The old story of the unimagined detours on the dreamt-of road to stardom. This particular detour, into the phone-sex business where acting and fantasizing talents do not go to waste, gets the Spike Lee treatment. Which of course includes the director's trademark shot of the stationary actor pushed or pulled along on a dolly (though this time we have to wait almost until the end for it). And it includes a few brief anamorphically squeezed images, just to show unrepentance for the extended sequence of these in Crooklyn, but not yet to show how such images might be used to good purpose. And it includes an assortment of overamplified background songs in distracting competition with the foreground action. And it includes slow-motion and jump-cuts and freeze-frames and off-center compositions and deep-focus compositions -- the director's complete personal lexicon, plus the Improve-Your-Vocabulary addendum of low-definition video transfers whenever the phone-sex customers are on screen. But more than all that, it includes a flatness and sluggishness a little difficult to reconcile with all that visual razzmatazz. Theresa Randle, Jenifer Lewis, Isaiah Washington. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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