'The Girlfriend Experience' and 'Anvil! The Story of Anvil'

posted by Jett Loe

‘The Girlfriend Experience’ and ‘Anvil! The Story of Anvil’ both start at the Belcourt tomorrow – they’re not on a double bill, but they should be:

‘The Girlfriend Experience’ Showtimes

‘Anvil! The Story of Anvil’ Showtimes

Let’s start off with ‘The Girlfriend Experience’.  As Gareth and I have realised in the last few months documentaries are where it’s at. Hollywood Cinema has become so rote – so sclerotic in it’s plotting, pacing, casting and visualisation that a trip to the multiplex all but guarantees two plus hours of tedium tedium tedium.

Documentaries are far more exciting, engaging and entertaining – whether it’s ‘Voices from El-Sayed’, which examines the daily life of a deaf Bedouin community in the Negev desert, or the brittle and sweaty anxiety producing drama of a Barbershop Quartet competition in ‘American Harmony’ – documentaries are IT.

So what’s a ‘staged cinema’ director to do?

Shoot your fiction film like it’s a doc.

And so we have ‘The Girlfriend Experience’.  A quick, cheap, flat story of the U.S. financial meltdown and 2008 Presidential Election featuring non-actors playing shadows of themselves TGE is a good film.  A good film.  Meaning it’s about something – the filmmakers experiment – they riff – the improvise – they stumble towards somewhere – and maybe, like a good documentary, they started out without knowing where the film was going to take them.

So we have a real-life star of pornographic movies, Sasha Grey, playing an escort.  We have a real-life film critic, Glenn Kenny, playing a reviewer of erotic services.  And so on.  Reporters play reporters.  Steven Soderbergh, a fiction film maker, plays a documentarian.  And so on.

It’s real, it’s sad, it’ll make you think and you should see it.

It’ll also make you want to flee the city – at least New York.  The film – a 78 minute litany of all that’s wrong with capitalism – the corrosiveness of a world in which everything is for sale, (sex AND art, affection AND experience), is deeply dispiriting.  If I had to see it again I imagine it would force me to sell the house here in Nashville and move to the country – at least to a place far, far away – mentally at the very least – to place where humans could love honestly and without shame.

So all is for sale in ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ – in ‘Anvil! The Story of Anvil’ nobody’s buying.

It’s ‘real documentary’ – nobody is a playing a version of themselves – they’re past that.  They passed it a long time ago.

‘Anvil’ tells the tale of a ‘amost-made it/never was’ heavy metal band that keeps on trying for that big break – keeps on trying for decades. The band members have passion, love, commitment – everything that’s missing from the people seen in ‘Girlfriend’.  Whereas TGE will make you weep for us humans – ‘Anvil’ will make you cheer.  Even if you don’t make it – the trying is the thing – the love is the thing.  The love is the thing.

See ‘Anvil’ if you can – and get this – the band itself, in person, in the flesh – will be playing this Saturday at the Belcourt.  Go see the film, and go see them.   And love someone.

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(Photo above of ‘Anvil’ from the Studio Daily Blog)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 1:15 pm. It is filed under Belcourt Theatre, Blog, Documentaries, Drama, Jett Loe, Jett Loe Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.