| − | La Perla underwear,beijing escort service, check. Michael Kors black cocktail dress, check. Dinner at Nobu, check. A Manhattan high-end escort, check. Steven Soderbergh's latest quasi-experimental film, "The Girlfriend Experience" has all the signal and surface trappings of what would seem a sexy, wise, and insightful movie about the banality and vapidness of Shrub period noticeable consumption, exactly what we now call the "bubble culture."<br><br>After simply marking the 20th anniversary of Soderbergh's win of the Palme d'Or at Cannes for "sex, lies, and videotape" (1989), "The Girlfriend Experience" as soon as again showcases the essential Soderbergh documentary-style realism, where truth TV intersects with the enforced moral and allegorical story of documentary. Shot from long and medium angles, the dialogue of the movie's characters is distant, aloof, flat-- perhaps similar to the commodification of culture and the transactional nature of periodic human relationships that is on full and vital display in "The Girlfriend Experience."<br><br><img src="/EmailImages/71306.jpg" width="400"><br><br>Shot in mid-October 2008 prior to the US presidential election, the film informs the story of Chelsea, a Manhattan high-end escort and her live-in boyfriend Chris, an individual fitness instructor. Both Chelsea (depicted by Sacramento local and adult film starlet Sasha Grey) and Chris (Chris Santos) accommodate the newly minted however now troubled transactional bourgeoisie of the bubble culture: financiers, movie and home entertainment execs, investment lenders, and business owners. Chelsea provides a suite of services besides the exchange of sex for cash: she provides the eponymous "girlfriend experience"-- conversation (or what passes for discussion anyway) at Manhattan "hot spot" restaurants, a date to the documentary movie "Man on Wire", a listening ear to her clients' issues about their now flailing business enterprises and uncertainty about their financial future, and the requisite feigning of interest in one of her client's impassioned conversation of ESPN and "Rome is Burning." Chelsea, aware that her $2000 a night rate goes to best precarious, based on her young people, beauty, and attraction, looks for to re-brand herself to create and market her own boutique style of escort services. Itgoes to this point in the film that we are presented to Glenn-- an erotic services blog writer known to the escort world as the Erotic Lover-- who guarantees Chelsea a more profitable online search engine optimization (SEO) for her site and services and even more high end clients if he uploads a laudatory review of her "talent" on his website. There is a barter and exchange that takes place in between Glenn (played by movie customer Glenn Kenny-- the best acting performce in "TGE") and Chelsea, to the detriment of her escort service as he acidly writes that Chelsea's done aloofness, albeit seductively with her perky tits and doe-eyed temptation, has actually nevertheless left him "limp."<br><br>Provided Glenn is a sleavy predator but at least there's a sincerity to his transactional and perverse proclivities. And although I'm loathe to admit this (especially as a self-proclaimed feminist), I found his assessment of Chelsea to be spot-on. I would say that "Girlfriend Experience" is a film that limps along,suziewong escort, trying to and failing to showcase Chelsea as a modern geisha, relatively overlooking the art type and craft to being a geisha, a studied and seductive siren, to being a well known and sought-after courtesan like Veronica Franco (see the film "Dangerous Appeal"). In the final scene, Chelsea arrives by taxi, not automobile service, to a jewelry store, not a Michelin-rated dining establishment, to visit her customer Isaac. There is no illusion of the girlfriend experience right here, this is a mere skin trade exchange.<br><br>Although I can appreciate that Soderbergh tries to provide an enveloped and "actual time" view of our "bubble culture" through the five-day tale of Chelsea, his lens does not have both an insightful indictment let alone review of the superficiality of the reigning "transactional bourgeois culture"-- its corruption, its incendiary demise. Soderbergh presents this screen of commodity fetish in a neutralized (and risk I state neutered) style, somewhat unconcerned by its cultural effects. The dialogue,Hot Pants-beauties First Choice, as both Soderbergh and Grey have actually gone over in various interviews, was improvisational, freely based upon a movie script by the composing team of Brian Koppelman and David Levian. Improvised or not, it is performative, afflicted, and contrived-- particularly in scenes with Chris and his clients and regrettably with Chelsea and her clients too. There were a few glimmers of light in Sasha Grey's efficiency however insufficient to hold my interest. Seventeen mins into this 77 minute movie, I was already looking at my watch, yawning, indifferent. If you must, see this film on pay per view or await it be offered on DVD.<br><br>Inspect showtimes at the Crest Theatre's website.
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