Grey. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

Sasha Grey has sold her debut work of fiction, The Juliette Society, it was announced Friday on Publisher's Marketplace. We last saw Ms. Grey at Gagosian Gallery on Sept. 11 for the opening of an exhibition by Richard Phillips, which included a short film in which she serves as star and muse to the artist. For a while now Ms. Grey has been busy carving out a career for herself in music and film, and in March 2011, just before officially announcing her retirement from the adult film industry, she released her first book, a photo compendium called Neü Sex. So it's not a huge surprise that she's dabbling with literature. Actually, we take that back. It is.

What's in store from Ms. Grey, novelist? The Juliette Society, according to a statement, attempts to "reinvent the erotic novel," and “take it back to its source as a salacious treatment of sex, particularly female sexuality, as something mysterious and sensual." We're glad to hear that, like any good fiction student, Ms. Grey is sticking to writing about what she knows.

As even the intermittent online porn viewer might admit, an endless cavalcade of uploads means scenes that are initially titillating can quickly become trite. "It's like with puppy videos," a girlfriend explained. "Now I need a puppy, spooning a panda bear, hugging a sloth." Next to the usual staged moaning and manufactured filth, the couple by the sink offered the same kind of novelty. Mr. Deen, credibly unaware of the cameras, splayed his hands in her hair and whispered something imperceptible. Whatever he said, it was working.

I'm hardly the first XX chromosome to have noticed. In a $13 billion industry driven by the single-minded pursuit of the solitary male orgasm, Mr. Deen has made a name for himself by appealing to the opposite sex. In the past six months, his allure has become something of a pop culture curiosity, a cipher about female desire that isn’t actually that hard to decode. The first real test of his crossover appeal, however, may come via one of his more literary admirers, Bret Easton Ellis, who wants to cast Mr. Deen in his new micro-budget noir movie, The Canyons. The project, which starts shooting in July, will be directed by Paul Schrader, the screenwriter and director behind Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and American Gigolo.

But before I could parse Mr. Deen’s mainstream potential, I had to figure out his name.

"Brown hair, kinda cute, really wants to get the girl off?" I asked my friend. "Oh, I actually know who you're talking about. And he's Jewish!" she squeaked, as though her Bubbe would approve. We were at a Korean restaurant in the East Village. She grabbed my iPhone and pulled up a lengthy profile in Good magazine about Mr. Deen. Before the banchan arrived, I Instapapered the story for the subway ride home. I was 27 when I swapped out erotica for something more visually stimulating. According to Good, many of Mr. Deen’s teenage fans are much, much younger.

After the article wound its way around the web, Slate was left squinting its eyes at “Porn Women Like to Watch,” as though it were a novel concept. Nightline followed up this February with an obligatory finger-wagging segment about Mr. Deen's underage enthusiasts, as though he were a gateway drug to Rick Santorum’s worst nightmare. The Nightline segment in turn prompted sex toy company Doc Johnson to mold a nine-inch, life-sized latex tribute targeted to Mr. Deen’s “very enthusiastic fan base."

Although the latest Nielsen ratings reveal that a third of the visitors to porn sites are female, apparently, it hadn’t occurred to anyone in the San Fernando Valley that girls might want to fantasize about the dude next door too.

At 5' 8" and 26-years-old, Mr. Deen is slight of build, fresh of face, and looks like that cute boy from your high school Spanish class. A little bro-y, maybe. Sophomoric, definitely. But he has a surprisingly witty Gmail handle and a sly sense of humor. He could be your boyfriend, if your boyfriend knew his way around a ball gag and just when to pull your hair.

“He doesn’t look like those mastodons with their bleached hair and their waxed pecs flexing,” Mr. Ellis explained by phone from his Los Angeles apartment. “It’s a more democratized look.”

Mr. Deen taps into a female fantasy that hasn’t seemed to interest porn studios much: a sensitive boy with closed-door swagger—the flip side of a good girl with a dirty mind. Onscreen he seems to exhibit savant-level responsiveness to his partner’s cues, anticipating (correctly, by the sounds of it) when she’d like to be kissed and when she’d like to be slapped.

His facility with the latter has incited a rising heart rate of moral unease, even among some of his co-stars. Mr. Deen, who has recently broken into directing, films about a scene a day—roughly one bondage and S&M scene for every three straight ones. Online, his teenage fans tweet and tumble and make gifs about his devastating eye contact—even as his co-stars lie bound and gagged at his waist. “There are these weird long flashes of tenderness that you don’t really see in straight pornography,” noted Mr. Ellis.

