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Time now to dust off the "where are they now" file for a look at recent developments in the career of Peter Landesman, award-winning, basement apartment-leaving journalist.

When we last left off, production was underway on the movie version of The Girls Next Door. Two things have changed since then: Milla Jovovich has dropped out and the title has been changed to Trade. Apparently, someone in marketing had the perfect answer — alliteration! — to the question, "How can we fool audiences into thinking this movie will be just like Traffic." Also, there's a nascent web site and a catchy tag line: "Every year, more than 1,000,000 people are trafficked [!] across international borders... against their will." I guess if your story is "not about numbers" (in which case, the tag line, like the cover line before it, is the best place to put them), then it doesn't matter if you just make those numbers up. The film's figure is inflated by 200,000 to 400,000 over the already inflated State Department numbers. I wonder why they didn't go with "Every year, perhaps as many as 15,000 people are trafficked into the United States, mostly to work in farms or sweatshops, but at least some, maybe even half, in brothels"? What, doesn't grab you?

Anyway, the film debuted at Sundance this week, and The Hollywood Reporter has the first review. Here's an excerpt.

A lackluster lump... generic... humdrum... lumbers... leaden... drab... uninspired... slow-footed... "important" [scare quotes theirs]... further slowed... tentative... lackluster... dreary and listless... sloppy cutesiness... [unfavorable comparison to] Walker Texas Ranger.

Posted by Daniel Radosh

10:11 AM