Now with 20% more ick

While I’m wait­ing for the mater­i­als I need to com­plete my Tuesday Foreign DVD report to mater­i­al­ize, allow me to point out that today’s the day the DVD and Blu-ray disc of Steven Soderbergh’s delight­ful The Girlfriend Experience hits the street. Among its extras is an altern­ate cut in which my char­ac­ter, The Erotic Connoisseur, is (spoil­er alert?) actu­ally shown bran­dish­ing the Q‑tip which is only tear­fully men­tioned in the the­at­ric­al cut. Subjectively, I can­’t handle watch­ing it; object­ively, it may con­sti­tute the apo­gee of the Sydney Greenstreet/Victor Buono imper­son­a­tion that is my per­form­ance. (Since I can­’t handle watch­ing it, how could I come to that con­clu­sion? I could­n’t tell you.) The still repro­duced here is of my lovely co-star Sasha Grey’s char­ac­ter, Chelsea, rumin­at­ing on the strange offer in the safety of anoth­er john’s hotel room. The look on her face in the actu­al scene is, ver­ily, price­less; a kind of “what you say?” made flesh.