“I’ve been into rough sex pretty much my whole sexual life and so I’m not, like, bad at it,” Mr. Deen told me by phone last month, on his 26th birthday. “I don’t know how to say it without being a hideous prick, but I’m pretty good at having rough sex. It got to the point where a lot of girls who aren’t into that type of sex were afraid to work with me because they thought I was going to slap them in the face or something.  But I only do that if the girl is into it. There’s no reason to choke somebody if they don’t like getting choked. Then you’re basically being an asshole.”

When the two finally met, Mr. Ellis filed that type of misunderstanding under something they had in common. “We chatted amiably about the unearned feminist hysteria we both received at certain points in our careers,” Mr. Ellis happily tweeted out to his 250,000 followers in January.

Mr. Deen has spoken publicly about abandoning certain “porn star punishment” sites for what he called “weird and sort of preachy reasons.” The sites he works for now, like Brazzers.com and Kink.com, make girls sign “limit sheets” that rate their comfort level on “every sort of sexual thing you can imagine,” he said. “Everyone has to sign it, the director, the top, bottom, everybody.

“It’s not like I’m beating women or sending messages that it’s okay,” he added. “Actually the opposite. Why don't we just say it? The submissive is always the dominant party.”

On the blog A Feminist Sub (as in submissive), the twentysomething author analyzed her "crush" on Mr. Deen last June. "His scenes show how sex can be ‘degrading’ without being for-real degrading,” she wrote. “He does a lot of BDSM porn, and plays the dominant role, but is not a prick about it." She also noted his exuberant approach to oral stimulation, which rarely gets as much screen time as when the genders are reversed, pointing to a particularly stirring 20 minute session, during which Mr. Deen was moved to "growl."

There does seem to be something in Mr. Deen’s approachability and eagerness to please that makes conversations about pornography—and how women consume it—suddenly permissible in polite company. Of course, not everyone thinks inspiring girls to talk about porn, often with each other, is a good thing. Just ask Nightline.

To Mr. Ellis, James Deen's success represents the dawn of a new kind of porn star—one who reflects a transitional moment in popular culture. "The dissemination of pornography has been this hugely liberating thing. You don’t go to a movie theater on Vine and sit in the dark by yourself or nervously walk to a newsstand and buy an issue of Hustler,” he pointed out. “James has grown up with it in a way, so he’s got a casual, comfortable relationship with it. Men of my generation don’t."

Nowhere is that comfort level more evident than on Mr. Deen's Twitter feed, which is regularly updated with self-effacing observations on nineties nostalgia, requests that someone bring him a burrito, and goofy musings on porn like, “Dry humping is the new anal” or “I wanna get your brain pregnant.” Mr. Deen also tweets out links to his unbelievably unsafe for work blog, which features extreme close-ups of his partner’s undercarriage and giddy narration of the scene he just filmed: “remy lacroix is one of my favorite new girls. this girl is super hot and really fun to bang and puts things in her butt...”

It’s easy to be sex-positive when no one ever taught you to be negative in the first place.

Mr. Deen, it should be said, is also unwaveringly complimentary of his partners, both on and offline. “There’s been a scene or two where I’ve had to put on a little bit of show,” he admitted, “But 99.9999999999 percent of the time, I’m just into it. I mean it’s pretty rare I’m like, ‘Oh god, what is wrong with this girl, she’s so mean.’"

So his turn-offs don’t include cellulite or silicone, but mean girls? No wonder he’s in the teenage girl pantheon next to Justin Bieber.

"I have a lot of friends who are James’ age, and I get it,” said Mr. Ellis. “I get the humor, the irony, the ‘dumbness’ of—dumbness in quotes—of how they express themselves in their blogs or Twitter. So what if he writes about wanting a burrito? What do you want him to be writing about?" Those who are offended by Mr. Deen’s blog posts, he said, are “having an Empire attitude about it.”

For a few years now, Mr. Ellis has been expounding on his notion that society has crossed over from “Empire” to “post-Empire.” His close reading of Mr. Deen’s appeal situates the porn star firmly in the post-Empire landscape. The rubric, which jumps off from Gore Vidal’s term for postwar American hegemony, basically marks a move away from hierarchical tastemakers toward “exhibitionistic display culture,” as he once put it, describing Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown. The Hills is Empire, Jersey Shore is post. Mr. Ellis recently offered another example by email: “Lana Del Rey? Totally post-Empire. The media reaction against her? Empire.”

