• “The Road” takes desolate journey from page to screen. [Wired]
• Andrew O’Hehir talks “Bad Lieutenant” with Werner Herzog. [Beyond the Multiplex]
• Anne Thompson says “Avatar” could debut at AICN’s Butt-Numb-A-Thon, of all places. [Thompson on Hollywood]
I absolutely love this. It would appear that porn star Sasha Grey and highbrow film critic Glenn Kenny have more in common than just their mutual appearances in Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience.” As this Rotten Tomatoes interview proves, Grey’s own cinematic taste is discerning, to say the least.
Asked to name her five favorite films, she rattles off a decidedly impressive — not to mention catholic — array of titles: Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek,” Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl,” John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under the Influence,” John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou.”
The latter auteur is apparently something of an inspiration; Grey almost adopted the name of Godard muse Anna Karina as her stage moniker. Who knew? Here’s Grey on “Pierrot le Fou”:
To me, it’s just a very romantic story. It’s the ultimate, “let’s just drop everything and run away together” movie; the way the story was told was so unique. There’s one scene in particular where Anna Karina is on the beach, and she rolls over and she just says, “F— me.” To put that in a film in that time period — you just didn’t expect that to come out of her mouth. It’s titillating, I guess you could say.
Interesting to hear that Grey has a very different idea of what is “titillating” onscreen than what she actually practices. The lady continues to surprise.
• AFI launches its own YouTube channel. [YouTube]
• Robin Sanders reports on the Stephen Frears event from Cannes. [indieWIRE]
• The wars continue: Patrick Goldstein lays into Peter Bart (and Variety) once again for being soft on the industry. [The Big Picture]
• Lionsgate launches an impressive new website for festival Sensation “Precious.” [WeAreAllPrecious.com]
• Chris Lee talks to “The Girlfriend Experience” star Sasha Grey. [Los Angeles Times]
• Kim Voynar, meanwhile, dissects Grey’s character and wonders whether the film objectifies women. [Movie City News]
• The publicity floodgates open for “Terminator Salvation,” starting with Irina Aleksander’s interview with the film’s rookie producers. [New York Daily News]
• Todd Gilchrist, meanwhile, corners director McG. [Cinematical]
• And finally, headline of the day, from John Anderson’s review of the film: “Hasta La Levity, Baby.” [Washington Post]
• Aha, headline of the day #2: “Tarantino ‘Basterd’-izes Cannes. Such sweet truth. [USA Today]
• In the wake of the new “Nine” trailer, Ryan Adams takes a look at the story’s awards ancestry. [Awards Daily]
• Helen O’Hara on the trouble with romantic comedies and how to fix them. Screw it, I kind of want to see “The Proposal.” [Empire]
• Andrew O’Hehir on why the original “Star Trek” series still matters. [Beyond the Multiplex]
• Linda Milazzo takes a mean-spirited cheap shot at “The Soloist.” [The Huffington Post]
• Lauren Wissot talks to “Girlfriend Experience” star Sasha Grey. [Spout Blog]
• George Johnson wonders why a 200-year-old conspiracy theory still haunts the Vatican. [Slate]
• David Thomson remembers the great James Mason, who would have been 100 today. [The Guardian]
• Nat Rogers: “Nine reasons I must see ‘Nine’ NOW.” [The Film Experience]
• Gill Pringle chats with Dustin Hoffman about acting in love stories. [The Independent]
• Alex Billington takes a few snaps of upcoming release poster artwork in Cannes (including “Shutter Island” and “A Christmas Carol”), then, the web being what it is, he slaps his watermark all over them. [First Showing]
• Kevin Costner keeps the western’s light flickering with an upcoming A&E mini-series. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• The top 10 movie misquotes of all time. [The Guardian]
• Vaneta Rogers consolidates the numerous “Green Lantern” rumors flying around town. Please, God, don’t fuck it up. [Newsarama]
• Speaking of rumors, Drew McWeeny recounts the crash and burn of one such, this one concerning the potential casting of Christian Bale in Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter of Mars.” [Motion/Captured]
• Roger Ebert expresses concern over the use of 3D technology in “Up,” specifically citing the potential for diminishing “brightness and delicate shadings of the color palate.” [Chicago Sun-Times]
• Anthony Breznican previews the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. [USA Today]
• Candace Jackson talks “The Girlfriend Experience” with director Steven Soderbergh and star Sasha Grey. [Wall Street Journal]
• William Goss remembers 1998: the movie summer that was. [Cinematical]
• Twitter’s potential effect on the unstable world of film criticism gets some more ink. [The Wrap]
(Somehow this post disappeared earlier. No idea why. Apologies.)
