Did another little journaling about this one. I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT AT ALL, unless you find the need to queue up a rom-com with a more unique premise than "big businessman meets owner of local bakery". For a TL;DR - a desperate, sex-addicted journalist randomly runs into a high price escort "who went to Stanford" and decides to write a profile of her life, and they gradually fall in love with each other mostly through the emptiness of the sex they have with other people. It never made theaters so it doesn't have a rating, but if that sounds like an R-rated scenario to you it's pretty impressive how coldly they go about making a PG-13 film out of it.

---------

Sometimes, I get a good night's sleep, put on a pot of coffee, read the morning news and figure out what I'm gonna do with my day off. Others, I eat too little food, plan to have just one drink before friends show up and turn it into four, get way too stoned on the way home, order four types of wings on GrubHub, eat a couple of each and fall asleep before 9PM only to wake up shortly after midnight and just kind of linger around doing nothing until finally I pull up Hulu and find some milquetoast trash (while I put on a pot of coffee, read the morning news and so on).

Today, The Escort was that movie.

First, the pros: Lyndsy Fonseca brings a lot to a remarkably thin role, the (first) conversation between the two leads over their preferred sexual healthcare providers feels charmingly genuine and the sex-positivity of a movie that finds a sex addict and a sex worker find love through the tropes of a typical romantic comedy (all while still having sex with many other people) is truly unique. That's three small, good things about this full length feature written by the star of the film and directed by a guy who mostly wrangles you-never-heard-of-it TV shows.

Luckily, the cons are pretty lukewarm. The star, Michael Donegen, has a super relatable inability to act that makes him a pretty rancid screen partner for Fonseca but a fine on screen avatar for any failing upwards white guy in his early 30s that hopes to settle down with the prettiest girl he ever met one time. Louder, for the people in the back: he sucks. The script (again, written by Donegen) is so concerned with satisfying the invisible rules of screenwriting that none of its characters have full names, their motivations absolutely never have an impetus beyond the tropes they're built to satisfy and the dialogue is the equivalent of putting a traditional rom com on mute and banging out whatever your bad lip reading version would be.

In another era, this would've been some kind of Saturday Night Special on NBC that aired once and was immediately forgotten by everyone who witnessed or made it. It's certainly shot and lit like an overlong special episode of a television show, which over time became my true biggest gripe with this movie. Because these are characters we're getting to know over the course of the film, rather than a television series, the constant blandness of the male lead and the set design really struggles to draw any emotional investment out of the viewer. As a television show, they'd have had a chance to develop some chemistry and spread all the PG jokes about X rated topics out across a couple of months - maybe even workshop them into good PG jokes about X rated topics.

In the streaming era, Hulu adds it to their trash heap, Nodima groggily and belatedly presses play one Monday morning and, just as the day The Escort was born it remains a remarkably sterile look at the lives of two people who find love for each other through the sex they have with other people. I'm frankly stunned at how efficiently this movie sucks the life out of itself, scene by scene, until the very last frame where it seems to realize what a useless husk it's become and just gives up. There are points in this movie where it feels like they did a single take on the first day the actors met. One scene in particular, when the not-yet-lovers first meet Mitch's dad, reads so clearly like two actors that don't have the timing of their scene down that I was almost convinced The Escort exists primarily as educational material, a great example of how a dozen tiny little things can add up to turn a unique premise into a generic product, but also why so many directors and writers gravitate towards the generic product in the first place.

Turns out, formula makes for a completely watchable, comfortable escape from the actual bad things in life more often than not. Even if it has very little in its favor other than satisfying the factory settings and, in a just world, offering a director with more talent and a better script in hand some notion that maybe a movie starring Lyndsy Fonseca in a role where she's more than an excuse for a bland nothing of a man to pick up the pieces of his life would be a great idea.



~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz