You won't be disappointed!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

I watched this without knowing any of the background material and thinking that it was just your typical 'Lifetime Weekly Movie'. I couldn't imagine a real young lady turning to porn to pay for College. But this one did.This character's flaw of bad decision-making was evident when you hear that she did receive offers from several colleges but she was "set on going to Duke". While that is admirable, I think no matter what, compromise and planning could have landed her in a better life decision circumstance. It was a question I am sure that was running through the mind of the viewer.One big flag in this film for me is that I could not ignore that this woman was offered a full ride to another excellent college, but she was "set on going to Duke". This is a choice that young people need to put pen and paper to and analyze it with their parents. Apply to scholarships, etc. One should not get hung up on "one school". But she did, and the resulting personal decisions to stay in that school is what this is about. Her parents thought they could afford it, but circumstances dictated they could not. So what does she do...? Figure out she needs a lot of money fast. A part-time job won't cover it either. Didn't seem like a real life choice, but for this person -- it was. As she dives into that world, you discover that she has had major self-esteem problems before that - that were not properly resolved.Then there is the "women's empowerment" message for the audience. Is it a crutch, a cover for trying to rationalize this with paying for higher education's skyrocketing and out of reach costs, or does she truly think that doing porn is empowerment for the women doing it? She wants the audience to believe women can do whatever they wish with their body, not be bullied about the choices, not know about negative consequences and covering it up under "women empowerment" rather than "a really bad choice when other options were available to ... HER."If one is to feel sorry for her as her double life is exposed, I couldn't. If I were to get a 'women's empowerment' message out of this, I couldn't accept one. It may have empowered her, but not everyone agrees on that type of choice as an empowerment.This film is on par with most Lifetime made Weekly Movies - "female watch bait". It a story told from the woman who did it perspective. It wasn't laid out as a cautionary tale, a tale of how college costs are skyrocketing, nor a tale where one should feel sorry for the character 'having to resort to this to pay for school'. It's just a tale of how one woman ignored other avenues of assistance, other schools to attend (or transfer to Duke later, why not?)and how she was shamed by students, etc., students but stood up for the way she acquired the money. Not a good lesson here as many Lifetime Movie Bio-pics try to do, but an interesting film to watch in how it was done.

This new Lifetime TV movie "From Straight A's To XXX" gets its inspiration from the former media celebrity Miriam Weeks,a college freshman who turned into sex worker and become actress Belle Knox in the industry of pornography,to sustain herself and pay for her college tuition fees at Duke University.The new TV movie stars Halley Pullos and Judd Nelson as Miriam and the porn manager respectively.The story takes us from the time Miriam started her first year of studies at Duke,her family's incapacity to pay for her expensive $43,000 a year tuition fee during the middle of the school year,her joining the porn industry,her initial experiences as a sex worker until achieving success, and the disclosure made by a fellow Duke student that made her stand up for feminism particularly her rights as a sex worker,defense of the porn industry by calling it legal, and her becoming a Libertarian student activist in the end.The movie was definitely not your typical Lifetime TV movie that one is usually used to watching considering the elements such as a common storyline,determined villains who are not taking "no" for answer are going to harass the main characters violently no end, and predictability are not present from it.In fact,the audience is presented with something better than those elements mentioned. Instead,politics was a big theme from it such as feminism and empowerment as well as issues affecting many young Americans today such as expensive college tuition fees are brought up.In addition to that,the audience is provided something that would allow them to give a thought to various themes such as politics,society,pornography,feminism,morality and the ideals of today's young women.Also included are college experiences of cyberbullying,the rape culture and harassment that are common in today's college and universities.Finally,it also would divide the audience in terms on how they view Miriam/Belle in terms of the choices and decisions she has made.

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.

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.