The Girlfriend Experience

[©brad]

Good interview here with Soderbergh. Here's a particularly funny bit:

"[Soderbergh] rejects the idea that with Grey he has resorted to stunt casting, insisting that the pornification of mainstream culture is so complete that it hardly matters.

For example? He confesses to being quite the consumer. In fact, he says, he has been known to storm out of hotels if they don't offer pay-per-view porn. "I was in a hotel in Anaheim about five years ago, and after checking in I literally went down to the front desk and said, 'I don't understand, there's no pay-per-view porn!' I called my producer and said, 'I can't take this, I'm checking out'. And I went to the hotel across the road. I think it should be in the bill of rights — when you're travelling, access to pornography should be the number three thing on the list after clean towels and 24-hour room service." He rolls his eyes upwards, to indicate the hotel rooms above, and sighs, "They don't have it here!"

[Alexandro]

I liked it. The idea of presenting this society in which everything is a business transaction sounds cliche until you actually see it and realize this horrible aspect of our culture is never exposed in movies in such a direct way. If Soderbergh would take a little more time to make these films he might have gone fully into this aspect of the story with more refinement and we could be talking about some sort of parallel between this and something like L'Eclisse, a film where the single most emotional scene takes place in a stock broker's hysteria. However, the film was quickly planned and made, and the result is good, although as usual wwith Soderbergh, it left me feeling a little cold. The only filmof his that has had any kind of true emotional impact on me is Che.

Sasha and the rest of the cast are wonderful, and I do hope she would get more jobs like this from time to time, because she seems smart enough to pull of some great performances with the right people (she certainly seems smarter than A LOT of the supposedly serious actress out there).