In fact, it was that shorthand that helped him discover Mr. Deen. His producer Braxton Pope—who also worked with Mr. Ellis and Mr. Schrader on the shark horror flick Bait, dead in the water after five years of development (so Empire)—emailed over a couple articles on Mr. Deen. “’So, what do you think of this guy? Empire or post-Empire?” he asked. Mr. Ellis’s reply? “Totally in the top ten of post-Empire!”

The writer and the performer eventually met for dinner, at Soho House in West Hollywood. “He said he was super nervous,” Mr. Ellis recalled.

“Maybe it’s because I’m an over-analytical Jew and all the issues that go with that,” Mr. Deen confessed. He was also worried about whether he could do the job. Mr. Ellis insisted he could. “We would not be having this conversation if he couldn’t pull it off, if he was simply a leaden actor who was just being hired because of the size of his dick.”

They addressed the question over dinner. “He was worried that he had no acting training,” Mr. Ellis recalled. “I said, ‘That’s not a problem, there are plenty of bad actors who do.’”

Mr. Deen, who is prone to calling his work “quote unquote acting,” still seems unconvinced. Looking at a girl while having sex with her, “doesn’t really feel like acting,” he elaborated. “I’ve been a fan of his since I was a little kid,” he said of Mr. Ellis. Nonetheless, Mr. Deen added, “I don’t know why he wants me in this movie so bad.”

Mr. Ellis, who is self-funding The Canyons (working tagline: “It’s not The Hills”) along with Mr. Pope and Mr. Schrader, will be releasing the movie via iTunes, Netflix, and VOD rather than theaters. The film, he said, will feature explicit sex scenes, but purely in service of character and plot development. He insisted that unlike in the Sasha Grey-Steven Soderbergh project, The Girlfriend Experience, Mr. Deen will not be playing a “a meta version” of himself.

First, though, he’ll need to win over 65-year-old Mr. Schrader, who Mr. Ellis says finds “the busyness” around James Deen “more of a distraction.”

If Mr. Deen gets the gig, don’t expect him to go the way of Sasha Grey, who retired from the porn business last year after breaking into the mainstream. “I got into porn because I want to do porn,” Mr. Deen vowed. If he sticks with that promise, it might be the most post-Empire thing about him.

“Doing the same thing every day is never going to be fun, which is another reason I’m so excited about this,” said Mr. Deen, reminiscing about his early years in the porn industry, when he felt pigeon-holed in one genre. “I would show up to work and it would be, like, ‘Okay, this is gonna be a rough sex scene.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, man, I kinda just want to make out with the girl and have normal sex with her?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, well, you can do that at home.’”

-ntiku@observer.com

Lohan.

Unless you’ve failed to turn on a computer over the past week, you’ve probably noticed that New York artist Richard Phillips, known for his large, often sexy, figurative paintings, has released a short film featuring actress Lindsay Lohan. The Lohan spot went up on T Magazine’s website as well as that of Gagosian Gallery, which represents him. A few days later, Mr. Phillips premiered a second film with adult film star Sasha Grey. Both were shown during the Venice Biennale in “Commercial Break,” a project created by Neville Wakefield and sponsored by the Garage, the Moscow contemporary art museum run by Russian art collector and philanthropist Dasha Zhukova.

The Observer met Mr. Phillips at Venice’s Cafe Paradiso, on the day the Grey film premiered. If it weren’t for bustling crowds of art pilgrims, the cafe would have been aptly named: a calm before a storm of art viewing. But the place was jam-packed. New York dealer Paul Kasmin glided by with a small entourage; artists Liz & Val dragged a wobbly wagon advertising their services as “art doctors.”

None of this fazed Phillips, a tall, rangy man in hi late 40’s with a shock of graying hair and intense blue eyes. Even describing getting lost on his way to and from his hotel—a requisite experience in this labyrinthine city—he was disarmingly articulate, speaking in clause-heavy, meticulously crafted sentences.

