since her small part in "TRICK" her blood curdling scream make me pee every time!! And then there is Varla,aspiring actress who moves in with the two "has beens" Varla has come to the other girls looking for acting tips and revenge! The one liners hysterical,politically incorrect..the best part!! And I agree the opening features on the DVD are as funny as the movie!!!

• "Happy people always make such a racket" - hilarious drag comedy

  man_alive2003-05-24

  ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** The 2003 San Francisco Indie Fest's opening night entry, Girls Will Be Girls made some noise at the most recent Sundance Festival, no small feat considering the tsunami of queer material there that included Macauley Culkin as a murderous disco queen and Gina Gershon as a bisexual rocker. But this stone-funny drag send-up of Valley of the Dolls and All About Eve would stand out in any cinematic crowd. Drag comedies can be as much of a drag as the tired queens who usually populate them. But Girls outstrips the competition thanks to a snappy, imaginative script, pop-art playhouse sets, and commanding performances by the three principals. Evie (Jack Plotnick) is the archetypal Evil Queen, a Kay Thompsonish hatchet-faced hag who presides over a collapsed acting career and a candy-colored apartment the size of a football field. Evie's in a perpetual drug n' sex dreamworld, from which she emerges to skewer her earnest lawyer son (a hunk with a micropenis) or her beleaguered roommate Coco Peru (Clinton Leupp). Into this dysfunctional little world comes Varla (Jeffrey Roberson, aka Varla Jean Merman), a younger roommate who's also the daughter of Evie's late rival, an equally cheesy actress named Marla. The film's fearless, vehemently un-p.c. script makes mincemeat of every target. When Evie sets up a phony accident for her son to litigate, she romances the guy who hit her: `You rammed me today and I want seconds!' she screams into the phone. When she gets the guy in bed, he sticks a porn magazine over her face and starts kissing it while he's screwing her. Peeved at his lack of interest, she inquires, `What's wrong? Did my glass eye roll back?' (Kudos to the special fx dept. for convincing us that Plotnick has a glass eye.) Some viewers will remember the actor as the queen reporter who strips to his tighty-whities in Gods and Monsters. Here he employs an improbably effective Paul Lynde imitation for much of his delivery. Or perhaps he's channeling Lynde's doppelganger Alice Ghostley. Either way, it works. Equally strong is Coco, as rendered by Clinton Leupp, who turned Trick into something watchable as the `acid queen' in the celebrated bathroom scene. Here she's a hopeless romantic who falls in love with her abortion doctor, then continues to get pregnant in order to have more abortions so she can date him. Coco is the main target of Evie, who does everything but set her on fire. (Well, she does shove her into a barbecue pit.) When Coco tearfully inquires whether Evie has ever had an abortion, Evie replies, `I've had more children pulled out of me than a burning orphanage.' Varla is a camped-up Eve Harrington to Evie's Margo Channing. She comes to Hollywood to `make it' and ends up literally doing so when a sleazy pimp puts her on the street. But Varla finds success in informercials hawking a space-age toxic frozen dinner. Varla's appearance at La Casa de Evie is not coincidental, but we won't spoil that for you here. While some of the momentum fades during the middle, Girls picks up speed and moves in a surprisingly poignant direction by the end, as that literary trope beloved by high school teachers - character development - kicks in. Yes, in this world there's hope even for the most evil of queens. It's a tribute to director Day's imagination, and his seemingly endless gift for aphorism (Coco: `Happy people always make such a racket'), that this brittle comedy also has satisfying moments of pathos. Girls deserves a wider audience and will be getting one soon with a release from IFC Films.