Fine Girl

Heard a quote earlier today about writing for movies. The quote states and I paraphrase, “don’t say what you think about the movie but write about what you felt”. Now this is all well and good except a formula can only work so many times before it becomes recitation.

Fine Girl tells the story of a young lady who finds herself in a bind when her father’s in the hospital with hospital bills due and a mother who cannot afford them. She picks up extra shifts at work and sells her personal belongings but still continues to come up short. A friend suggests an escort service which she joins after much deliberation. After her first go-round, she returns home to find out that her father passed away. As self punishment she continues to work for the escort service until she meets William.

As you can guess, William is her knight in shining armor. He is the whole nine yards and an extra one (cos 10 is a round number). Son of a wealthy family, business tycoon, lives in a mansion, can buy her and her entire village and yet he’s taken by her. He soon enough falls in love with her and sets off on his path to ‘rescue her’.

It’s hard to say which part of the synopsis would be a spoiler because the entire thing is a rolling cliche. If there’s one thing to speak on it would be the casting of this movie.

The movie is headlined by Lota Chukwu who is a relatively new actress that most of us saw for the first time in “Spotlight“. Spotlight was a movie I loved. One thing it did was launch a few new actors, Lota inclusive, so it was a delight to hear of “Fine Girl” and find out that she would be headlining a movie on her own. The question, after seeing this movie, is “was it too soon?”

The supporting cast and male lead of this movie are fairly strong actors with a plethora of experience. From Belinda to Yvonne to Ozzy and everyone in between, Lota was surrounded by fortresses. It’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing. It’s great because everyone else in the frame can act pieces. It’s bad because Lota is a relatively new actress and is not as strong as the others in the frame.

So while Ozzy is spitting fire on the romance side, Lota is sounding like she is trying to decide if she believes the words that she is saying.

Regardless of this though, the performances were strong enough that the movie came out to be a cohesive whole. The only problem was the end. The movie was already 100% unoriginal and completely predictable, so I wonder what the reason was that the movie ended as if the scriptwriter ran out of ink. Was it an attempt to salvage originality or were we pretending to be unpredictable? Either way, it makes the movie seem incomplete.