Whirlygirl (200?) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

(The date of the film is debatable. It was filmed in 2003. It premiered in September 2004 at the New Haven Film Festival because most of it was filmed in New Haven. It went to DVD in 2006. The DVD box calls it 2004, but IMDb calls it 2006.)

Whirlygirl is, more or less, the same movie as The Girl Next Door, both of them cut from the original cloth of Risky Business. The perfect preppie, level-headed, smart and athletic, risks his future in senior year when he becomes involved with a stripper who has struggled through life. Their relationship has some stops and starts, and it appears for a time that the lad may be messing up his life, but she ultimately helps him to loosen up while he helps her straighten out.

The strength of the movie, as I see it, is that the guys in the prep school and their teachers are all real, recognizable human beings and not expedient cinema stereotypes. They have conversations that sound real, and the boys react to situations in sensible ways, given their immaturity. There is no evil gym teacher, nor stereotypical bully, nor Asian computer genius to bail them out of scrapes. Just reg'lar guys. That was a nice touch.

The weakness of the film is that the part of the Whirlygirl was not written as well. Her situations were more like movie life than real life, and she had to deliver some mighty corny speeches at the end of the film, in the obligatory scene where our hero avoids punishment for all his lies and missed classes and so forth.

The difficult part of writing this kind of story is coming up with an ending. We see that they have more between them than pure sexual magnetism, but it simply isn't possible to close the story with them together as he heads off for his freshman year at Yale. That just has no grounding in reality. By necessity, this type of romance needs to have a bittersweet ending where they both go off to do the growing up that they have to do alone. Maybe some day they'll be together, but not now. Ultimately, that makes the film too downbeat to be a romantic comedy, and some sections are too airy for drama, so the screenplay has to walk a fine line between laughs and tears. The greatest tribulation for the screenwriter was the part of a soldier who is stalking the Whirlygirl. He is sometimes treated as a comically inept buffoon, but near the end of the film he turns from the butt of jokes into a genuinely menacing rapist. I could have done with a re-write of that character, but the script does have some successes in balancing those difficult tone shifts, to go with some failures.

The musical score and the male star are bland and low-key, so the film sometimes feels like it needs an infusion of energy, but overall it is a competent, watchable film, if not a memorable or original one. On balance, I'd say that you will like it more if you're looking for a reality-based coming-of-age drama, than you will if you're looking for a feel-good comedy/fantasy ala Risky Business.