Girl 6

Spike Lee's newest is really a surprisingly vivid dramatic study of an aspiring actress in moonlighting hell. Read full review

In one of his most impudently engaging movies, Lee's heroine has a lot of sex—on the telephone. Read full review

Girl 6 is a snappy, contemporary comedy about an aspiring New York actress who drifts into and out of the world of phone sex. It's an often sexy, funny show with interesting slants on modern New York culture and mores. [22 Mar 1996, p.F]

But Girl 6 isn't what we'd expect from Spike Lee: after exhorting his fans to wake up in his early efforts, he now tempts them to hang up. Read full review

Lee, I'm afraid, hasn't a clue. He has made half a movie, a phone-sex comedy in which the heroine has no real existence apart from the phone. Read full review

Unfortunately, while certain aspects of Girl 6 are handled with flair, the film's dramatic scope too often isn't compelling enough for subject matter of such rich and varied possibilities. Read full review

Mr. Lee isn't as successful at shaping a story around Girl 6, but enjoying her company is all his slender, sunny film really tries to do. Read full review

Girl 6, the goofy phone-sex comedy that he directed from Suzan-Lori Parks's script, may be incoherent, but it's never boring. Juggling a dozen or more subplots and letting them drop wherever they fall, the movie gives the impression of having been invented as Lee went along. [26 Mar 1996]

Strongly told stories have a way of carrying their characters along with them. But here we have an undefined character in an aimless story. Too bad. Read full review

Much of the movie exploits its subject for low-grade laughs, but in the end it takes a foursquare stand against the sleazy business it portrays, exposing its capacity for decadence and degradation. Read full review

The enormously appealing Randle holds the screen even when the thinness of Suzan-Lori Parks' script becomes inescapably apparent. There isn't much vigorous narrative pulse, complexity or even faceting of Randle's character, and the arbitrary ending seems both forced and inconclusive. [22 Mar 1996, p.53]

The film works up to a totally conventional ending: It's never much of a comedy or an exploration of the phone-sex phenomenon, and it often seems to be just an excuse for Madonna, John Turturro, Quentin Tarantino and other Lee pals to make cameo appearances and mug for the camera. [22 Mar 1996, p.24]

Trading in his thinker's cap for a craftsman's apron, Lee is content to carve a little something out of nothing much - the result is as dismissible as it is diverting. [Apr 12, 1996. pg. C.2]

Spike Lee deserved a vacation after putting himself through the grueling emotions of Clockers, but Girl 6 is too flimsy to excuse even as cinematic R&R. Frenetic but lazily conceived, it's like one of those puny low-budget toss-offs Brian De Palma used to spring on us when he thought nobody was looking. [22 Mar 1996, p.4D]

It's a mess alright, but it's easy on the eyes. Like phone sex is for the ears. Only not as much fun. Read full review

Too slight to be taken seriously and too off-putting (especially when the phone callers get hostile and the work demeaning) to be funny, Girl 6 feels like the first draft of a potentially interesting project. It just hasn't been made good on here. Read full review

Vintage Lee visual flourishes and a couple of chucklesome fantasies spoofing a 70s sitcom and blaxploitation flicks make this more watchable than the infuriatingly pointless content warrants. Read full review

A wispy, fundamentally sentimental tale about a nice girl who has to support herself by working as a phone-sex siren, Spike Lee's movie takes the better part of an hour to get started. Once it does it still can't dramatize the script's one good idea. [2 Apr 1996, p.A12]

Sans emotional depth or narrative drive, Lee's latest flick is little more than a profane litany punctuated by Oscar-caliber orgasms. Read full review

Instead of effervescent and mercurial, the movie is simply muddled. Lee has far too much skill to be delivering work that so often degenerates into incoherence. Read full review

Girl 6 is glossy, technically proficient and a glib waste of time. Lee and his screenwriter goof around with phone-sex rhetoric ("I wanna service your juicy kielbasa''), but that gets tired quickly. Read full review

Girl 6 is such a mundane, flat comedy. Read full review

Girl 6 is shameless stuff -- pompous, sentimental and attitudinizing. To swat the Spikeman with his own symbol, the film feels like he phoned it in. Read full review