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Mar 31, 2007 Web Exclusive By Chris Tinkham

Ever needed tips on the best way to drive home intoxicated after a party? Or how to prevent the cocaine in your pocket from being dampened by sweat while dancing? That’s where The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down can help. Writer-director Paul Sapiano’s irreverent debut feature is a colorful ensemble comedy that doubles as an educational film on how to avoid the pitfalls of hooking up on the club and party scene.

Anyone who’s ever scoffed at the absurdity of guest lists and velvet-roped entrances will appreciate how thoroughly and effectively Sapiano satirizes a culture and lifestyle that’s already a straight-faced parody of itself. What Office Space was to the workplace, Boys and Girls Guide is to the bars and clubs of Hollywood’s Cahuenga Corridor.

A little like American Graffiti in that multiple characters and story threads intersect during a single evening-through-morning period, Boys and Girls Guide eschews plot for a chapter-to-chapter instructional manual format. Vignettes on topics ranging from pussy power (essentially female Jedi mind tricks) to fauxmosexuals (straight guys who fake being gay to get in girls’ pants) and coke fiends are introduced by sedate male and female voice-over narration and supplemented by animated graphics. Though it’s a clever unifying device, it also proves to be a double-edged sword. The scenesters in the film are portrayed more as caricatures than characters—like Bryce (Steve Monroe) and Andy (Michael FitzGibbons), the two blinged-out white guys in basketball jerseys—and although Dominique Purdy as Jonny, an “old school fool” with aRadio-era L.L. Cool J fashion sense, steals the film, he does so before it really gets started. Because Boys and Girls Guide doesn’t move toward resolving an overriding conflict, there’s no need for the character arc found in Swingers or a dramatic climax like in Graffiti. However, because Boys and Girls Guide remains unburdened by plot, the jokes don’t trail off in deference to a romance or moral as they do in Office Space. In fact, Boys and Girls Guide gets funnier after last call, and Sapiano’s best moments as a director are captured when his after-hours partygoers must begrudgingly commingle with the city’s early morning go-getters.

Raised in England before working as a television commercial director in the States, Sapiano maintains a brisk pace for Boys and Girls Guide, integrating an astonishing 180 speaking roles with intermittent visual puns and a score by Dirty Vegas. Shot on location and cast with Cahuenga regulars, some of the acting is understandably flat. And not all the jokes are funny or original; Swingers already referenced House of Pain as a term of disparagement and Annie Hall had a similar cocaine mishap. But what makes Boys and Girls Guide distinctive is that it actually works as a functioning guide, sort of like Vice’s “Dos and Donts” acted out on screen, with advice that really could prevent some bad memories from ever happening.

www.guidetogettingdown.com

Author rating: 6/10