Amazon.com
Sassy, in-your-face account of an intelligent, flippant Brooklyn girl who lives in the projects and dreams of college. Ariyan Johnson is captivating as the teen with attitude and a brain, but she cannot decide which should guide her. She wants a better life but finds herself taking a very hard road. First-time writer/director Leslie Harris put together a sharp, realistic, very funny account of life for a young black woman. It is rough around the edges, however, and is definitely hampered by the minuscule budget. This may not always be pretty, but it is consistently interesting.
--Rochelle O'Gorman
The heroine of Leslie Harris's début feature is a black inner-city teen-ager named Chantel (Ariyan Johnson), and the film means to demonstrate that kids like her can't be reduced to a stereotype. For maybe the first three minutes, you feel the thrill of anticipation, a sense that you're about to get an entirely fresh perspective on urban experience. But after the opening sequence, which is edited to the hip-hop rhythm of a number by the female rappers Nikki D and Cee Asia, the movie starts to go wrong. As a storyteller, Harris moves to the beat of the same old drummer which usually sets the tempo for earnest low-budget independent movies; she leads the heroine, and the audience, on a forced march from lesson to lesson. Chantel is less a person than a counter-stereotype, and Harris uses her according to the didactic need of the moment. Sometimes Chantel is a positive-image icon, sometimes a cautionary figure; she's always a statement of some sort. The filmmaker's eye for the nuances of behavior isn't sharp, and scene after scene is ruined by faulty observation; Harris is in such a hurry to get through the lesson plan that she garbles messages that shouldn't be difficult to put across clearly and forcefully. (The messages that do come through aren't always welcome; a classroom sequence, in which Chantel argues with her Jewish history teacher, is unmistakably anti-Semitic.) -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
