Dirty Girl

I'm a cliché artsy girl form NYC and often i look forward to films like these.. you know the little indie gems that not many people have heard of.. Dirty Girl was like a treat for me and i can watch it again and again.It's not a perfect film and definitely not mainstream, but absolutely entertaining. Juno Temple couldn't have played this part any better as a young promiscuous teenage girl who seems confident and unafraid to conquer the world but is actually quite vulnerable and easily broken.. Clark was so lovable as the fat gay best friend and hopeless romantic, even with all their flaws , the chemistry between them was outstanding, and me and mom couldn't help but to laugh at the different emotions from the bag of flour and to adore the cool soundtrack (she's an 80's chick so it was inevitable)..

The journey was so fun to watch that i didn't want it to end, part of me had wished that Danielle and Clark could have ran away and started a new life together.. that would have been epic, but by the end of the film it was easy to admire the writers for thinking outside the box and reminding me why i love films like these so much ~

It's 1987 Oklahoma. Danielle Edmondston (Juno Temple) is a dirty girl. She has sex with the boys. She gets dropped into the special class filled with misfits. She befriends outcast Clarke Walters (Jeremy Dozier) who is coming to terms with his homosexuality. Her home life with her mother Sue-Ann (Milla Jovovich) is chaotic as she is about to marry Ray (William H. Macy). Danielle and Clarke go on a road trip to search for her birth father as Clarke's parents (Dwight Yoakam, Mary Steenburgen) chase after him.

I want to root for Danielle and Clarke. The movie needs more comedy. It's not that funny. With better comedy, the buddy chemistry would take care of itself. The movie would be much improved. It also relies too much on musical interludes. The story is a bit too messy. I wish the movie and the dialog is better written.

Dirty Girl (2010)

The movie starts with such stupidity and what seems like terrible acting and movie-making you're going to want to quit. Unless you're a high school kid looking for cheap thrills (and there ain't anything wrong with that--it's just a style thing). But hang in there. This movie gets better and better and better. By the end all the hilarity crashes down to a weepy finale--more convincing than it has any right to be after all the zany stuff prior.

It's mostly about two high school kids who don't fit in. They seem like opposites and we all know how fun opposite are in movie comedies. One is slutty girl Danielle who has a dysfunctional home life and who is wild partly because she's bored by school and is (it turns out) smarter than the cliché would have it. The other is an overweight kid Clarke who knows he's gay and who is afraid of coming out but everyone knows already anyway. He also has a dysfunctional family, and the movie eventually also clashes the two sets of parents (and accessory kin).

The plot moves fast and turns into a crisis and then a road trip. All good stuff. And it's filmed with an openminded low-budget freedom that makes it fun and doesn't always worry about verisimilitude. (The two leads are in a family planning class, for example, and are given a bag of flour they have to treat as their new baby. The bag has a face drawn on it in magic marker, and the face changes depending on what's going on around it. Her--it's a girl.)

But mostly it's the acting of Danielle (Juno Temple), and Clarke (Jeremy Dozier), that makes it all stick. Temple in particular is just oozing and exploding with energy and dramatic screen presence, whether being saucy or sassy, fun or sad. She takes over every scene and you want her to. Danielle drives a red 1965 Mustang convertible (of course--what else?). She knows what matters and who's a jerk and doesn't put up with crap. She's troubled, but all along you know she's basically right, and you end up totally on her side. And on Clarke's side, too, as he tries to make sense of his world now that someone accepts him without even blinking.

Eventually there is a deliberate Hollywood ending, complete with tears and spotlights on the stars. It's a farce, I suppose, or a silly over the top romp, and there are going to be people who never let it click. Humor is fickle. But once I was a good half hour in (and it took that long, unfortunately), but once I was, there was no going back. It's worth sticking it out. Very worth it.

"Nobody likes a dirty girl," Principal Mulray (Grubbs) tells Danielle (Temple) early on. She is a promiscuous adolescent, full of life, spunk, attitude, and guts. But she comes from a background that isn't so full of life and gutsy. Her mother (Jovovich) was a tramp in high school and because of that Danielle has never heard of or met her real father. After discovering her father's real identity, she packs up and hits the road going across Oklahoma to find him. She also does it to avoid her mother's new Mormon fiancée (Macy) and his outlandish punishment of virtually abandoning one of their own to show how important family is. My guess anyone would abandon him at first chance.

Danielle takes the car of her chubby, homosexual friend from Sex Ed. class Clarke (played fantastically by Jeremy Dozier). Clarke's father (Yoakam) has been verbally and physically abusive to his son for many years and is only further outraged to find out of his sexual orientation. Thankfully, the film, mostly, doesn't play Clarke's sexuality for laughs. We have a strong sense that he can't help his feelings, and is dealing with them in the only way he knows how to. Guys and girls alike proclaim their love for the opposite sex, why can't Clarke? Danielle and Clarke also take a sack of flour (their "baby" from Sex Ed. class) along on the ride and boy does the kid get the journey of her life.

Dirty Girl is an exciting, sort of refreshing gem that mimics not only the eighties style of rebellion, but bathes in a surprisingly dramatic bath of coming of age storytelling. Going into this expecting a solid comedy with laughs and humor galore, I was stunned to see how heavy the dramatic elements are. In many ways, this is a very sad view on one's adolescence and sometimes the laughs we get are because of insecurity and stem from the fact that their true feelings are hidden.

There's also a nice blend of wit and soul in the writing. In some ways this could be an account of writer/director Abe Sylvia's life. He grew up homosexual in Oklahoma and had been working on this story since around 2004. The film's bawdy nature is fast paced and entertaining, but Dirty Girl seems to stem from a world a lot more sentimental in emotions than we could've thought.

For an independent film, it certainly packs in some credible names. Milla Jovovich is a nice addition to the cast, Temple is very convincing, Dozier is the star of the entire film, Macy is about ten miles away from his character of Frank Gallagher in Shameless, and Tim McGraw and Dwight Yoakam are delightfully unexpected.

In many ways Dirty Girl is funny, charming, delightful, and satisfying. In many ways it's dark, sad, depressing, and begging to be loved. We have two insecure characters that go about their insecurity in totally different ways. One, giving herself up to anyone and everyone, and the other just sitting by idly in high school taking the hatred from his peers and probably his classmates. It's a sad world after all.

Starring: Juno Temple, Jeremy Dozier, Milla Jovovich, William H. Macy, and Dwight Yoakam. Directed by: Abe Sylvia.

This movie was rated 37% on Metacritic and 27% on Rotten tomatoes and honestly I think this is wrong, wrong, wrong. I expect this is because the title is misleading...the movie is not about a "dirty girl" at all, it's about a journey of discovery and maturation and the transformative power of friendship. The writing is not particularly sophisticated so in lesser hands the movie could easily have sucked. However the two lead actors were so engaging (and the supporting cast were also excellent) that what could have felt like a flat, unconvincing story was, in my opinion, extremely touching. I confess toward the end I was crying in sympathy for the loss experienced by the main characters. Thankfully, the final scenes in the movie turned this into a positive (and even mildly cathartic) experience. I had become invested in the characters (so you see, I cannot possibly trash this movie the way so many others have).