The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

If you have ever wondered what the life of a high-class Manhattan call girl is like, then The Girlfriend Experience might be just up your alley. Steven Soderbergh’s film puts you in the shoes of a two-thousand dollar an hour prostitute named Chelsea, who is played by actress Sasha Grey, a famous porn star. The film follows Chelsea through five days of work, as she visits many of her wealthy clientele during the October of 2008, and uses a loosely mixed up narrative structure to tell its story. The film claims to be “experimental” but I didn’t find it too difficult to follow or have it use too many self indulgent techniques that the term “experimental” seemed to indicate.

The film does a great job at focuses on the trials and tribulations of the call girl profession. Chelsea has to be there for all her clients. Not simply physically but also emotionally and intellectually. As the film progresses we see that Chelsea finds things lacking in her own life and relationship with her personal trainer boyfriend. The difficulty of maintainin a long term relationship with a prostitute is explored quite well and provides most of the conflict in the film as Chelsea contemplates breaking up with her boyfriend.

The Girlfriend Experience is extremely low budget, and aside from a couple of the main characters, it uses mainly inexperienced amateur actors in many of the roles. This makes some of the acting seem a bit weak in some scenes as the actors are clearly improvising a lot of their lines and seem almost overacting a bit to appear casual. It works very well in other scenes like when Chelsea is interrupted by one of her johns on a date with her boyfriend and awkwardness ensues. I thought the casting of a porn star in the lead role was a little too obvious of a choice, but Shasa Grey worked well in this role. She was very believable and seemed to be a bit of an airhead but was very vulnerable too.

One of my favorite aspects of The Girlfriend Experience is the constant references to the economy and the 2008 presidential election that are made throughout the film. From Wall Street big shots betting on how many electoral votes Obama will take, to a Hassidic Jew client urging Chelsea to vote for McCain in order to save the state of Israel, these exchanges really give the movie a sense of time and place, and will make the movie even more enjoyable to watch ten or twenty years in the future.

The Girlfriend Experience doesn’t really go anywhere, attempt to tackle anything really big, try something different. It is a slow, quiet movie, that is entertaining enough while it lasts but you won’t be thinking about it much after it finishes. Much like a real prostitute.

7/10

Troll 2 (1990)

Troll 2 is what happens when you try to set out to make a silly horror comedy without any good jokes or a cast that lacks any degree of comedic timing or talent on a shoestring budget. You get a movie that does end up being humorous, but for all the wrong reasons.

First, viewers should know that Troll 2 engages in a deceptive bit of false advertising. If you are thinking that a movie called Troll 2 should feature a Troll or maybe two Trolls, then you will be in for a grave disappointment. Because I will let you know up front that Troll 2 is about Goblins. Yes, that is right... Goblins. I have no idea why Troll 2 features Goblins, but I can only imagine that the script for this movie was simply tacked onto this project when the studio decided to make a sequel, and nobody either bothered or cared enough to make the changes necessary.

Troll 2 begins as an innocent young family engages in a house switching program with a Amish family in the rural town of Nilbog. When they arrive at the community they soon discover that things are not normal in this community thanks in part to their psychic son Joshua. Joshua has a completely inexplicable ability to communicate with his dead grandpa Seth, who for some reason can appear to him through mirrors and warns Joshua that his family must leave the town of Nilbog as soon as possible.

Apparently Goblins have taken control of the small city and brainwashed its denizens by using a strange green vegetable slime implanted in their food. Joshua tries to warn his family of the Goblin danger by hilariously peeing on his families food before they can become poisoned. Of course, his family refuses to believe him and his claims about Goblins and contact with grandpa Seth. Most of the middle portion of the film consists of completely random scenes as the Waits family blindly stumbles into the goblins clutches while Joshua tries to warn them. Eventually, Joshua figures out that Nilbog is actually Goblin spelled backwards, but by then his family has been captured by goblins.

Troll 2 is simply a mess from start to finish. You can tell that director director Claudio Fargasso was trying to create a clever, but tense and creepy film somewhere along the line of a cross between Gremlins and the Ghoulies, but you can tell that the cast of this film is made almost completely of amateur actors, and the script feels almost unfinished as there is no internal logic to the film at all. Sometimes Granpa Seth can appear to Joshua and other times he can't. It is also never very clear what the Goblins goal is other than being Goblins and enslaving this family.

Which reminds me, the goblins and special effects for this movie look like complete shit. The goblins themselves are actually nothing more than guys in pajamas and cheap Halloween masks.

Troll 2 has become legendary for how bad it is, so keep this in mind when you are watching this and you might have a good time.

1/10

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Hello, just checking in to wish everyone a happy holiday for december. Expect some new updates and reviews soon.

How can the back crawl?