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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
If groupies followed film critics around from screening room to screening room, I suppose I might take a different view of their social value, but they don't, so right now I'll stand on my conscience and say that the premise of "The Banger Sisters"--that two women in middle age need to revive the spirit they had when they were rock groupies decades earlier--strikes me as, well, bananas. The negative rap on groupies wasn't that they had sex with lots of guys but that they were parasites whom no one wanted to see in the morning. Where was the cool part of it? "The Banger Sisters," a comedy written and directed by the screenwriter Bob Dolman, is almost as bizarrely askew in its desire to shock as the new, independently made "Secretary," in which a masochistic girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal) finds happiness working for a creepy lawyer (James Spader) who regularly whacks her on the fanny. "Secretary" is not meant to be realistic; it was shot by the director Steven Shainberg in a slow, dreamy neo-De Palma style and in candy colors, and Gyllenhaal has a Kewpie-doll silliness that almost makes the naughty parts of the movie fun. Still, the meaning of "Secretary" is that pain is liberation. This is not a comic idea but a pornographic idea,...
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