A candid but ultimately frustrating documentary look at the modern-day experience of escorts in the United States, American Courtesans both benefits and, later, suffers mightily from its informal, conversational style, centered as it is around the digressive recollections and asides of executive producer/interviewer Kristen DiAngelo, herself a former prostitute still active in the sex industry. Heartbreak and contented curiosity abound in this subcultural curio, but with no sense of flow that might lend it a honest recommendation.

American Courtesans takes as its interview subjects a spectrum of sex workers, some of whom are previously personally known to DiAngelo and some of whom are not. There’s an escort who also shoots adult movies; a former real estate agent who now offers up the “girlfriend experience” (plus some bondage, if needed); a woman who talks about her past as a sex caregiver (think The Sessions); and a variety of prostitutes whose experiences range from streetwalking and brothels to more discreet bookings. The stories are often shocking (one woman was working in a whorehouse as a 14-year-old) and sometimes bizarre in their illuminations of wounded logic (a mother turning to prostitution instead of going on welfare, to provide for her son).

Unfortunately, American Courtesans doesn’t have a grounded point-of-view or sense of streamlined purpose; it lurches to and fro, alighting on anecdotes and settling for garish shock when a more poignant knockout punch is easily within its reach. The chief culprit is director James Johnson, who oversees an extraordinarily muddled and misguided technical package; the film is arbitrarily edited, in a fashion that repeatedly undercuts otherwise significantly emotional reminiscences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Centex Enterprises, unrated, 86 minutes)

A Transporter-type programmer of moderate if ever-diminishing intrigue, Guido tells the tale of an Iraqi immigrant limousine driver and “fixer” who gets mixed up in an illicit deal gone wrong, and then has to drive both a corpse and his terminally ill landlady across the country. Scripted by and starring Alki David, the film benefits from an above-average supporting cast of recognizable faces, but ultimately offers up no fresh or compelling spin on a fairly standard package of wayward hitman/lowlife clichés.



Bad things always seem to happen at the New Jersey docks, and the first act of Guido evidences no exception. After he’s tasked by his boss (Gary Busey) with overseeing the illegally curated arrival of what turns out to be a container full of sex slaves, the gun-toting title character (David, above right) is attacked and lays waste to a bunch of the offending participants (including Ron Jeremy).

The now-dead Albanian mafioso with whom he arrived, however, swallowed an important cell phone memory chip, which means various scumbags (including Billy Zane) and federal agents (including Armand Assante) are on Guido’s tail as he drives west to Los Angeles, to deliver the body to some other thugs. Also along for the ride is Maria (the late Lupe Ontiveros), Guido’s sickly but moralizing Mexican-American landlady.

David, who acted with Jason Statham in The Bank Job, appropriates some of his erstwhile costar’s sullen, tough-guy mannerisms. Apart from a wan explanation for his name, however, David doesn’t delve into Guido’s immigrant backstory with any measurable depth, leaving an enormous reservoir of character-deepening intrigue untapped. This doesn’t matter as much early on, when Guido is coasting along on the strength of its somewhat off-center and contrasting characters. As it moves into its second and third acts, though, the film’s innate lack of ideas comes to the surface. Fisticuffs and car chases ensue, along with yawns.

Cinematographer Ted Caloroso and composer Jim Lang deliver solid budget work, but director Colin Campbell does little to distinguish himself by way of action framing. It doesn’t help much that some of the conceits he’s handed are outlandish; say, Guido giving chase after his stolen limo on bicycle, then roof-surfing and punching his way back inside, all while Maria still sleeps in the backseat. This puts Guido in the awkward position of being too over-the-top to be convincing and yet not wild and eccentric enough to qualify as a testosteronized action romp. (FilmOn.com/O’Connell’s Limo Service LLC, R, 90 minutes)

Summoning up unnerving visions of an inevitable American remake starring Josh Duhamel or some similar Haircut, lukewarm French comedic trifle The Stroller Strategy, which is about a guy who bumbles his way into temporary guardianship of a baby and uses it to try to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend, indulges in hoary gender clichés in lieu of interesting characterizations. Directed by Clément Michel, the Paris-set film tracks along the same lines as Life As We Know It, What To Expect When You’re Expecting or the French source material for what in America later would become Three Men and a Baby (minus two guys, of course), but in a manner that hopelessly conflates amiability and ambiguity, making for a shrug-inducing experience. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Rialto Premieres, unrated, 90 minutes)

A snappy, expressive visual style and superlative lead performances power 23-year-old writer-director Xavier Dolan’s audacious, melodramatic French-Canadian import Laurence Anyways, about a man in a committed relationship who decides to undergo transgender reassignment. Executive produced by Gus Van Sant, the film unfolds on an expansive canvas that will immeasurably deepen its emotional richness for those with whom it most strongly resonates, but only to serve to highlight the problem of its obsessive self-regard for those who view it as blissed-out and gorgeously designed yet at its core indulgent arthouse wankery.

