Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

Girlfriends! Most guys know you can't live with them -- and you absolutely can't live without them. Especially in the movies.

So it piqued my interest when Mark Waters' Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience both popped up on DVD and Blu-ray. It is a coincidence, of course, that they share "girlfriend" in their titles. But they still make an oddball double bill. Of opposites.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a conventional romantic comedy co-starring Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner. It made its DVD and Blu-ray debut this week. The Girlfriend Experience is a experimental drama starring Sasha Grey, a petite porn star making her "mainstream" debut, with little nudity and no explicit sex scenes. It makes its DVD and Blu-ray debut Tuesday.

Watching both back-to-back creates a bizarre resonance. It can lead to keen debate about the war of the sexes.

However, on its own, Ghosts is a howling dog, a whining, whimpering mess of a movie. With profound apologies due Charles Dickens, it is based on the same idea that inspired A Christmas Carol. McConaughey (as usual) plays a handsome, charming but piggish playboy who beds the babes and runs. When he threatens to make a shambles of his brother's wedding, his dead but still dissolute uncle (Michael Douglas) pops up to tell him, Marley-like, about three gal ghosts who will appear and show him the truth of his wicked ways. Including that he is living a lie in relation to Jennifer Garner, his grade school girlfriend.

Handled deftly, this premise might actually work in a modern setting. Here, it is abysmally executed, with the exception of Garner, as the jilted ex, and Brecklin Meyer, as the jolted brother. Otherwise, director Waters pushes his actors into farce without providing the right milieu for them to thrive, or even survive.

Waters does not explain himself on the DVD. There are no extras. Those are saved for the Blu-ray, a disturbing trend that manipulates consumers. On the Blu-ray, the extras playfully tease out how to be a ladies man, with fawning observations on the real-life McConaughey. He is, by all accounts (and my experience) a dandy fellow, but he is increasingly playing insufferable jerks. McConaughey needs a new on-screen routine.

The Girlfriend Experience is another animal altogether -- including on DVD and Blu-ray. Both offer the same interesting extras: Soderbergh's commentary with Grey, an alternate cut and a brief background doc.

On and off-screen, the star attraction is Grey, whose nearly 200 porn flicks range from Sasha Grey Superslut to This Ain't Star Trek XXX. For Soderbergh, she plays a high-class hooker plying her trade during the 2008 U.S. presidential election and economic meltdown. As clients prattle on about politics and economics, she provides a "girlfriend experience" by actually listening before the sexual services kick in. One new client, however, upsets her sanguine resignation.

Soderbergh shot this as a low-budget, guerrilla-style, indie flick. It is edited into a fractured time/space confusion that eventually gives us a tender portrait of the girl at the edge of her own volcano. Grey, while lacking the technical prowess of experienced actors, is riveting precisely because you know she knows the reality of the sex profession.

"What I'm fascinated by," Soderbergh told Sun Media recently, "is when the gap between our own story and everyone else's idea of our story starts to get so wide that it can't be ignored." In Grey's case, Soderbergh said, "She meets someone and realizes she is vulnerable to the turbulent emotional events that normal people are."

So big ideas are in play in the little movie, The Girlfriend Experience. In the big Hollywood production, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, the ideas are all ground to dust.