4/10
Bad central casting, softcore porn styling and hooking clichés quickly sink this quick-buck enterprise.
14 August 2007
Wild child Heidi Fleiss goes from party girl to queen of Hollywood commercial sex - but the careless house-of-cards soon starts to wobble. Based on an over-reported true story.

Money. Sex. Power. Like cherries on a one armed bandit when they line up you should give a decent pay-out. Here, however, they barely give out a profit.

For a start sex on the mainstream screen is all about foreplay, tease and aftermath rather than the act. The power soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty used sex with far more effect than these producers because they knew the audience could fill in the blank between the bedroom door and next morning themselves. Here we are forced to watch a coupling only being performed for financial gain. There is no before and no after. Nothing has changed. We learn nothing. Does the fact that big money is being exchanged add anything or change anything? Is it any more dramatic (or different) from what goes on in a motel room on the wrong side of town?

Jamie-Lynn Sigler was good (as the questioning daughter) in the Sopranos, but that was an undemanding role. Here she plays a complex women who is supposed to be smart and yet at the same time very dumb. Well dumb if not going to jail is one of your high priorities in life. She also mixed selling drugs with selling sex - one of the golden no-no's. She all but painted a cross on her forehead. Add her refusal to pay bribes/inform to the police and you have a perfect "how not to do it."

Nick Bloomfield's documentary was far more interesting as it played her life as unscripted comedy and tragedy. A bizarre version of the American dream where being famous and being infamous are pretty much the same. I am all for the legalisation of prostitution, but if these are the people that are going to benefit then maybe things are not so bad as they are...
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