recently graduated from Syracuse University with a massive student loan debt and living with parents who’s bank accounts she has drained and who’s patience she has finally exhausted, her life is a mess. No local employer wants to employ a Poetry Major so she ends up getting a job at a local porn store run a sweet old married couple she ignores and managed by Alex a cute young man she patronises.She does however discover that Rat Billings her all-time favorite poet is about to do a signing in a local bookstore and she starts to stalk him desperate to be taken on as his ‘protege’. Past his prime, Billings has seen better days and has never managed to re-capture the success of his earlier books back in the 1980’s, and is now reduced to producing jokey anthologies to sell in Urban Outfitters. He is bitter and sardonic whilst Amy is irritatingly self-absorbed and simply aggravates Billings by her relentless persistence.
Amy spends most of her time and money submitting her work to countless periodicals who reject her work without hesitation, and she is desperate for Billings to confirm the massive talent she alone believes she has. He eventually tells that she must live life and go do ‘things’ before she can really start to begin as a writer. Odd then that on the very morning she wakes up from losing her virginity (to the Store Manager she despised) she gets a phone call offering her a full time commission writing erotic for a porn magazine she had been baited to submit a piece too.
The movie starts with Amy in her bedroom with its poster of her idol Sylvia Plath who she is about to copy by sticking her head in the gas oven. It’s a hint of what was to follow which was all a tad over melodramatic even for a self absorbed bothersome young woman like her. She was played by pretty Emma Roberts who, in case of art copying life, is currently studying poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Alex was played by Evan Peters who in real life is now Miss Robert’s fiancee even though last year she ended up in a Canadian jail after being charged with domestic abuse against him!
One troubling question that remained in my mind after watching this rather irritating movie, was why would anyone cast the glorious Cloris Leachman (as the Porn Store Proprietor) and then give her nothing to do/say? The one bright spot was Rubia, a glamourous transvestite with a very caustic wit who seemed to have unspecified role in the Store and in Alex’s life, rather brilliantly played by Armando Riesco.
If you can cope with 97 minutes filled with a pretty but shallow young woman whining ‘oh whoa is me’, then you’ll like this movie much more than I did.
Out now in US theaters and on Amazon
