Flash Dance meets Coal Miners Daughter

Rating: 4/10 (7 August 2000)

To be honest, my wife dragged me to this film. I think she was expecting more of a Thelma and Louise meets cocktail type film with strong female roles running a bar and not taking crap from anyone. Yeah, they all danced around in skimpy outfits to 20 year old music, but there are sexy and strong willed people in the world. What bothered me about the movie is that it was a long disjointed collection of cliches that we've seen before and done better. Girl goes to New York to be a songwriter (in case you saw the preview rather than hearing about it from friends this is actually what the movie is about). Guess what, no one will buy her songs. Big surprise there. No one will even be nice to her! What a shock! She lives in what looks like the projects, has no job, has a stock dead mother family past. I keep thinking I've given too much away, but this is all the first five minutes of the film. Nothing else develops other than the generic boyfriend with a stock sitcom relationship. Oh yeah, the bar? It could be left out. It has nothing to do with the plot. She doesn't even grow as a person there. All those tough, take no prisoners women who work there? Wimps! They couldn't get together and make one stable person. And they are messed up in a seven dwarfs kind of a way. Oh let's see there's Slutty, and Bitchy, and Bossy. Each one is screwed up in her own endearing way. There is no explanation of why they are like this, and their tag name is the end all and be all of their personality. The characters all march through the plot like dutiful actors hitting the mark because that's where the director told them to go. No matter that it's out of character (Oh but they have none), or that it contradicts what they said 5 minutes ago. The lead character is from 20 miles South in New Jersey. She acts like she's from Nebraska or Iowa or something. Big doe eyed sucker from some farm, or fall out shelter. Doesn't the local library have internet access? There really is no excuse for being that naive in life.
Now there were things I did like. The house she moves from looks like a working man's house in New Jersey. The apartment looks like one I rented in Boston. The bar looked like a New York bar. If we could get rid of the actors, and plot we'd have the beginnings of a pretty good Andy Warhol movie. Call it "Apple".