Share
Women in Trouble Awkwardly Mixes Blue Material with Sob Stories
By Melissa Anderson
Tuesday, November 10th 2009 at 3:38pm
Details:
Directed by Sebastian Gutierrez
Screen Media Films
Opens November 13
With more references to vaginas than Our Bodies, Ourselves, Sebastian Gutierrez's Almodóvar-in-the-'80s accented comedy isn't quite the unequivocal embrace of pussy power it tries to be. Featuring a criss-crossing, virtually all-distaff cast—including Gutierrez's real-life girlfriend, Carla Gugino, as patient porn star Elektra Luxx, and kid, Isabella Gutierrez, as weirdo tween Charlotte—Women in Trouble awkwardly mixes blue material with sob stories. Elektra and her XXX castmate, Holly Rocket (Adrianne Palicki, smartly playing a dumb blonde), who moonlights on occasion with working girl Bambi (Emmanuelle Chriqui), provide both raunch and emotional sustenance during random encounters with other characters: Holly and Bambi dry the eyes of a betrayed therapist, while Elektra counsels a conflicted mother. Though his film is more fun—and much less insulting—than Diane English's abominable remake of The Women, Gutierrez (who wrote the scripts for Gothika and Snakes on a Plane) still lapses into WE TV hokum ("If we don't tell people how we feel, what are we doing here?") and seems wildly anxious about the delta of Venus. Josh Brolin, in bad Keith Richards drag, suffers misfortune while orally pleasuring Marley Shelton's flight attendant; Holly, who has the hots for Bambi, is incapable of going down without throwing up. You can't successfully deliver a vagina monologue with such a sensitive gag reflex.
Recent Articles
More by Melissa Anderson
Get Pummeled by Global Guilt-Tripping with Mammoth
Saintly White People Do the Saving in The Blind Side
'New French Films' at BAM Not Unmissable
The lackluster latest from France
Women in Trouble Awkwardly Mixes Blue Material with Sob Stories
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet and The Red Shoes
A grand duo of ballet films comes to Film Forum. Well choreographed!
Site Search «
Most Popular
-
The Strangest Landlord-Tenant Relationship In Town? Stacked up in cubicles for decades, immigrants living in a Bowery tenement may have a very unusual situation.
-
The Pet-Death Business All dogs go to heaven. Yours will probably get there in an urn.
- We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?
- On Michael Jackson's Mercifully Goofy, Cheerful This Is It
-
The Secret Life of Girls On the latest blog-rock sensation's improbable, somewhat verifiable backstory
| buy, sell, trade 10,183 | musician 3,497 |
| rentals 12,962 | jobs 2,176 |
| adult entertainment 34,820 | |
| classifieds | backpage.com | Post ads for free! | |
|---|---|