Peereddi
I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.
Chirphymium
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
Micah Lloyd
Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
hall895
Director Steven Soderbergh calls The Girlfriend Experience an experimental film. Which is a convenient way of providing yourself an excuse when you end up making a terrible film. And make no mistake, this is a terrible film. Give Soderbergh no credit for his "experiment", for trying something different. The truth is he made a boring, monotonous, quite wretched film.Adult film actress Sasha Grey stars as a high-class escort. It doesn't take long to see that Grey should have stuck to that other type of film. She's no actress. Her performance is so lifeless that it sucks all the energy out of the film. Not that there was ever really going to be any energy to begin with. The story is not compelling at all and unfolds in non-linear fashion with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. The movie jumps all over the place, back and forth in time, and does so to no good effect. The way the story is told just makes a muddled mess of things. But even had it been told in a more straightforward fashion the story was never going to work. There just isn't enough story at all. Clocking in at a brief 77 minutes there's not enough story to even stretch this thing out to proper feature length. And even at 77 minutes the film seems interminable. It all leads up to a damp squib of an ending which is really no ending at all. There's no resolution. Not that there's much to resolve. An escort has some relationship issues with her boyfriend. And...that's about it. And there's not even very much to that storyline. And everything else is a complete waste of time. This is a very amateurish effort from everyone involved. The script is terrible. The cinematography is terrible. The acting is terrible, with Grey getting no help whatsoever from anybody else in the cast. The director really should be ashamed. As experiments go this is a total failure. As films go this is among the worst you'll ever see.
MBunge
To fairly judge The Girlfriend Experience, you have to ask a simple question. What would you think of this movie if it were the product of an unknown filmmaker instead of Steve Soderbergh? My reaction would have been "Wow. This guy's an amazing cinematographer but he doesn't have a bleepin' idea how to tell a story." This thing looks like a Ferrari and runs like a broken down Dodge Dart.Set in the end of 2008 with the financial crisis underway and a Presidential election looming, this non-linear tale bounces through the lives of a young prostitute (Sasha Grey) and the many men she slides around. An escort who offers what is called "the girlfriend experience" where she not only has sex with you but pretends to actually "be" with you for as long as you can afford, she juggles her many clients, a live-in-boyfriend, a journalist trying to pry into her heart and a guy who offers to boost her career in whoredom by giving her a good review on his website that caters to guys who like going to prostitutes.The film skips from moment to moment and back again, circling around the escort and her personal trainer boyfriend (Chris Santos) before settling on a big event. The escort meets a client and is so taken with him at first sight that she agrees to go away with him for the weekend, breaking her professional rules and the trust of her boyfriend. The anticipated getaway goes poorly and she goes back to boinking moderately unattractive dudes for cash.The Girlfriend Experience officially lasts only 77 minutes, but it feels twice that long. It is bereft of energy or momentum and sits on the screen like the slowly melting ice sculpture of a vagina. The script tells you no more about the life of an escort than would the average magazine article and for all the whining and moaning about the economy done by many of the characters here, it tells you less than nothing about the 2008 financial implosion.It certainly looks great, though to no apparent purpose. For example, there's a scene where the escort and her boyfriend are talking in a bar. They're out of focus in the foreground and then the boyfriend goes back to the bar where it's in focus and exchanges a few words with other people there. In shooting it that way, Soderbergh may have been trying to say something about the indistinct and undefined nature of the escort and her boyfriend…or he might have just been dickin' around. I have no idea which it is. There's a lot of stylish imagery here but none of it seems connected to a narrative or even a theme.As for Sasha Grey, while her career as a porn star may be based on her physical accessibility, she's mentally and emotionally impenetrable here. Again, that may be the effect Soderbergh was going for. That doesn't change the fact that looking at Grey is like looking at a porcelain gravy boat.I can only hope that Soderbergh got to "experience" Grey for himself, because otherwise this motion picture wasted the time of literally everyone who made it, just as it will waste the time of anyone who watches it.
jennifer anniston
15 minutes into the movie, I was bored out of my mind and decided to fast forward through the movie. If you watch it in 5x, you'll notice all they do is eat and drink and change wardrobes.The worst part about it was that there was no Sahsa Gray sex scenes. There should have been like 4 or 5, but there was none! I wanted to give it one star, but Sasha Grey is so pretty.Blah blah blah... I have to write 10 lines even though I only have 6 lines to say. What a stupid policy and a way to extract forced and constrained, thoughtless reviews like this one. What, do they want me to make up stories and lie about the quality of the audio as if I actually cared?
swooned
Why is it that with all these reviews, only tieman64 and his review 'Eyes Wide Shut ' on 13 June 2009 is the only guy to mention the hug Sasha gives the big fat guy in the end? How did all of you miss the last thing the interviewee asks is: what kind of guy would she give her heart to? It was this last guy that she hugged like a buddy. She sad: "Come here." like a friend.Why are so many of you looking for a soft-core porn flick? Would any graphic sex change the message of the film? He left it out to stop *$%#ers like you getting it for the wrong reason.It does show that she is lonely, that she is willing to give up any security for who she feels will be the one. OK, she blew it, but it wasn't her fault. There is no indication she is returning to her old boyfriend. He is playing the field just like the next guy. She's alone.Funnily enough, I was actually not to impressed until the last scene, when she hugged the big guy. That the dialog is improvised only shows how &^$%ed up the basic conversations are of the average American. Useless, meaningless drivel. Don't blame the director for that. It only adds to the alienation Sasha is dealing with. Anyway, tieman64. Good review, especially for mentioning the big fat Jewish guy at the end. Just goes to show almost the rest of you were watching the film for the wrong reason. Go get laid, and try to do it for free, OK?