“Commercial Break” consists of short films by contemporary artists that play with the imagery of advertising. They were slated to appear on a Jumbotron that would drift up and down the Grand Canal­—an ironic take on Venice’s no-ads policy. Mr. Phillips’s films are 90 seconds long and characterized by lingering, introspective shots of the stars. In the Lohan film, inspired by classic glamour shots in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and of Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, Ms. Lohan appears on a beach in Malibu; in the Grey film, Ms. Grey is seen in and around the Chemosphere, a flying-saucerlike Modernist house in Hollywood, designed in 1960 by architect John Lautner. While he is interested in these actresses’ “communicative beauty,” Mr. Phillips insists that his films are the opposite of exploitation.

Mr. Phillips has always been a provocateur. Ten years ago, when he showed at New York’s Petzel Gallery, he had the band the Black Dice play at a blaring 140 decibels. “The opportunity to work with Lindsay and Sasha in this important time in both of their careers is the visual 140 decibels,” he said.

In making these films—his first, he created them with surf filmmaker Taylor Steele just over a month ago—Phillips was interested in looking at “young actresses or artists at a very transformational point in their lives,” explaining that “I wanted to push back from the media and the negativity that had been put on them, either associatively or directly.” He wanted to make a creative space where it was possible to do something positive—the anti-Vanity Fair, a new form of portraiture. “Sasha is moving from adult performance art into the cinema,” he added, “and Lindsay is re-engaging with her artistic potential. It wasn’t about me using them as a vehicle for expressing ideas that I had. It was a direct connection with them.”

Mr. Phillips said he is moving away from previous work, including an exhibition at London’s White Cube Gallery earlier this year, which featured large works referencing publicity shots of celebrities. Given that, it was impossible not to think of the lawsuit his dealer, Larry Gagosian, was recently embroiled in along with painter Richard Prince. “Recently we’ve seen the consequences of appropriation art and the way that it no longer has the same meaning going forward as it once had,” he said. “And that artists are not exempt from recourse.”

Five days after he completed shooting with Ms. Grey, she announced that she would no longer perform in adult films. “That gave particular poignancy to our project,” Mr. Phillips said. Ms. Grey had acted before, appearing as the call girl lead in Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience and played herself in an episode of Entourage. But both of those roles made reference to her work in adult films. Mr. Phillips’s is the first project she’s done that doesn’t—and he seems proud of that fact.

“This film stays clear of that content and gets into her psychology,” he said. “If you think about it,” Mr. Phillips said to The Observer, “in adult content, you never see melancholy. And why? Because you never want to see that in a sexual situation. It absolutely countermands that projection.”

Later, The Observer attended a party for “Commercial Break” on the patio of the Bauer Hotel. Crowds surged at the door and a D.J. spun danceable hits; during intermittent rain showers, V.I.P.’s like Ms. Zhukova, Mr. Wakefield and fashion writer gadfly Derek Blasberg lounged on couches in a velvet-roped-off area.

Mr. Wakefield leaned over the rope to speak with The Observer. The Jumbotron hadn’t worked out. “We weren’t able to make it as big as we wanted to,” he said. Instead, the films of “Commercial Break” appeared on a large, hi-def screen on the patio. They also streamed on the exhibition’s website and appeared on iPads, courtesy of the London fashion magazine Post.

Mr. Phillips was nowhere to be found. Likely he was back at his hotel, or lost down one of Venice’s alleys, content knowing that while his Lohan and Grey films weren’t necessarily floating down the Grand Canal, flummoxing tourists, they were somewhere much better: they were everywhere.

sdouglas@observer.com

Terminator Salvation

What’s the story: If this is how the end begins, wake us when it’s over. We caught Terminator Salvation last night, and about the nicest thing we can say is that it’s better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine. For those of you who haven’t seen the ubiquitous trailer—and be thankful if you haven’t, since it gives away the entire movie—Christian Bale stars as John Connor, all grown up and leading the Resistance in its struggle against the machines; you might want to check the postage on Mr. Bale, as his performance is one of the all-time great mail-it-in efforts. The same can’t be said about Sam Worthington, who plays a mysterious antihero named Marcus Wright (oh, hell, since it’s in the trailer anyway: he’s a machine, too!), and does yeomanly work amongst the giant killer robots. If you're looking for some fireworks over the holiday, we guess you can do worse than Terminator Salvation. At the very least, director McG knows how to blow stuff up real good.

Who should see it: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

What’s the story: The sequel to Night at the Museum finds Ben Stiller returning to the scene of one of his biggest hits, as a security guard who watches museum exhibits come to life. With its goofy special effects, broad comedy and silly premise, Battle of the Smithsonian looks like the type of film we would have loved in the fifth grade. Expect it to make mucho cash.

