online review of 'middle men'
knew nothing about this film before renting it one saturday.
interesting backstory on how the internet adult industry got started (and how it's run from the ground up). best part of the film is the moral crisis at the heart of luke wilson's character's story. as it happens, that moral crisis is also at the heart of the debate over what's pornographic and what's not, and what good and what's bad about the internet.
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Download & dirty
Last Updated: 10:00 AM, August 6, 2010
Posted: 1:37 AM, August 6, 2010
Comments: 0 More Print Lou Lumenick
Blog: Movies
MOVIE REVIEW
MIDDLE MEN Porn again. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated R (sex, nudity, profanity, drugs, violence). At the E-Walk, Lincoln Square, 86th Street East, others.
Just because George Gallo's "Middle Men" falls short of its appar ent goal to be the "Boogie Nights" of In ternet porn doesn't mean this loosely fact-inspired serio-comedy isn't far more entertaining than you'd expect from a film that was dumped into theaters with minimal promotion by Paramount.
Luke Wilson, who has appeared in a long run of bad movies, seizes on his juiciest role since "The Royal Tenenbaums" here. He plays Jack Harris, a Houston businessman who, in 1995, envisions enormous profit potential when he meets a pair of stoners who have invented software that allows anyone in the world to discreetly download porn using a computer and credit card.
Two software inventors (Gabriel Macht, left, and Giovanni Ribisi) pave the way to Web porn.
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Harris, a fictionalized version of producer Christopher Mallick, is introduced to Wayne Beering (Giovanni Ribisi) and Buck Dolby (Gabriel Macht) because they're already having issues with a Russian mob boss. But Jack deludes himself into believing he can solve his family's financial problems without getting involved in porn's seamy side by acting strictly as a middleman.
It's a naive rationalization that Jack shares with the whistle-blowing hero of Steven Soderbergh's "The Informant!" Eventually, he's spending less time with his wife (Jacinda Barrett) and kids back in Texas than with one of his clients, a 22-year-old Internet porn star (Laura Ramsey) in Los Angeles.
By this point, Jack is in deep, thanks to the accidental killing of a bag man sent by the Russian mobster (Rade Serbedzija), a secret side deal by his loose-cannon partners involving child pornography, and an unlikely alliance with an FBI agent (Kevin Pollak) tracking post-9/11 terrorists.
Jack, who places entirely too much faith in his skills as a calm, smooth-talking negotiator -- at one point he tries to blackmail a district attorney (a hilarious cameo by Kelsey Grammer) -- also has to reckon with a sleazy but well-connected lawyer he's unwisely cut out of a deal with his partners.
The lawyer is wonderfully played by a foulmouthed James Caan, a hoot who's working with Wilson for the first time since the latter's acting debut, "Bottle Rocket."
"Middle Men" shows evidence of post-production tampering, possibly at the behest of a studio unnerved by the movie's seamier aspects. The complex flashbacks are sometimes confusingly edited, a problem only partly fixed by wall-to-wall narration.
However uneven, this very well-acted, often amusing and dirty-minded hard-R film still stands out in a sea of market-driven blandness.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/download_dirty_IQCtmE8dOm8o8XdxI1TCzN#ixzz1DDU1API6
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gregory 20611.