Search - 5 Girls (Kartemquin) on DVD

How OUR half lives

Jeffery Mingo | Homewood, IL USA | 12/20/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"This work gave me a flashback. In 2000, a series called "American High" came on. The channel showing it quickly dropped it due to low viewership. The thing is: it gave no insight into Columbine, the year before. It showed that high school is just as normal and mundane as one remembers. "Boston Public" showed the edgy stuff that older people wouldn't know, but "American High" was same old-same old. So is "5 Girls."

"5 Girls" shows 5 girls from the middle-class, with mostly two parents, and attending great schools. They all have everyday non-shocking issues and they all go on to great colleges and then pursue respectable careers. If you are middle-class, you won't need to see this because you've seen your daughter go through it or you've seen countless other successful girls like these. There's nothing exceptional here. If the Brady daughter or the Cosby daughters were real people, they'd be like the girls in this documentary. This show the privileged and not the challenged seen in "Girlhood" or "Aging Out."

The work tries to be diverse in terms of race, sexuality, and immigration status. Still, it may stand out there are no Latinas featured here.

Do you really need to see minutes after minutes of well-loved and protected girls eat dinner with their families, go clothes shopping, or participate in extra-curricular activities? Yawn! Probably not!

It's great that young girls can have the spotlight in a work, but this documentary was two hours of things so obvious, it'll make you wonder why video was wasted on it in the first place. Mundane, quotidian, predictible, commonplace, all that applies here."