The title character of Laurence Anyways (Melvil Poupaud), a 35-year-old author, poet and teacher, has an intense, us-versus-the-world-type relationship with his fiancée Frédérique (Suzanne Clément, quite good), or Fred for short. But he has a secret, too: he’s always felt trapped and phony in his masculine form. He decides, then, to become a woman, and goes about breaking the news separately to Fred and his mom Julienne (Nathalie Baye). At first Fred’s instinct is to break things off with Laurence, but then she decides she loves him enough to stick it out, telling Laurence, “The moment I met you, I knew I was in for something extraordinary.” The film then charts their on-and-off relationship over the course of the ensuing, pop song-annotated decade, from the 1980s into the 1990s.

With its moments of intense subjectivity, and music frequently at odds with the characteristically heavy and dour nature of its subject matter, flashes of Laurence Anyways evocatively capture the fitful and woozy feelings of both deep inner turmoil and contentment, which much surely encompass feelings of gender identity disorder as well. Counterbalanced by some touching, quiet ruminative moments, scenes like these feel different and special, and hint at a work that can more readily surmount its proudly worn precociousness.

But its interview framing device feels arbitrary, and weighs the movie down. Other bits, like Laurence’s knee-jerk instinct to initially fib to Fred about wearing women’s clothes after just coming clean about his disorder, come across as false. The broader problem, however, is that there’s not any editorial rigor applied to the underdeveloped plotting — which is bloated, no matter the years Laurence Anyways ticks off.

Wunderkind Dolan (I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats), who helped design many of the costumes for both Laurence and Fred, has a nice eye for florid composition, and indulges a few moments of cathartic outburst and break. But while Poupaud and Clément evince a great chemistry, sometimes the movie’s self-consciously intense, handheld camerawork skirts dangerously close to parody. Mostly, though, it just evidences a hoarder’s bond to moments of extravagantly photographed feeling — no matter that it’s often the same feelings being communicated, over and over. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Laurence Anyways opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall and Downtown Independent. (Breaking Glass Pictures, unrated, 161 minutes)

Themes of cultural identity and disunity figure prominently into the work of director Rachid Bouchareb, including 2006’s Days of Glory and 2011’s Outside the Law, both of which were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Academy Awards. Bouchareb’s English language debut, Just Like a Woman, however, is a phony female fantasy — a minor chord variation on Thelma & Louise with none of that film’s panache, verve or insight. Instead tone-deaf and at times downright insufferable, this road trip flick in which bellydancing holds the key to feminine enlightenment most notably begs the question of just how long into its 90-minute running time it can go before someone inevitably says, “Just feel the music and let your body decide — it’s all about sensuality.”



Recently axed Chicago secretary Marilyn (Sienna Miller) has a loutish, philandering husband (Tim Guinee) straight out of Central Casting, so it takes but a slight nudge to get her to follow the advice of her evening bellydancing class instructor and light out for Santa Fe, where, you know, there are those open auditions coming up for that great traveling bellydancing company. Egyptian-American Mona (Golshifteh Farahani, above left), meanwhile, lives with her shopkeeper husband Mourad (Roschdy Zem) and bitch mother-in-law (Chafia Boudraa). Marilyn and Mona are initially little more than casual acquaintances (the former stops in occasionally for soda and cigarettes), but after a domestic accident leaves Mona questioning her future with Mourad, the two women escape their unhappy marriages and hit the open the road. There they, like, learn about friendship and stuff — by way of racists at RV parks and creepy club owners who book same-night, traveling freelance bellydancers.

Thrice-nominated for Oscars, Bouchareb conceived of the story for Just Like a Woman himself, but pulled in Joëlle Touma and Marion Doussot to collaborate on the screenplay, presumably in an effort to give it some sort of estrogenized bona fides. The tack does not work, alas. Bellydancing specifics aside, the lame, wearingly familiar plotting feels like it was assembled from the aforementioned Thelma & Louise, pamphlets from a women’s shelter and a very stupid and condescending episode of Law & Order, centering around an ethnic minority community. Most damningly of all, though, the film doesn’t allow for a meaningful exploration of a deepening, substantive female friendship. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cohen Media Group, R, 90 minutes)