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From Straight A's to XXX

From Straight A's to XXX (2017)

February. 11,2017
|
5.2
|
PG-13
| Drama TV Movie

When a change of circumstances leaves Miriam unable to pay her college tuition, she makes a surprising decision: to start performing in adult films, using the pseudonym Belle Knox. Miriam lies to her family and her friends at school, keeping her double life a secret. But soon rumours spread and Miriam becomes the subject of vicious online attacks and unwanted attention. Miriam fights back: she talks to the media, saying her new line of work empowers her as a feminist. But her confident stand has unintended consequences. Miriam is shunned by her conservative family and her colleagues in the adult film world. One impulsive decision has quickly spiralled out of control - and Miriam's problems are just beginning.

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Ed-Shullivan
2017/02/11

This review is written from an open minded male father's perspective. The film was difficult to watch as a father who would not want his own daughter having to earn her university tuition making adult films, nor being harassed by both male and female college students insulting her for her choice of employment and propositioning her to have group sex. Funny hah hah? No! Funny nah nah! People make personal choices in their life but they should not be openly criticized just because we may not agree with what we may consider to be a poor choice.On the other hand I would be even more uncomfortable if my daughter earned her income working the grave shift at a gas bar where she could get robbed and/or raped by gunpoint with no one around to stop the crime. I would also not want my daughter operating a crane 50 stories up in the air, or excavating coal 200 feet under the earth surface all considered to be dangerous but acceptable employment from the mass perspective.The message I absorbed from this made for TV film loosely based on the true story of the life of Miriam Week's using the stage name Belle Knox while performing in adult films and attending Duke University where her annual tuition fees were $60K a year Miriam relieved herself from the financial stress of her choice of school's expensive tuition and unfortunately replaced that with even a greater stress by attempting to maintain a secretive life in the adult porn industry from her family and school friends. One would ask why didn't she just apply for government loans? Miriam did apply to the government for financial assistance but she was turned down by the government.Yes, there is a seedy side to working in the adult film industry where women appear to be the subject of pay for play but ask yourself this question. How many men in adult films make as much money as their female co-stars do? Although I did not agree with Miriam Week's choice of employment she appears to have come out of the experience all in one piece and she has a message for the rest of the world. University tuition is very expensive and maybe Bernie Sanders should run again for the U.S. presidency in 2020 to have his platform succeed, free tuition for all students and free health care. Even the adult film actors would be in favor of that platform. It appears that Miriam Weeks may take up the stand in her future political career if Bernie would only agree to support her.I give this made for TV film a decent 6 out of 10 rating.

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Noka Ala
2017/02/12

After recently watching an interview of a porn-star, I had some idea about what happens behind the scenes. The director here has tried his best to show it. The movie falters when the context of the good and bad side of a porn is brought into question. It only turns to the age-old conservative conclusion that porn is not good. That's a cliché in today's world. When we have already learned to accept all kind of jobs as it is.Lastly, the acting could have been better. The acting kind of seems mechanical. A life is missing in them. The dilemma of the protagonist is too unreal. On one hand, she knows what to expect from the porn industry and bravely joins it, on the other hand, she acts like a Disney princess oblivious to reality.A lot has gone into making the movie set but it surely lacks the content it wants to project.

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airfaith
2017/02/13

This is just another one of those made for TV movies that twists the truth as much as humanly possible to get you to feel sorry for the main focus, she was not a straight A down to earth catholic girl by any sense of the word, she was quite the opposite with serious mental problems who took to cutting to deal with it, had they stuck with her real life story it might have been an interesting watch, but as always lifetime has to make the women out to be innocent and weak, it ruined what could have been an interesting true story with another pointless waste of time.Don't bother watching this whether you are a huge fan of hers or never heard of her before, because either way you'll just be getting lied to throughout and come out believing she is someone she most definitely is not.

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mgconlan-1
2017/02/14

First up on Lifetime's prime-time schedule last night was a "world premiere" film with the provocative — to say the least — title "From Straight A's to XXX," telling the pretty sad tale of Miriam Weeks (the attractive and appropriately perky Haley Pullos — whose name is the sort of thing that in the days of classic Hollywood got changed; who, the studio chiefs thought back then, would want to see "'The Wizard of Oz,' starring Frances Gumm"?), who gets accepted to her "dream" college, Duke University (and it was a bit startling to hear the name of a real university in a Lifetime movie instead of a fictitious one like "Whittendale," though given that this is the story of a young woman who pays for college by selling her body sexually it would have fit right into the "Whittendale universe"), only just as she gets the news that she's in, her dad, Dr. Kevin Weeks (Peter Graham-Gaudreau), receives word that he's being sent to Afghanistan. This means that the family's income is about to take such a major nose-dive that the Weekses, Kevin and his wife Harcharan (Imali Perera) — I don't recall hearing her first name on the soundtrack but that's what IMDb.com says it is — can no longer afford to cover her tuition.So what's a poor young college girl to do? She discusses this with her college roommate Jolie (Sasha Clements) — who is really from Oklahoma but has spent enough time in New Orleans to acquire a (bad) Southern accent and a lassiez-faire attitude towards public displays of casual sex (of course Miriam asks her about Mardi Gras and Jolie fends off the question with a hauteur that indicates she's bored with the whole ritual and if you've seen one Mardi Gras you've pretty much seen them all) — and they joke about various options. Miriam doesn't want to take out student loans — "My dad didn't finish paying off his student loans until I was in middle school!" she whines — and she doesn't want a job as a waitress, not only because it's demeaning but because the low pay for a waitress in North Carolina (where the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, the same as the federal one) is barely going to make a dent in the $65,000 per year Duke charges for its education. "Maybe we could rob a bank," Jolie jokes — and Miriam jokes back, "Or I could be a porn star." Eventually, using the nom de porn "Belle Knox," she shoots to the top of the porn world even though maintaining her double life — neatly dramatized by director Vanessa Parise (a cut above the general run of Lifetime directors) in a series of intercuts between Miriam's and Belle's Facebook pages — gets harder and harder, as she's shown frantically plowing her way through a thick and impenetrable women's studies text during breaks on her porn shoots. Meanwhile, an Asian-American student named Jeff discovers Belle's videos online and recognizes her as Miriam, and soon it's all over Duke that one of their nice young freshgirls is doing porn.The credits say this film was "inspired by a true story," but it also travels down the same roads seemingly hundreds of previous Lifetime movies have gone before, though I give writer Hess credit for not having Miriam get hooked on drugs to sustain herself through her porn work — a plot twist usually de rigueur for these sorts of titillating stories about nice young girls who get involved in sex work and then lose control. (Maybe Hess and director Parisse figured they'd already done the innocent-girl-seduced-into-the-drug-scene number in their previous film "Perfect High" and didn't need to do it again.) As familiar as most of this story is, we never feel for Miriam so much as we do when it seems like she's lost all sources of community and been rejected by her family, her college friends and her porn friends. The story lurches to a close as Miriam closes out her freshman year and then, two years later, speaks at a rally of pro-sex feminists and says that feminism ought to be about a woman's right to make choices about her own life — including selling her body on screen for money, if that's what she wants and feels she has to do. It's an O.K. ending but an oddly inconclusive one for a film that, as familiar as the paths it trods are, does have some unique aspects and also makes me wish Vanessa Parise would be able to break out of the Lifetime ghetto, get some decent scripts and take a run at feature films.

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