This Girl's Life (2003)

User Rating:

5.9/10   

Director:

Ash Baron-Cohen

Writer:

Ash Baron-Cohen (writer)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

"Slice of life" take on life of international porn celebrity, Moon, and her musings on modern life, love and loss.

Plot Keywords:

Friend | Porn Star | Attraction | Parkinsons Disease | Blind Date

Awards:

1 win

Cast

James Woods	...	Pops
Juliette Marquis	...	Moon
Kip Pardue	...	Kip
Tomas Arana	...	Aronson
Michael Rapaport	...	Terry
Rosario Dawson	...	Martine
Isaiah Washington	...	Shane
Ioan Gruffudd	...	Daniel
Cheyenne Silver	...	Cheyenne
Kam Heskin	...	Jessie
Alexi Yulish	...	Nick Hudson
Sean Douglas	...	Marco
Sherrie Rose	...	Nurse
Sung Hi Lee	...	Kobi
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Chase Bramlage	...	Jason
Maria Cina	...	Reporter
Ken Davitian
Peter Dobson
David Alan Graf	...	Cab Driver
Jimmy Jean-Louis	...	Action Jackson
Alexander Keith
Kelli King	...	Young Moon
Sangini Majmudar	...	Indian wife
Isley Nicole Melton	...	Friend
Joel Michaely	...	Jetson
Mac Miller
Jay Montalvo	...	Latino man
Kimberly Rowe
Bob Sattler	...	Police Officer
Graham Shiels	...	Skinhead
Katherine Taub	...	Receptionist
Natalie Taylor	...	Mal
Wendy Thompson	...	Skinny Girl

MPAA:

Rated R for strong sexuality including graphic dialogue, nudity, violence, language and brief drug use.

Runtime:

104 min | USA:101 min (cut version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Finland:K-15 | New Zealand:R18 | Canada:16+ (Quebec) | Canada:18 (Nova Scotia) | Canada:R (Manitoba/Ontario) | USA:R (edited version) | Singapore:R21 | Iceland:16 | South Korea:18 | Australia:R

Filming Locations:

Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Departure Entertainment

Quotes:

Moon: I'm not gonna wait until I die to find out if there is reincarnation. We can reincarnate while we live, right?

Movie Connections:

References "The Real World" (1992)

Soundtrack:

Picture Pervert

Better than it has a right to be.

After the success of the inexpensively made trade movie "Boogie Nights," one might expect a series of even cheaper and less skillful ripoffs. The usual trajectory for ripoffs would be more sex and less character.

I suppose in some ways, we wouldn't have "This Girl's Life" if we hadn't had "Boogie Nights," but this film is actually pretty good. If the earlier film was mostly an ensemble effort, this one depends on Juliette Marquis. We see things almost exclusively from her point of view. She's a porn star with a heart of gold and some brains. It sounds like a cliché, but she pulls it off okay. She's not exactly beautiful but she is sexy and exotic and has a nasal voice that sometimes drops into the lower register.

But Marquis gets surprisingly good support from such mainstream players as Rosario Dawson, and adequate support from Cheyenne Silver, a genuine star of sex films who has a fresh-faced attractiveness that suggests she grew up on a farm and fed on nothing but cream and ripe strawberries. Anyone who wants to see what she looks like all over can easily have his curiosity satisfied with a bit of effort.

James Woods is super as Pops, Marquis' father who is stricken with Parksinson's disease. He's a courageous actor, wandering around in public with what seems to be an enormous head and a shrunken flabby body. The only investment of ego on display is his talent.

If "Boogie Nights" showed us that the sex movie industry of the 1970s was like a family, "This Girl's Life" demonstrates that the family is not entirely functional these days. The head of the studio keeps carrying on paternally about how we are all one big -- incestuous -- family, but when he wants one of his girls to do something that she does not want to do, he prompts her to do a line of coke and shoves her roughly against a wall. Spare the rod and spoil the child, you know.

The director has Marquis talk directly to the camera on several occasions, as if this were a reality TV show. She shows us how a microvideocamera works, a "spy camera" like that used in police and FBI stings. And there are times when scenes appear as if shot with one of those tiny cameras, all fuzzy and with horizontal lines. Not sure what the point of that was. And I'm not sure what happens to Pop either. His case seems to be hanging in the air at the end when, after a violent encounter with a man whose life Marquis has just professionally put an end to, she takes off with her naive young monogamous lover.

I assume -- I HOPE -- that she finally got back to taking care of Pops, because his disorder is rather advanced and it would take him an hour to peel a banana.

In any case, the very amateurishness of some of the performances contributes to the documentary feel of the film, but it's a documentary that is emotionally charged.

A surprise, well worth watching.