This cautionary tale about the life of a video girl is not very popular with viewers. Video Girl features Meagan Good, Ruby Dee and Lisa Raye. Meagan Good is a ballerina whose dreams were smashed when she got into a car accident while away at college. She retreats to what appears to be New Orleans and decides that she is not going back to college. Her sister wants her to follow her own dreams, instead of taking care of her grandmother, who is played by Ruby Dee.
She ends up meeting a director for a music video and makes $800 in one day. He then wants her to go to Los Angeles, which she does, and ends up staying out there living with him while he controls her career. He cares for her, but he also controls her, but at the same time as soon as she breaks away from him and starts to pursue a career on her own terms she develops a cocaine addiction and ends up living with Melyssa Ford.
She tries to book her own music videos but her drug addiction is spiraling out of control and she can no longer work with anyone. She even runs into a pornographer and narrowly escapes his attempt at date rape. In the end she goes back to what really seems to be New Orleans (though it is never truly confirmed in this film) and moves back in with her grandmother. The movie concludes with her attending drug rehabilitation, and hooking back up with a local basketball player that got signed to the NBA she had kept pushing aside for her career as a video girl.
Ruby Dee must have been hard up for work and needed to pay the bills. Why in the world such talent would digress to playing in this film is beyond me. The only good thing about this film is that there are as many rappers, singers, and video girls from the music industry as there are actors. Their presence made the film more believable. The movie also has a few twists and turns. One is the visions that Megan Good keeps having about her sister, who was killed attempting to stop a confrontation that her boyfriend had with another drug dealer who owed him money. I did not think that they would have killed off the sister so early in the film.
Another surprise is that the video director who brought Meagan Good into the game was not physically abusive with her. It was clear early on that he was manipulative, and controlling, but in a strange way you also walked away feeling that he cared about her more than anyone else did. Her best friend ended up with him after he kicked her out of his home, once he realized that he could not control her.
This has to be one of the absolute worst films I have ever seen Meagan Good in, which isn’t saying much because she has been in a lot of awful films. This one definitely takes the cake; the movie accomplishes its goal, and gives you plenty to think about, but it is still predictable, and has already been done by Spike Lee and far more talented artists than those that contributed to this project. I would not give the film as low of a rating as IMDB has, but I do think that it deserves at least 2 out of 5, which is around 4 out of 10 on their scale.
