Monday, August 20, 2007

Confessions of a Call Girl DVD



DVD Review by Kam Williams

Headline: Tamala Jones Plays Conflicted Title Character in Kinky Blaxploitation Flick

On the surface, Tory Adams (Tamala Jones) seems to be leading the perfect life. By day, she’s a doctor with a successful practice in Manhattan. Off hours, she retreats to the lavish, $3 million Harlem brownstone she shares with her loving, lawyer husband, Miles (Bokeem Woodbine), and their six year-old daughter.
But what nobody knows, except for her shrink (Lynn Whitfield) is that Tory’s is hiding a big secret, namely, that she’s suffering from a compulsion which has her moonlighting as Candy, a high-priced call girl who caters to the fantasies of the rich and famous. The nymphomaniac feels that her addiction is more about the power than the money, which might explain why among her clients is the Mayor of New York (Munro M. Bonnem) and other pillars of the community.
This is the provocative point of departure of Confessions of a Call Girl, a skin flick which is really little more than an excuse to get Tamala Jones nearly naked in a series of compromising positions with guys and lipstick lesbians. My problem with picture is not with its kinky premise or that it borders on soft porn, but that writer/director Lawrence Page tries to pass it off as a ghetto-fabulous melodrama.
As a result, the film’s dialogue is laced with the n-word and the f-word, and women are routinely referred to by terms like “bitch” and “ho.” And in this post Imus era, such misogynistic epithets grate on one’s nerves like nails on a blackboard.
If the sisters are all sluts, almost as irritating are the generally unflattering portrayals of brothers as shallow and shiftless buffoons, such as Chauncey (Clifton Powell), an unemployed alcoholic who boasts “I’m a mother-bleeping man” while being fellated, only to be stabbed in the chest during the act by the ex-girlfriend (Angell Conwell) providing the oral favors. Another player, when asked if he has any kids, arrogantly answers, “None I know about” with a wink.
There’s also a black MD who makes house calls, but comes on to his patients, and a dude separating from his wife who bitterly complains, “Only in America could a black bitch put a black man out of his bleeping house with a gun.” Nonetheless, Confessions of a Call Girl lands in this critic’s “It’s so bad it’s good” file because the characters are so laughably cartoonish and because Tamala Jones never gets tired of baring her curvaceous booty and cannonball implants for the camera.
The cinematic equivalent of slumming.

Good (2 stars)
Unrated
Running time: 105 minutes
Studio: Code Black Entertainment/Universal Music & Video Distribution

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