The Center of the World (2001)
Dir: Wayne Wang
Official site:
www.center-of-the-world.com
REVIEWS
Roger Ebert writes the first
positive review of The Center of the World I've come across by a mainstream film reviewer. Ebert seems more open to erotic subject matter than most reviewers; remember, he collaborated with Russ Meyer on several films back in the 1970s. One line from the review made me laugh out loud: "Show me a sexual practice that involves ice cubes and hot sauce, and I will show you a sexual practice that would be improved without them."
Chicago Sun-Times
In contrast to most regular movie reviewers, the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Mistress Marisha praises The Center of the World for its
"gritty, realistic" exploration of the psychological dynamic between sex workers and clients. "The film is about borders: about people from different psychological countries meeting in a strange, international territory (Las Vegas). It is also about power: how some people pay for other people like commodities, and how others allow themselves to be bought, hoping that selling their time does not equate to selling their soul. But more than anything else, the film is about fantasy: the fantasy of the Internet IPO, of the millionaire winning over the hooker with the heart of gold, of the artist who does whatever is necessary to pursue her true calling."
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Jessica Winter gives The Center of the World a lukewarm review, calling it
"oddly squeamish" about its own erotic subject matter.
Village Voice
A.O. Scott hated The Center of the World, calling it "one of those films, often considered a French specialty, that
takes sex so seriously as to make you wonder why anyone would bother with it."
New York Times
Janelle Brown looks at The Center of the World's core themes of
sex, technology and alienation, which she finds ultimately a bit shallow. "Wang may have the details of geek life circa 1999 down pat, but his condemnation of the computer as a font of loneliness and alienation doesn't quite ring true."
Salon
Steven Mikulan praises "the courage of Wang and his cast in standing against a culture that nervously treats sex as either a prurient joke or a puritan crime." However, he finds the film itself dramatically unmoving and not very erotic: "the actual love play is about as arthritically constricted as any PG-rated film's."
LA Weekly
Kevin Thomas admires the filmmakers' risktaking but finds The Center of the World tedious and emotionally empty, arguing that its "heavy-duty sex play is not balanced by a depth of characterization." Moreover, he writes, "There's a puritanical strain in the film, as is so often the case with American films that push the envelope in erotica.... [T]he more sex the film reveals and suggests, the more miserable its people become, as if punishment for apparently mutual pleasure were in order."
LA Times
Mick LaSalle calls the film
"degrading and dispiriting" and later "mindless and prurient."
San Francisco Chronicle
INTERVIEWS
Mary F. Pols interviews Wayne Wang about his new film The Center of the World and his research among San Francisco's strippers and dotcommers.
Contra Costa Times
Sonya Hepinstall
talks to Wayne Wang about his new film The Center of the World, a low-budget erotic drama shot on digital video. "Sometimes I get really upset and bored with how the movie industry is filled with lawyers and executives and rating boards and preview focus groups that tell you, 'you can't do this, you can't do that, this is illegal, this you'll get sued, this won't work.' It's filled with everything that you're not supposed to do."
Yahoo News
Alvin Lu
talks to Wayne Wang about shooting his new film The Center of the World on digital video. "If you don't treat it with respect, it can easily turn into a student-film mentality, where you just shoot anything and you're nondiscriminatory. Because it is so cheap.... On the other hand, you do get the freedom to move around, to work fast, to give actors the room to do what they need to do, so all that stuff is great."
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Karen Croft
interviews Wayne Wang about The Center of the World, his new film "not only about sex but about the compelling intersection of technology, courtship and money that was unique to the Internet boom world of late-1990s California--before the current 'correction.'"
Salon
Bob Graham talks to Wayne Wang and previews his new film
The Center of the World, which opens the San Francisco Film Festival tonight. Wang reveals that the credited screenwriter, "Ellen Benjamin Wong," is actually a pseudonym composed of the middle names of Wang and writers Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster.
San Francisco Chronicle
Gary Dretzka talks to
director Wayne Wang and co-star Molly Parker about The Center of the World and the continuing difficulty of making intelligent, serious films about sex in Hollywood.
LA Weekly
ARTICLES
Artisan Entertainment, which used the web to build advance buzz for The Blair Witch Project, is taking the same route with upcoming release
The Center of the World, which tracks the adventures of a computer nerd and the lap dancer he hires for a weekend of sexual fantasy in a Las Vegas hotel room. The promotional site for Center of the World mimics the look of a porn site for a Shockwave tour through the strip club, the strippers' dressing room and eventually a private "chat" with Alisha Klass, who portrays a dancer in the film. (This article calls it a "hard-core site," which it most definitely is not.) Check out the site at
www.center-of-the-world.com.
Newsfactor
At Inside, Michael Cieply writes, "As Artisan Entertainment's erotic case study Center of the World edges onto a few screens in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, it's worth recalling one of the more peculiar realities of the movie business:
Sex doesn't sell."
Cieply reviews past erotic box-office failures like Crimes of Passion, Showgirls and Adrian Lyne's Lolita.
Inside
Laurel Rosen, who worked as a research consultant on The Center of the World, traces the project's early development. On one of Wayne Wang's initial research trips to San Francisco strip clubs: "Wang then told [the dancer] his idea involving a stripper and a day-trader financier in New York. Says the dancer: 'I was like, "Dude, you are so missing the wave. This whole dot-com thing is blowing up. Make it about a tech guy."'"
San Francisco Chronicle
Manohla Dargis bemoans the number of
films featuring prostitutes and the dearth of films honestly exploring female sexuality. She criticizes Wayne Wang's new film along the way: "The Center of the World isn't much different from numerous films in which a woman's sexual desire is deviant, pathological and even deadly."
LA Weekly
Dozens of newspapers
rejected print ads for The Center of the World as being too risqué. This article includes the ad in question.
Billy Wildhack
CINCINNATI SNIPPING SCANDAL
Cincinnati's Esquire Theater showed The Center of the World last month, but the theater
trimmed several seconds from the film without telling filmgoers or the film's distributor, Artisan Entertainment. When Artisan discovered the unauthorized re-editing, it pulled the film from the Esquire in mid-week. The theater's regular patrons are rightly outraged.
Cincinnati Enquirer
Another story about the Cincinnati art cinema that cut the lollipop scene from The Center of the World before screening it. This article quotes the theater manager explaining why he ordered the cuts: "I found this act to be both degrading to women and most likely violative of community standards. I could not risk Cincinnati's 'Jewel' (the Esquire) over this three-second scene. It is my sincere belief that the three-second edit in no way altered this film's artistic integrity. I still chose to exhibit the film, however, because I did not want to be censored by intimidation.... Obviously, I exercised bad judgment and should have chosen instead not to play the film." One theatergoer says, "At times like this I am embarrassed to say I live in Cincinnati."
Cincinnati Post
The Cincinnati theater owner who re-edited The Center of the World has now
banned the movie reviewer who broke the story.
Cincinnati City Beat
The Cincinnati film reviewer who noticed that a local theater had snipped some dirty bits from The Center of the World talks about being banned from the theater after breaking the story.
Cincinnati City Beat
