The Girls' Room

Grace and Casey really are quite convincing as friends, before they become enemies again. This explains the movie title in my TV listings "Best of Enemies".

While Casey's personality is kind of hard to take, Soleil Moon Frye gives a great performance. I saw her play a similar character for years on "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", where Sabrina was the cute princess. Casey really isn't so bad, and she is so sweet and loving with her grandmother Nana.

Julianna McCarthy is quite appealing as Nana. Not your typical grandmother, but appealing enough.

Cat Taber is just adorable. You expect she will be this spoiled rich girl but there's more to her than that. In some ways Casey is preferable, but Grace is not so bad and sometimes easy to like. If you don't have money, you have to laugh at her priorities.

Sweetie is anything but sweet. I could have done without her. But she adds something to the movie and sometimes we just need to be exposed to that which is outside our comfort zone.

This is kind of hard to explain, but I'll try. A few years ago I couldn't find the magazines I wanted at the big downtown library and I had to go to nearby Wake Forest University to see them. And now that library is closed for renovation and I'm spending even more time at Wake Forest. I thought the architectural style of the college buildings was quite attractive but it didn't hit me why everything looked so familiar until the credits. Not even when I saw the unique name "Reynolda Hall". I tape everything I watch so I was able to back up and see the buildings again. If I had known ahead of time that it really was Wake Forest, that would have been an even bigger reason to watch.

Is it worth seeing? Probably.

what is this movie about? - that's what you'll be saying to yourself throughout most of the movie. The acting SUCKS, the soap opera score and 80's music semi montage scene's only hurt the film, you don't beleive a thing the characters are doing, it all appears to be forced emotions. As far as giving it credit for low-budget film making, I give them credit for only getting this horrible movie made, the editing sucks, the cinematography is mediocre, and the script f***ing blows, "I have to do this page" fade to black, fade in hang out with your room mate all of a sudden in 15 seconds she turns into satan for revenge, this movie is almost as bad as my spelling

I saw The Girls' Room at the Nashville Independent Film Festival and was floored by it.

Inspired direction, a terrifically complete script, and sharp performances fill the screen. Irene Turner's directorial debut is an excellent and well-paced one. Soleil Moon Frye's Casey absolutely owns the screen as a defining sexual-existential-college-punk-grrl.

The title may make males wince, but The Girls Room is happily not a chick flick. It is a funny and knowing Gen-X movie that hopefully will find a large audience.

I just bought the DVD from amazon and had to write about it. It was the most realistic and inspiring portrayal of being a woman at college that I have seen. Being a southern woman who attended Brown before transferring to NH Community College, it was a hard adjustment for me. Cat the protagonist in the film, was a role that I could relate to.

I think anyone who went to college, man or woman would like the film. Highly recommended. Although it sounds like a straight-ahead chick pic, ~ "The Girls' Room" instead turns out to be a humorous tale of difference and tolerance that, in the hands of frosh helmer Irene Turner, is less gender specific than the title would suggest. Winning, intimate performances by former sitcom star Soleil Moon Frye ("Punky Brewster") and newcomer Cat Taber anchor the film and help smooth over its occasional lapses in logic. The generally appealing picture has an outside shot at finding a distributor and will deservedly open doors for Turner, a co-producer on "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss."

College roomies Casey (Frye) and Grace (Taber) are a contempo odd couple. Casey, a bohemian performance artist with a penchant for bad boys, profanity and pot, garbs herself in black and heavy mascara. Preppy good girl Grace just wants to ace her classes and wed her frat boy Romeo (Wil Wheaton). When Casey's obnoxious taunts and schemes put Grace's plans in jeopardy, she resolves to get even.

And so Grace begins to spend time with Casey's pal Joey (Gary Wolf), a guitar-strumming loner and the only guy her roommate hasn't nailed. That seemingly platonic friendship begets a cycle of jealousy, suspicion and innuendo that further imperils Grace's nuptial plans.

Far from being an update of "Single White Female"-the film that gave female roommates a bad name- "The Girls' Room" nicely develops its characters, resisting the urge to limit them as easy stereotypes. Casey, it turns out, knows she was dealt a bad hand from the start, whereas Grace subtly begins to question her sheltered Southern upbringing.

Nor does Amanda Beall's script demonize either character. Both women are flawed, to be sure, but despite their surface antagonism, each harbors a real desire to explore the other's life. Their mutual attraction-repulsion keeps the tension percolating and thankfully leaves some surprises for the final reel. The characters ultimately emerge in the script as wholly rounded and,as realized in Taber and Frye's empathetic performances, neither easy to like nor completely despicable.

Others in the cast, especially Wolf and Julianna McCarthy as Casey's grandmother, provide ample support. Production values are sharp, and the ___location photography (at North Carolina's Wake Forest University) adds a sun dappled collegiate feel to the proceedings.

"The Girls' Room" is a surprisingly engaging little indie "sleeper" about two college seniors and roomies. One is a proper and privileged Southern Bell "have" (Taber) and the other a pot smoking, beer drinking, sexually active "have-not" (Frye aka Punky Brewster). The plot is about the inevitable conflict and competition which, after much ado involving friends and guys and girl issues, results in both learning more about themselves through each other. The film manages an even tone, avoids the usual excesses of filmdom, and communicates an important subliminal message about how, though we all may take different paths through life, we can learn from each other and arrive at the same destination of self-actualization realizing a happiness as unique as ourselves. A pleasure to watch and highly recommendable, especially for females. (B)