Sexy and edgy – worth seeing

Rating: 8/10 (21 February 2004)

I was shocked when my wife agreed to go see the sneak preview with me last night, and I anticipated seeing a teenie-bopper sex flick with lots of nudity, poor acting and a bad plot. I was very pleasantly surprised that The Girl Next Door had such a funny, sexy edge that had us leaving the theater smiling and excited.
Elisha Cuthbert (you may know her as Kim Bauer on Fox TV’s “24” series) plays Danielle who is a porn star (aka “Athena”), and she stole the entire show by showing off her near-flawless physical features -- even my wife said she looked amazing! But she can act as well, adding some decent depth to the movie, and the chemistry between Danielle and Matthew (Emile Hirch) grew from an innocent boy’s infatuation to self-sacrificing love.
Why did they release a sneak preview three weeks early? My guess is to help target the female audience. The male audience is easy to capture here, and the theater had a few singleton males to prove the point. But there were plenty of females in the audience as well, and men and women alike seemed to laugh at the funny parts.
Direction? Again, surprisingly good for relative newcomer Luke Greenfield. Production-wise, Girl was good. If I had to complain about anything it would be the editing – not that film editor Livolsi did a poor technical job (I actually love his works) -- but that the decisions of WHAT to cut got a bit sloppy at toward the end of the film. Everything was moving along wonderfully…. we’re laughing, laughing, ohh! sexy, laughing, movement, movement… and then there were some dead spots. There were a few scenes that perhaps could have been cut in their entirety without any adverse affect on the plot. Show ‘em on the Deleted Scenes on the DVD!
While driving back from the theater, I remarked that the movie somehow felt unique but that I couldn't put my finger on it. My wife said that it had an American Pie-type humor with all of the innocence of the high school boys trying to get some girls. I thought that the movie was a good erotic-comedy-romance, with a well-deserved R-rating for some drug use and brief nudity (but not of Elisha Cuthbert) and strong sexual content. Here, the term “strong sexual content” is right on because it really couldn’t get much stronger without being an outright NC-17. Had the sexiest scenes (and there were plenty) had nudity in them, it would have gone way beyond an R rating! As it was, it was tastefully done but still highly erotic.
Highly recommended.