What do you get when you blend pretentious movie-making with the values of an arthouse theater, add a dash of rich people and smother with a porn star as the lead? If you ask me, you get some excrement covered in blood and semen. If you ask Steven Soderbergh, apparently, you get "The Girlfriend Experience," proudly continuing Soderbergh's legacy of occasionally dropping all the cocaine and hookers associated with the money generated by the Oceans series. The last time Mr. Soderbergh left the drugs and whores on the couch, he made "Bubble," an awkward little film about an awkward little murder and some awkward little people.
This time around, "The Girlfriend Experience" ditches any veneer of formal film making. Gone are properly lighted sets, numerous cameramen and a semblance of a coherent story. Instead, we get the lovely Ms. Sasha Gray, up and coming porn star extraordinaire, well known for... well use your imagination on screen. Wow, it's all starting to make sense now. She offered her "services" to Soderbergh a few times to convince him to give her the lead role in "The Girlfriend Experience."
That's not to suggest the acting is horrible. Rather, Gray is quite convincing in her role. It's just that the story is so incoherent and boring that it falls flat. Christ, what is the world coming to? When a movie about nuns is more captivating than a story about hookers in New York, you know we have a problem.
The best way to describe "The Girlfriend Experience" is not what distributor Magnolia Pictures decided to label the film. "The Girlfriend Experience" isn't a comedy, by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it's more like a time capsule. Buried deep in the ankle-high flow of crappy independent films, to be uncovered years later by snotty people at a wine party, who'll chuckle at the "quaint" reminder of 2008 Soderbergh gave them.
Recommended for: Aspiring porn stars, hookers, drunken film directors
Not recommended for: People who earn less than $1,000,000 a year
Back Inside is a column written by The Raconteur and eatYourOats, discussing the quality of movies and television shows now in theaters or on your television.
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