Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Ed-Shullivan 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.

Sabre-El The story is about a girl who starts out with porn in order to pay for her tuition fees. The acting is quite ordinary, but the movie does a relatively good job stating both sides of the argument. It throws light on the high college fees and the difficulty that students face in order to pay for it. It also states how people see porn as bad for society, but then there are others who state that a person should not be shamed for it.The problem here lies in the message that the movie sends, which is that is doesn't matter what you work in as all jobs are 'good' jobs. Porn is definitely not a great thing. I also disagree with the argument that people show double standards when they watch porn themselves, but don't like a person doing porn. This is because even those who watch it know that it is wrong. In the movie, the protagonist knew that everyone around thought such as well, and she kept crying throughout the movie. She also knew that her family won't accept it.. yet she went on to do it. This is the very thinking that is plaguing this generation and supporting it will only burn society.If the point of the movie was to give a message (which I believe such movies should do), it should have been that a living can be earned by doing much more respectable jobs.

kinetic_kid Overall, this was a fairly good movie. My DVR cut off a little bit of the opening credits and so I did not know going into it that it was based on a true story and therefore watched it completely under the belief that it was Lifetime fiction.The story itself was good; however, I felt that the movie could have been much better developed. ***SPOILER ALERT*** We see her in the beginning as this studious quote 'good girl' and my thinking was that she was going to get involved with the wrong crown in college and that was how she gets into porn. But upon realizing financial troubles she jokes to her roommate that she could become a porn star and watching it you think that it was just that; a joke. But when you see her checking out Internet searches on how to become a porn star it really hits you off guard as there was no buildup to that. She breaks up with her boyfriend before leaving for school and you aren't even sure if she has had sex or not. In her first scene shot she admits that she likes rough sex and you are wondering "who is this character?" I also did not understand the apparent cuts on her legs. All she says was that she went through a 'Girl Interrupted' stage in high school. Things are just kind of thrown at you in bits and pieces and you have to kind of coalesce it all together into a story line. Had I realized beforehand that this was inspired by a true story then I would have given it an even lower score.All said I did like this movie, I just didn't love it. Remember, I was watching it through the prism of it being a fictional Lifetime movie. This is not to cut it down nor prop it up; Lifetime as a network has broadcast some great movies over the years but has also had its share of duds. I wasn't exactly sure which way this one was going to go while taking it in. You more or less 'get the gist' while watching this; the foundation of the story itself is very weak at times.I think it should have started with a better background as to how she was raised. We should have known earlier on that in spite of being brought up Catholic she was socially liberal and viewed pornography at a young age. I also would have liked to have known more about her so-called 'Girl Interrupted' stage in high school. Did she cut herself and if so, why? Was this a stepping stone towards her later interest in B&D and S&M that she admits during her CNN interview? We also should have known that she was not a virgin upon entering college. She mentions that her parents believed she was a virgin and before she scopes out websites on how to enter the industry you would have thought this as well. When she goes to shoot her first scene she is manhandled roughly and admits that she likes rough sex. Huh? You never would have thought this watching this movie. There was no buildup to any sort of sexual interest let alone her consideration towards doing porn. She does speak frankly with her friend early on about sex but there is no clear indication that she has ever had it. You seem to go from Point-A to Point-F in this movie at times. Details as such do come out I just felt that a lot of the setups were all wrong.Perhaps these awkward surprises were intentional and trying to keep you off stride. But that is being very generous. Again, though, it is worth watching. I don't think I'll be adding it to my DVD collection but it was a good story that just needed better stitching. MUCH better stitching.

mgconlan-1 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.