The Movie: I'm not exactly sure how this movie ended up on my Netflix queue. I think I must have been drunk and looking for any and all movies set in Las Vegas, because here is the description of this movie from their site:

Dot-com computer nerd Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) has $20 million and no life. So, what does he do? He rents -- for $10,000 -- the services of a stripper (Molly Parker) for a fantasy sex weekend in Las Vegas. But before they get down to "bidness," certain ground rules are laid out. That's OK with Richard … only he never imagined he'd fall for the woman. Directed by Wayne Wang.

I must have figured... hey, Vegas, strippers and computer nerds! My kind of movie! Or something, because when this movie showed up in my mailbox I was actually kind of shocked because I didn't recognize the name or anything. Anyway. The movie was about what you'd expect from reading a description like that... like soft-core porn or something. Artisan decided to release it as an unrated movie, rather than attaching the MPAA's NC-17 rating on it.

The really interesting thing to me I guess is that this movie's concept and direction came from Wayne Wang, better known for directing The Joy Luck Club and Anywhere But Here... and well, this movie is nothing like Joy Luck Club haha.

The DVD: This movie was originally shot on digital video and then transferred to film. The video on this DVD was then subsequently transferred from that film back into digital format. As a result you get both video grain and film grain all in one, and it can get pretty damned grainy at times. And I think the anamorphic widescreen transfer brought in some artifacts of its own as well, so overall, the video quality wasn't that great.

Although the audio is technically encoded in a 5.1 surround format, this movie might as well have been in mono, as the bulk of the action takes place inside a hotel room, and well, there isn't a whole lot of sound effects or ambient noise to talk about in one of those.

This disc did come pretty full of extras though. You get an R-rated teaser, and a full theatrical trailer. You also get a behind the scenes that goes behind the scenes not into the movie, but into the website, which apparently tries to capture the experience of going to a strip club. I'll probably check it out after writing this review. There are also two rather lengthy (and somewhat enlightening) alternate endings, a director's commentary track, and cast/crew bios. I guess there is also some DVD-ROM content, but even a computer nerd like me never checks that stuff out.

One thing I did notice though is that while I was criticizing the extreme graininess of the video to film to video transfer... the deleted footage on the disc appeared to be straight from the original video, and well, the film transfer actually looked better, after all.

Anyway. In my opinion, this is a pretty horrible movie, but if you like it, you'll probably like all the extra stuff that comes on this DVD, so you may want to check it out.