jadavix Here in Australia there is an extraordinary statistic which tells us that the majority of students at the biggest university in the country work in the sex industry. You see, study is expensive. Who wants to slave away at McDonald's for hours after class to buy books and pay off student loans when you can make ten times that much for a fraction of the time spent? There is obviously an interesting movie to be made here. This is not that movie. I knew a girl who paid her way through law school by working as an escort. Any one of her stories about "clients" would be more interesting than this.As the title implies, Chelsea/Christine, the main character, is an escort who also goes out on dates with her clients. She also meets regularly with a journalist who is apparently writing an article about her. This is funny, because as either Christine or Chelsea, the prostitute alter ego, this woman doesn't say a single interesting thing throughout the entire movie. The only interesting characters are the "clients", and yet they're paying Chelsea for her time, not just for sex.It is tempting to critique Sasha Grey's performance, but the script doesn't give her much to do right, let alone wrong. It's a one note character, and a one note performance."The Girlfriend Experience" also refrains from making any kind of statement about this strange, shocking situation that so many students are in now. It's just Chelsea visiting different men.It has occurred to me that the repetition of these scenes makes it deliberately confusing as to who the men are. At first, you assume they are all clients Chelsea is servicing. Then, you realise that Chelsea is Christine with some, one is a boyfriend, the other is a journalist interviewing her. Is the point that for someone in Christine's situation, men are interchangeable, and it is hard to tell clients from spouses? This is not the way any of the real-life sex workers I have heard from describe their work and private lives, but hey, I'll take meaning where I can get it.

subxerogravity If I had saw this movie when it first came out in 2009, I may think differently about it. It's interesting to me how outdated the movie feels. The story centers around a high price escort doing her job just after the finical crisis of 2007 and the 2008 election. The constant mentioning of these two events makes the conversations feel forced and not natural, which is strange considering the film came out a year after these events, events that we are still going through as I write this. The movie is cluttered and makes no sense. The editing style makes you need to watch it more than once to understand what is going on (I myself watched it twice). The only problem is, I did not find it entertaining enough to even sit through it once.Sasha Grey is not all she's cracked up to be. I've seen pron stars in mainstream movies act better. I've seen her act better in mainstream movies. I guess I should not be so harsh since this was her first mainstream event. It may have been a better idea if Soderbergh at least got better actors for his supporting cast, instead of the dry uninteresting folks that make up this one. A lot of the movie is just conversations and it looks like the actors were picked because of their grasp of the conversation topic, which was about money, rather than their capability to make this topic interesting to someone uninterested in the topic.The movie does feel like a beta test for what would become a string of movies Soderbergh would end up doing after this with the same style to it. Unless your that die hard of a Soderbergh fan I would watch every movie that came after the Girlfriend Experience instead.

Jackson Booth-Millard I first saw the well-known former XXX hardcore porn star in the low budget terrible horror film Smash Cut, and this film from director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brocjovich, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven) sounded like her kind of territory, and a return to the director's Sex, Lies, and Videotape beginnings. Basically, set during the time of the 2008 Presidential Election, between Barack Obama and John McCain, in the city of Manhattan, the story centres around the life of high class call girl and escort Chelsea, real name Christine (Sasha Grey), and the many challenges she faces between work and her personal life. Chelsea charges $2,000 an hour for all clients from all backgrounds, and for that she offers the "girlfriend experience" (GFE), where she acts like a girlfriend towards her clients, dressing for what they have in mind, whether it is dinner and a movie, or a hotel meeting, she will listen to their conversations, and with mostly business consumed clients they will mostly talk about work and finances, and of course having sex with them. The story sees five non-consecutive days of her life, she is finding recently that she is not seeing as many clients and wanting to make more money, so she arranges to meet a sleazy Interviewer (Mark Jacobson) who has met many other escorts to give them a review of an experience with them, most getting positive description and boosting their profiles to get more clients, but he says he should get a free session. She also has a boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), who works as a personal trainer and is aware of what she does for a living, but she has promised him she will never go with a client longer than a single night, so she is going against her rule with this suggestion of spending a weekend or longer with the interviewer, but she insists it is for the sake of making more money. Chelsea is devastated in the time we see that she loses one or two clients who have families and feel great guilt wanting to have sex with her, the interviewer gives her a lacklustre review complaining that despite looking beautiful she does not perform all sexual acts as good as other women he has been with, and not getting personal with clients, or talking about what she has been doing with her boyfriend, the only people she can open up to her female friends and one man at a bar who just wants to talk. Also starring Philip Eytan as Phillip, Glenn Kenny as The Erotic Connoisseur, T. Colby Trane as Waiter, Peter Zizzo as Zizzo, Ron Stein as Vegas Buddy #1, David Levien as David, Alan Milstein as Pete, Dennis Shields as Dennis, Marshall Gilman as Vegas Buddy #2 and Michael Roberts as Vegas Buddy #3. I had seen a few of the hardcore videos of Grey before this, so it was certainly interesting to see her play the prostitute character well enough that you can empathise with her to some extent, she is pretty much the only thing you can watch about this film, because many of the clients along the way blend into each other and seem too similar, besides of course the filthy minded interviewer who just exploits and takes advantage of her, the sexual content is not that frequent but is I suppose necessary, there is not enough focus on an engaging story, and it only gets more interesting in the last few scenes when the lead character's conscience and personal life comes into play, so overall it is an alright enough but lukewarm drama. Okay!

HuntinPeck80 The Girlfriend Experience is almost fascinatingly awful. Not a case of 'so bad it's good', but one to chew over, to list just how many different shades of empty it featured. And then forget it forever, or until you enrol for BA Media, Social Networks and Comms at the University of Inanity.At one and the same moment, it is and is not about the financial meltdown, is and is not about commerce, about the Big Apple. It's definitely not about the 'big O'. As far as I could see, desire was not one of the themes being explored. Curious omission, wouldn't you agree.The director and his 'breakthrough' star seem determined to carry her as far from her hardcore persona as they can; in short, by making her behaviour seem fairly normal, or more accurately, how might your everyday young woman with no acting experience respond to the task of playing the role of an escort? This is why I referred to 'assisted reality': reality being the context for banal dialogue. Tedious conversation, of which this film is bursting.Sasha Grey, unsurprisingly, gives Chelsea no personality, no inner life. She listens to rich men monotone about money and their woes, her eyes glazed over, and later we hear her dispassionately relate what went on once they got back to the bedroom. Don't expect any kinky scenes and don't look forward to the sort of demented energy she habitually put into her xxx scenes. Her character, Chelsea, is vapid and wholly unbelievable as a super high class hooker, much less as someone's actual girlfriend. The man playing her boyfriend puts more energy into his performance but it is still devoid of interest.The trouble is, this isn't a documentary, an analysis of venality or the greed is good culture, but nor is it a study of eroticism or desire. So when Chelsea speaks highly of her own skills as a seductress, we can't relate to it; when an unsatisfied client rubbishes her on the web, it's all too true.To sum up, the visual style is drab and wearying, the outbursts of music jarring and irrelevant. Nobody had their heart in this project. The film's emptiness would seem to reflect the emptiness of Sasha Grey in real life, often described as glacially detached, but written up as brainy and sophisticated by idiots basing their opinion solely on what goes on her 'likes' list.Maybe it says something about the world we've moved into. Hasn't Soderbergh retired now?