Who should see it: Sasha and Malia Obama.

The Girlfriend Experience

What’s the story: Steven Soderbergh’s Godardian take on the life of a high-class escort just so happens to be one of the better films we’ve seen this year. With a jumbled narrative that would make Quentin Tarantino blush and a riveting lead performance from a porn star (that would be Sasha Grey, the amazingly beautiful blank slate, as the escort), The Girlfriend Experience is proof that Mr. Soderbergh has no rivals when it comes to skill behind the camera. Does he have to make everything look so easy? If you’re a fan—and frankly, who isn’t?—you’d be wise to check this one out. (It’s also still available via On Demand until May 28.)

Who should see it: Ashley Alexandra Dupre.

Dance Flick

What’s the story: To answer your question: Yes, they are still making Wayans brothers movies. Though this one is from director Damien Dante Wayans, nephew of Damon, Keenan Ivory, Marlon and Shawn. As you can probably tell from the title, Dance Flick is a spoof of dance films done in the vein of Scary Movie. We’d be lying if we said the trailer didn’t make us chuckle, but don’t take that as a sign of quality.

Who should see it: The Fly Girls.

The 46-year-old director, responsible for such seminal films as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, the Oceans franchise and the recent sprawling epic Che, laughed. “We continually have these fantasies that technology will solve whatever societal problem we have that every generation buys into. I just wish it was being used to solve the really big problems. You wonder if the ability of all the people in the Sudan to Twitter would finally tip the world into taking some significant action to stop genocide, then you’d think it was a good use of technology. If the ability to be in constant communication and the ability to connect to anybody anywhere in the world hasn’t resulted in the solving of a problem like that, than what is it for?”

The Girlfriend Experience reflects some of these anxieties, as well as others that come with living in the modern world. It follows Chelsea, a high-class call girl (Ms. Grey, in her mainstream film debut) for five days in the fall of 2008, during that tumultuous period before the presidential election, and before our economy really started to crumble. Chelsea lives with her devoted personal-trainer boyfriend (Chris Santos), and she makes enough money that she can breeze into any Soho shop and buy at will. (Take that, Pretty Woman!) But she’s ambitious; she wants to expand. Enter the Internet and all of its accessibility and sleaziness (look for an awesome cameo by former Premiere critic Glenn Kenny). “It’s changed the business a lot,” Mr. Soderbergh said of porn and the Web. “It enables them to work entirely on their own. There isn’t a fetish that exists that doesn’t have a site for people to surf.” But The Girlfriend Experience is also about money—where to get it, how to keep it and mostly how to spend it.

Mr. Soderbergh, who has been living in Chelsea (the neighborhood) since 2002 with his wife, Jules Asner, spent 16 days with a skeletal crew, a lightly written script by Brian Koppelman and David Levien and a cast of mainly unknowns (with the exception of Ms. Grey), who were given instructions to improvise. “It’s really fun, because you don’t know what you’re going to get with this kind of controlled improvisation. It’s like hands-free directing,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “You give them a goal and you give them some bullet points, other than that there are no real answers. You’ve hired them because they are close to the character they are portraying.” (Indeed, in one pivotal scene, Chelsea is interviewed by real life journalist Mark Jacobson.)

The Girlfriend Experience features a glamorous yet still kind of spookily sleek New York City, with lots of posh restaurants and pristine penthouses that all seem to hum and run on money and loneliness. “People have asked why I showed so many exteriors,” he said, getting up to pour himself a glass of orange juice and to gesture out the window at the streets below the office of Magnolia Pictures, which is releasing the film. “As a filmmaker there’s such an incredibly rich tradition of New York filmmaking so when you’re starting out, you feel a little anxious. Like, what are you going to do after Sidney Lumet or Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee? Like, what is your New York going to be?”

He clearly relished how fast the shoot was, and the ease of being able to dash anywhere with his crew and shoot so quickly and unobtrusively he could film hundreds of people crossing the sidewalk unaware (not so easy when you’ve got Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon on set, we’re guessing). “It’s tapping into the enthusiasm of the amateur,” he said. “I’ve definitely seen student films with more lights than what we used.”

