They should offer bins at each screening of Hot Girls Wanted, so everyone can throw away their laptops and vow never to look at a pornography again. As as a “scared straight” manifesto, this new documentary may do the trick when it’s rolled out as a warning in high school assemblies. As cinema for anyone who has read a newspaper, it’s a considerable flub.
Our focus is the bottom of the barrel of what’s called “amateur” porn. “Every day a new girl turns 18,” muses a 23-year-old manager of wide-eyed young women. They literally come to him off the bus in Miami. Within days, the girls have a false name, a Twitter handle and a photo page for porn producers to peruse. At first, the women are thrilled: $900 for five hours of work, something you can’t get working at a fast food joint in Texas. Three months later, there’s a slim chance you’ve become a star and moved to LA, or you are sticking with the job and doing more niche (and dark, brutal) fetish work. More likely, you are spat out by the system that demands a fresh face, and are now lonely, confused, exploited and unable to return to a home town that knows you as the girl who does porn.
At least that’s how this movie sells it. “Success” cases like the Duke University porn star and self-described feminist Belle Knox are derided. The one gal in the low-rent Miami home that seems to have her head on straight (she’s created an on-screen “character” and reads Frank McCourt during her free time) doesn’t get much of the directors’ focus. She doesn’t really fit the movie’s alarmist agenda, which is rife with intertitles of terrifying statistics and absurd montages of the Kardashians and Justin Bieber, suggesting that our modern culture has created this market of sexual exploitation out of whole cloth. There’s also the wretched Bon Iver-style music dripping all over this film, such as when one of our gals is out hunting with her father, who doesn’t know what she’s doing down in Miami.
There are occasional, vérité-style glimpses of what this film would be like in the hands of less pamphleteering film-makers. These moments are quite touching, lacking the abrasive bombast that mars the rest of the picture. The increasing acceptance of pornography in our culture is an important topic, and no one would deny that the industry is built on exploitation. Were I to advertise on Craigslist, I’d write Better Filmmakers Wanted.
