The Hottie
By Kevin Maher
The Times, March 20, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
Paris Hilton has made a movie. A real one, called "The Hottie
and the Nottie." The film is poorly written, lazily directed and only vaguely
amusing.
Hilton acquits herself amiably, with a heavy hint of self-deprecation. She does
a good slow-mo sex icon and a fine spoilt party-going harridan. And, in one
scene, sitting on a picnic blanket with her voice dropping to a whisper, she is
positively luminescent. Hilton’s turn is better than anything that Scarlett
Johansson has done in her past nine movies, or Kate Hudson’s past seven, or any
role from Jessica Alba or Lindsay Lohan.
The Paris Hilton that you hate is not a flesh-and-blood person. She is a
self-created concept, an icon and a signifier for our times.
"I think every decade has an iconic blonde, like Marilyn Monroe or Princess
Diana, and right now I’m that icon," she said more than a year ago. The
comparisons were telling, and accurate, for she has undoubtedly become our Diana
– one of the most hunted, most Googled, desired and objectified commodities on
the planet. But unlike the Princess she has done it all herself. Like some
MySpace savant she is fully in charge of her own exploitation. She is a YouTube
princess for a generation raised on Pop Idol spin-offs and the transformative
powers of an omnipotent celebocracy.
Hilton is a post-feminist trailblazer. She wields her sexuality with pinpoint
precision, just as she wears her cover-girl status with delicate irony. It’s
always there, right in the centre of the semi-clad photo op – that smirk, that
half-wink that says: "I know exactly what I’m doing, and you suckers are paying
for it."
Thus Paris-bashing is based on a sense of powerlessness among the bashers.
Hilton is reinventing the rules on the run, and she promises to endure for some
time to come.
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Not the Worst
By Joe Queenan
The Guardian, March 21, 2008
The release of the Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie
has revived the debate as to which is the worst motion picture ever made.
Because the film logged in with some of the worst receipts in history - $250 per
screen on opening weekend - there is a temptation to accord it the mythical
status of such universally ridiculed motion pictures as ...
Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is
watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a
slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the
public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad
movie ...
A generically appalling film like The Hottie and the Nottie is a scab that looks
revolting while it is freshly coagulated; but once it festers, hardens and falls
off the skin, it leaves no scar. By contrast, a truly bad movie, a bad movie for
the ages, a bad movie made on an epic, lavish scale, is ...
To qualify as one of the worst films of all time, ... a truly awful movie must
have started out with some expectation of not being awful. That is why making a
horrific, cheapo motion picture that stars Hilton or Jessica Simpson is not
really much of an accomplishment. Did anyone seriously expect a film called The
Hottie and The Nottie not to suck?
AR This girl is good mindless fun. As a web-age update on the classic airhead blonde she is a unique cultural asset. So far she has succeeded in being just unpredictable and cheeky enough not to be boring.
Ruth Fowler
The Nottie
By Ruth Fowler
Guardian Unlimited, March 20, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
I enjoy a good political sex scandal. There's something so
satisfyingly delicious about the downfalls of these arbiters of our morality,
something so reassuring in the revelations that those who preach loudest don't
necessarily listen to the sound of their own pious honking.
The downside is the spate of ridiculous articles and opinion pieces churned out
afterwards by self-important commentators eager to cast a judicious eye over
what's known as "the sex trade" - stripping, escorting, massage parlours,
whatever.
I used to be a stripper, and let me tell you, however objectified I felt on
stage and in the Champagne Room, it was nothing compared to how objectified and
humiliated I've felt having "my story" told and retold by journalists and
interviewers who have not done my job, have probably never been in a strip club,
and only venture forth to anywhere remotely connected to the sex industry in the
hopes of revealing some whiff of scandal, some dark revelation.
Strip clubs are dirty, they are often not particularly pleasant
environments to earn a living, you get burned out, you begin to hate it after a
while. But working in more than six clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, I can
reassure you that as unpleasant as strip clubs may be, the vast majority are not
that bad.
The sex industry is merely a means to an end for
thousands of girls like me. Strip clubs are a valid means of making a living at
certain points in life when another career, for whatever reason, does not appeal
or is impossible to undertake. Most of us are there
because in the fabulously tawdry 21st century with all its glamorous moral
decline, we may as well get paid for what girls do for free in clubs, pubs and
bars across the country.
No Man's Land: A Memoir
By Ruth Fowler
Viking, 272 pages
Due out in June
"In Ruth Fowler's excellent No Man's Land, the Cambridge
graduate's dark and harrowing account of her work as a stripper in New York City
...
quite effectively undermines perceptions of sex work as a viable form of
postmodern female empowerment."
Jean Edelstein, The Guardian
AR This girl is less amusing. I see her story as a cautionary tale to illustrate the coarsening effects of sex work on a young mind.