• Mother’s Day is coming, so here’s a list of the 40 (yes, 40) best movie moms. [Premiere]
• Has “Wolverine” skewered the intelligent superhero movies? [The Guardian]
• With Cannes around the corner, Tim Robey spotlights the best Palme d’Or winners of all time. [Daily Telegraph]
• Stu VanAirsDale stands up for Sony Classics honchos Michael Barker and Tom Bernard against the jolly mean giant, Nikki Fikke. [Movieline]
• Screenwriter Larry Gross attempts to take yours truly to task on a passing comment that obviously had more behind it by spewing assumption after assumption with verbiage that would bring Bill Strunk to tears. [The Hot Blog]
• Peter Bart writes up former CBS programming head Mike Dann’s new memoir. [Peter Bart]
• Steven Zeitchik presents the MTV Movie Awards as an Oscar cautionary tale: when populism runs rampant. [Risky Biz Blog]
• Back to business. Sasha Grey to follow up “The Girlfriend Experience” with “This Ain’t Star Trek XXX.” [/film]
• Erica Abeel chats up Carlos Cuaron on his latest work. [indieWIRE]
The Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey offers an interesting piece today about screen acting, and the narrow criteria by which many of us judge it. He is writing principally in response to a recently released British film, “Helen,” a rigidly stylised meta-film in which actors play actors participating in a police reconstruction, which has attracted divisive reviews for the deliberately stilted performances of its cast.
Complaining that many audiences place too much stock in “realism” in acting — using the deification of intensely studied, precise performers likes of Meryl Streep (“a walking manual on acting”) as an example — Gilbey argues the following:
David Mamet writes that “We confuse ‘I like it’ with ‘It is very realistic.’ If we like it we say, ‘Yes, that’s very true.’” So truth becomes our alibi, our defence for that which pleases us.
Given our myriad ideas of truth, it is no wonder we turn to the awards ceremonies to clarify and ratify. But while Sean Penn, Philip Seymour Hoffman or Meryl Streep win prizes, and their acting may feel true or right, it is detrimental to the craft to hold up as ideal only those performances that work as audition pieces, or as 30-second excerpts on Oscar night. The actors in Bresson’s Mouchette or Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus are but one component of those films’ defining philosophy and meaning; removed from that context, their performances have no meaning.
Steven Soderbergh really gets back to what he’s good at in “The Girlfriend Experience,” a look at five days in the life of Chelsea, an upscale Manhattan escort (adult film star Sasha Grey, in her mainstream debut).
The film is intimate (no pun intended) but also keeps the audience at arm’s length, forcing a voyeuristic quality to the goings-on. Soderbergh employs long takes throughout, allowing his characters to steadily reveal their intentions, desires and simple thought processes. But what he ultimately conveys is a portrait of some alien being, seemingly out of touch with all human feeling and emotion.
Perhaps this is Grey’s downfall as an actress (since Soderbergh goes to great lengths to establish her as a thoughtful person), or perhaps it is the filmmaker’s point. Whatever the case, “The Girlfriend Experience” represents Soderbergh at his most compelling, asking questions with his work behind the camera, probing the reality of relationships and bringing his audience along on a journey that ultimately gives no answers, offers no revelations and abruptly concludes after a brisk 77 minutes. It doesn’t work completely but it is a preferable road to the “Ocean’s” series for the filmmaker to be on, of that we can be sure.
Steven Soderbergh is one of the intrepid titans of the day-and-date release system, causing the film purists to remain up in arms here and there. His thriller “Bubble” opened simultaneously in theaters and on the cable/satellite TV network HDNet Movies just over three years ago. But he’s trying something a little different this year.
“The Girlfriend Experience” lands tonight on Video On Demand networks across the country, more than three weeks before its May 22 theatrical release. The film is already available at Amazon’s On Demand service as a “pre-theatrical rental.” You can stream the film or download it to your PC for $9.99. Downloads to Macs aren’t currently available (sacrilege!). At a brisk 77 minutes, it’s not a bad way to see the film.
Since the world portrayed in the film is very real and, with the controversy surrounding former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, quite current, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a smart piece out there featuring the assessments, even anonymously, of people with…experience, shall we say. Nothing yet.
The film features adult film star Sasha Grey in her first mainstream appearance. Reviews will probably land, by and large, when the theatrical release hits but I’ll probably have something up later this evening (no pun intended).
Here’s the trailer:
Until I actually get to see it, I have absolutely no idea what to make of Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” — which, if you haven’t heard yet, is a breakthrough vehicle for multi-award-winning ingenue Sasha Grey. Soderbergh’s lo-fi experiments work for me approximately half the time, so I’ll just have to see which side of the fence this one lands on.
But however the film turns out for me, there’s no denying that this is an absolutely first-rate poster, from the graphic concept to the typography to that killer tagline. Great work all round.
[Courtesy: Vulture]