The Girl Next Door is essentially Risky Business for the 21st century, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The story of a dorky high school class president (Emile Hirsch’s Matthew) who finds love, happiness and self-confidence by dating the porn star (Elisha Cuthbert’s Danielle) who’s housesitting next door, it’s a mixed-up fantasy in which pornography is incongruously presented as the mainstream and as a degrading outsider profession from which one yearns to escape. Danielle is an adult film starlet who falls in love with Matthew because – as a nerd with a severe lack of sexual experience – he’s a safe, white-bread do-gooder who sees the compassionate person underneath her raunchy, sex-biz exterior. Director Luke Greenfield unimaginatively tries to have it both ways by having the audience revel in the thought of wooing a porn star while simultaneously assuming that any sensible woman working in porn would desperately want to settle down in suburbia with a bland boy-toy (countless real-world examples to the contrary). Meanwhile, the film fails to even acknowledge the fact that a straight-laced, Georgetown-bound geek might think hard (pun intended) about the health risks – not to mention potential moral implications – of sleeping with someone who’d spent years having nasty, kinky sex on camera. Timothy Olyphant (this film’s version of Joe Pantoliano’s Guido) is amusingly sinister as Danielle’s skeevy manager/film producer Kelly, but once it hits the mid-point and preposterous narrative devices begin piling on top of one another, The Girl Next Door goes flaccid.
Hold on . . . You make it seem like pornography isn't respectable? And health risks? I'm sorry, but the porn business has a very respectable health care program. Gosh darn it . . . those girls get tested!!!! Get your facts straight, Schager.
Posted by: Wawa | September 20, 2004 at 05:47 PM