The Life (Unrated Edition)
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Movie Reviews of The Life (Unrated Edition)
Movie Review: "It's all a mixture if disgust and strange delight"
Summary: 3 Stars
The Life has been a wildly misrepresented movie. The cover of the DVD shows Denise Richards and Daryll Hannah languidly posing, arms draped over one another; so one would expect a film that is largely a fictional narrative, but instead, the film is mostly a collection of interviews from prostitutes of every imaginable variety from Spain, France and Eastern Europe. They range the gamut from the sleaziest of streetwalkers, to male hookers, and on to the most up-market of call girls.
While the interviews themselves are quite fun and enlightening, the movie doesn't really work as well as it could, because the scripted drama gets in the way. The Life certainly isn't as bad as some other reviewers have pointed out, but the idea of combining fictional narrative with documentary techniques (probably to sell in the American market) definitely wasn't the right approach to take. The film probably would have worked just as well as a straight documentary.
Denise Richards stars in the fictional portion of the film as a young woman living in Los Angeles and studying anthropology in graduate school. She's doing a study on prostitution, which leads her to conduct a variety of information gathering conversations with real life hookers. These sessions are presented in the film as part of her research, even though confusingly, Richards never appears onscreen with any of the interviewees.
When pressured by financial worries, her prostitute neighbor (Daryll Hannah) suggests that Richards sell her body for cash. She's at first hesitant to do so, having had an awkward experience with an Arab businessman, but soon she plucks up the courage, realizing that if her neighbor can do it, she can too. The film is book ended by a scene where she interviews for a photography shoot, but the interview conducted by an adult film producer, is really just an excuse to coerce her into the business.
The interviews with the real-life prostitutes and their pimps are by far the most interesting part of the film. They are indeed an eclectic bunch, ranging from street hookers who have been physically abused, upscale French call girls, adult film directors, porn stars, sadomasochists, and most interestingly, the sexual proclivities of the men (and women) who are willing to pay for it all. Their confessional is vast and wide-ranging; covering such subjects their sexual limits, their attitude towards money, their attitude towards men, and also their eventual hopes and dreams.
There are also lots of racy stories that provide a few laughs: One of the hunky male escorts discloses an interesting tidbit involving a client, his police costume and his Billy club. There's also another black, gorgeously nubile Ghanaian woman who boasts, quite unashamedly, that she likes to be splattered all over with male bodily fluids. She also likes to keep up her technique by practicing on a banana. She's obviously proud of what she does and readily admits that she wants to be the world's greatest super-hooker.
The Life would have been far more powerful if it had discarded the unnecessary storyline featuring Richards and Hannah and had taken the real life interviews and shaped them into a more cohesive and solid documentary. The fictional story has the unsettling and disquieting effect of glamorizing and sensationalizing a profession that is unfortunately far from glamorous. The end result is a film that a strange mixture of sexual chic and that ultimately trivializes and denigrates the sex business. This is a serious, important subject that demands a much more cutting edge and focused treatment than a movie like The Life is willing to give. Mike Leonard April 05.
Movie Review: Daryl Hannah and Denise Richards' poor choice.
Summary: 1 Stars
This documentary style film on prostitutes suffers in so many areas, that the 87 mins seemed elongated and I have totally lost my interest in it after 30 mins. It's a big question when it comes to seeing that both Denise Richards and Daryl Hannah had just about 10 mins of screen time and their roles are insignificant. Daryl Hannah was much more enjoyable in Dancing at The Blue Iguana a few years ago. Granted that her career has gone downhill, but doing this kind of film, is just pure bad publicity. The editing of the interviews is overwhelmingly inconsistent along with aweful soundtrack. It's bad for the eyes and ears. They should've just deleted Hannah and Richard's roles and focus on all documentary. The only thing that is worthwhile is that the non-actors(real prostitutes male and females) do provide their share of their experiences and feelings about their lives as prostitutes. Now why the heck was there no North American prostitutes interviewed, and just mostly Spanish, and some French, and one Japanese? They were talking so fast that it's hard to catch up reading the subtitles throughout the film. Movie Review: Read the dvd description!
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Life" is based on the book Yo Puta, consisting of interviews to real life prostitutes. The film has this story (starring Denise Richards & Daryl Hannah) but it merely serves as an excuse to present the dialogues/interviews with the real life people.
The interviews are fascinating, they really serve as an insight into the mind of a prostitute (both male and female) and presents us with myth and stereotype shattering ideas.
Movie Review: Deceptive
Summary: 1 Stars
Deceptive package. The amount of time spent by the two female leads onscreen is basically an afterthought. Way too much time is spent interviewing real hookers/pimps/gigilos. Can you say boring?! There are also issues with the captioning/subtitles way out of sync with the film. Low tech 2ch sound, grainy picture. It is worth watching to see Denise Richards get 'doggied', although way too briefly. For rental only by hard core fans of Richards and Hannah.Movie Review: Crappy filmmaking, completely incongruous elements.
Summary: 1 Stars
This film looks like a botched rough cut. Given the material they had, what might have emerged from this footage is probably an unflinching documentary which examines "the life" in prostitution. Instead, what we have is about one short film's worth of fictitious narrative-film footage, shot with big-name actors and proper production values, intercut with narratively befuddled interviews that don't build towards anything, and some of the worst "special effects" I've ever seen on a commercially available DVD product.
Director Luna (Maria Lidon)'s "post-modern techniques" are the main thing that screwed this film up. The film is so busy throwing transitions, still photographs and random imagery at you that it forgets to draw you in. Editing decisions appear to have been made based on what might look cool visually instead of what's engaging dramatically. And Lord knows why Daryl Hannah (who made a blazing comeback in the Kill Bill films), the terrific Joaquim de Almeida, and mainstream star Denise Richards agreed to be in this crap -- it looks like the producers ran out of money a quarter of the way through production and tried to patch it up with "verite" documentary footage shot on the cheap and bad, low-grade stills and videography effects.
Most grievously, the narrative footage and the documentary footage don't connect. The only way this intercutting style could work is if the two halves are relatively balanced in proportion (think of the voice-over segments and the story segments in the first two thirds of Memento), and if each half is directly relevant to the other. But the documentary segments in The Life are narratively aimless, and fail to really establish the characters of the prostitutes, gigolos and madams who populate them. And the fictional segments added together form a completely generic girl-turned-prostitute story that hits all the tired story marks, with nary a unique dramatic moment in sight. Two bad films edited together do not make a good one...in fact, The Life feels like one and a half bad films. The documentary segment alone, if properly put together, might have been interesting (provided you kill those cheesy effects), and the narrative segments might have formed an acceptable if unremarkable short narrative film. Instead, together, each only serves to deepen the other's stink.
If you want a story about the sex industry, try This Girl's Life, which was a relatively sensitive, engaging look at an internet porn star, with fine acting moments from Juliette Marquis, James Woods and Michael Rapaport. The Life, on the other hand, is a pointless exercise in post-modern b.s. videography and editing which tries to show off its hipness but ends up flushing its own potential assets down the toilet.