Ms. Grey is a fascinating presence onscreen; where one would expect to see an actress emote, she’s mesmerizingly opaque. “People are interested in this movie because of her, not me,” said Mr. Soderbergh. “Believe me, we’re in awe of her status of porn diva. If I’d cast someone who had never been in front of a camera or a traditional actress, there wouldn’t be this kind of discussion.” He said he first became aware of her when he read about her in LA Magazine a few years ago. “She seemed like a new breed. I hadn’t heard anybody in that industry talk the way she talked. She was a mold-breaker and she’s only 21. She’s very ambitious and very, very, savvy. It will be interesting to watch people try and wrap their minds about what she does. Because she does very extreme stuff! It’s like … seriously extremely stuff.” (Go on, Google it if you don’t already know.)

The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and Mr. Soderbergh said that Grey Goose Vodka, which was set to sponsor the after-party, pulled out when they found it was Sasha who starred in the film. “Stolichnaya stepped in which is great but I was thinking, come on! Vodka and porn, that’s an American combination! I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Our whole country is still confused about sex. It’s everywhere but people are still upset about it.” He pointed out the discrepancy between prostitution being illegal while women in the adult film business have sex for money, too – just in front of a camera. “It’s a larger question…are we ever going to have laws that are rooted in the way the world actually is and has been forever and will continue to be? It’s time to have laws for the way people act - not the way we want them to act.”

And, speaking of legislation, last month Mr. Soderbergh testified at a congressional hearing to discuss piracy and the movie industry. Che, he said, was “killed” in Latin and South America because it had opened earlier in Spain, which he said is the hub for piracy. “It’s a real problem,” he said. “It’s shocking. They don’t realize the amount of theft going on. When I testified I said, you have to understand that it’s the equivalent of an automaker saying that between the assembly line and car lot 25% of the cars were disappearing.” He sighed. “That’s what’s happening. Also, remember, that this is a good business. It generates like $13.5 billion a year, and it’s one of the things that America is still understood to be the best at.” He grinned “I’ve long since given up being embarrassed about working in the entertainment industry.”

The Girlfriend Experience is technically Mr. Soderbergh’s 20th film, though it’s the 19th film to be released; The Informant, starring Matt Damon will be in theaters this fall. Where does he find the time? “I work a lot because I like to work a lot,” he said. “It’s probably harder on my wife than anyone else. But she knows that’s sort of my metabolism. I won’t slow down—one day I’ll just stop. I’ll go out and do something else.” Like what? He grinned. “Maybe instead of whining I’ll get involved with some cause or activity that’s trying to improve somebody’s situation somewhere,” he said. “Instead of just looking at the paper and going, ‘Oh, God, that’s so sad.’”

svilkomerson@observer.com

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

What’s the story: For a movie that has spent the last few months dodging one publicity landmine after another—reshoots, bad buzz, online leaks—we weren’t the least bit surprised to read that the outbreak of swine flu negatively affected Wolverine’s box office in Mexico. While we won’t say the film is cursed, we can only imagine a swarm of locusts is just around the corner. As for the plot … you know the drill: Hugh Jackman stars as the titular mutant and fights with Liev Schrieber’s Sabertooth and Danny Huston’s General Stryker while stuff blows up really good. For The Observer's take, check out Sara Vilkomerson's review here.

Who should see it: Magneto.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

What’s the story: Counterprogramming at work! While all the boys are busy sharpening their claws at the showings of Wolverine, New Line hopes that the girls go see Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner meet-cute in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Don’t expect too much though: The film, a romantic comedy version of A Christmas Carol, looks like straight poison. Not even the presence of Lacey Chabert—presumably still trying to make “fetch” happen—and the always-welcome sight of Breckin Meyer (Clueless for life!) can get us excited for this mess.

Who should see it: Kate Hudson.

The Limits of Control

What’s the story: It wouldn’t be the first weekend of summer without a little indie goodness. Enter Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, the director’s first effort since taking Bill Murray on a deadpan road trip in Broken Flowers back in 2005. Mr. Murray makes an appearance here as well (along with other famous faces like Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal and John Hurt), but the real star of the show is Isaach de Bankolé, a frequent Jarmusch collaborator seen most recently gritting his teeth on this season of 24. We’ve found Mr. Jarmusch’s work to be hit or miss, and unfortunately it sounds like this film—the story of a mysterious loner on a dreamlike quest—fits into the latter category. The Limits of Control has a 19 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and our own Rex Reed called it “pure, undiluted crap.” Hmm, what time is Wolverine showing again?

Who should see it: Ghost Dog.