OnDVD: Soderbergh’s ‘Girlfriend Experience’ too grey

Grey

Few low budget films in any genre have ever gotten the pre-release publicity given to Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (Magnolia), which will be released on DVD Tuesday. The main reason for all the attention was that this marked the "mainstream" film debut of Sasha Grey, a huge star on the adult film circuit and the personal selection of Soderbergh to be the focus of a production about call girls.

Grey played a $2,000 an hour female escort, who promised clients "the girlfriend experience." For the money she guaranteed men the identical intimacy and companionship they could get from a girl friend. Unfortunately Grey's own life in the film was vapid and empty, and she increasingly became unable to separate fantasy from reality in any situation.

Using hand-held cameras and crafting a very bare-bones scenario, Soderbergh treated The Girlfriend Experience like a quasi-documentary, inserting bits of political discussion about the upcoming election into the scenario to provide a contemporary flavor. Sadly, the main character proved unable to communicate any emotions beyond a bored expression and the dialog consisted of mundane, forgettable chatter.

Whether Grey was being directed to look and seem robotic or was simply unable to bring any degree of emotional variety or thematic edge to her performance was a heavily debated topic among the handful of critics who bothered to screen The Girlfriend Experience .

Still, it might prove an interesting subject for DVD viewers, if for nothing else than to catch the rudimentary cinematic technique and follow the light storyline Soderbergh utilizes.

At 78 minutes, it moved so quickly and shifted its focus so abruptly you never got any insight into Grey's character or feelings. Indeed, it doesn't even end so much as simply stop. As an experimental project, The Girlfriend Experience certainly possess an avant-garde sensibility. It just doesn't offer too many other things.

New release

Equally unorthodox in style, though better acted and presented, is Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes' Away We Go (Focus), which will also be released on DVD Tuesday. The film's biggest plus is the pairing of John Krasinski (The Office) and Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live) as a couple expecting their first child who try to decide where they want to live and begin their family.

The search takes them to Canada, Arizona and Florida among other places, and they also encounter some strange people and even wilder situations. Some of these are so absurd that it stretches credibility, even in a comedy-drama.

Krasinski and Rudolph were quite good, but their performances couldn't elevate a work that's not quite in the class of another Mendes comedy/drama American Beauty.

TV on DVD

One year after Patty Duke became the youngest Oscar winner in history (at that time) for her masterful portrayal of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker ABC decided to make her the focus of a half-hour comedy.

The Patty Duke Show featured her in a dual role, playing identical twin cousins Patty and Cathy Lane. Cathy was English, and her father worked for the New York newspaper where Patty's father served as managing editor. The stories weren't anything spectacular, but it did give Duke the opportunity to showcase her skills over the next three years.

This week The Patty Duke Show — The Complete First Season (Shout! Factory), a six-disc boxed set, puts all 36 episodes from the show's inaugural season back in circulation. There are also new interviews with the cast members, whose ranks include veteran actor William Schallert (still active in Hollywood in his '80s), and Duke, whose later memoirs openly discussed some of the problems she encountered with fame and success.

The series was filmed completely in black and white, and was among the first to extensively use split-screen technology. Most of the episodes are thematically simple and quite predictable, but they also highlight a much simpler, more innocent time in both America and television.