The Center of the World is a movie about sexual fantasies. It wants to push the envelope but feels hamstrung by self-censorship. In the end, it's only a frustrating, Puritanical soft-porn exercise. Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) is a nerdy young millionaire who offers $10,000 to stripper/drummer Florence (Molly Parker) to spend three days with him in Las Vegas, where she will attend to his sexual fantasies. The setup is perfectly fine, and director Wayne Wang starts off this would-be sizzler promisingly—in a strip club called Pandora's Box, where all-nude dancers bump and grind and writhe for other rich nerds.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the film never lives up to this early potential. Reminding Richard that she's most certainly not a hooker, Florence sets down specific ground rules—no kissing, no penetration, no contact except between the hours of 10PM and 2AM, etc. Naturally, these rules begin to be broken, as Florence finds herself falling for the cute, sensitive nerd. But when did this potentially hot, edgy flick become a boring, not-even-close-to-erotic soap opera?

At about the halfway point, the gorgeous Carla Gugino (Spy Kids) interrupts this two-man show, seeming to point the film toward the possibility of a kinky threesome, but even that promise turns sour, detouring into anger and melodrama.

And why does it all look so ugly? Perhaps Wayne chose to shoot The Center of the World in digital video to add a sense of realism, or perhaps he wanted the film to have the low-budget look of porn. But you'll be put off by the medium's unsightly clarity, which magnifies every imperfection on the actors' skin, making them look like victims of radiation sickness.

Wang's desire with The Center of the World was to have total creative control over his film—without the interference of lawyers and studio suits. He told Artisan that he needed only a small budget with which to push the boundaries of both content and the digital medium. In my mind, he hasn't pushed any content barriers at all—except for one all-too-brief shot involving a lollipop that shocked me and had me frantically pressing the reverse button to make sure I'd seen what I thought I'd seen. As far as making progress in the digital realm, I can appreciate some of the work that Wang has done here, but despite all his efforts, this still looks like it was sprung from a video camera bought at Wal-Mart.

The DVD presents the film anamorphically in its original 1.85:1 theatrical aspect ratio. The film is very clearly shot on digital video, with all the attendant trademarks (or flaws). The image tends to look bleached out, backgrounds are often lost in softness, and close-ups on faces show irritating amounts of details. Every pimple is evident. The filmmakers have taken great pains to stylize the image—using different kinds of digital cameras for different scenes, altering the digital look in postproduction—but before I learned off all these efforts, all I saw was a bothersome, inconsistent, undeniably digital image.

I did appreciate the filmmakers' use of color in this film. At times, Wang saturates certain items within a desaturated shot to call attention to that item. For example, scenes within a strip club appear richly red. Also, flashbacks appear so desaturated that they seem black and white.

HOW'S IT SOUND?

You get two audio options on this DVD. The Dolby Digital 5.1 is preferable to the Dolby Digital 2.0 mix, but only marginally so. Audio is generally centered at the screen, although the score has a nice open feel. Surrounds are essentially inactive, except for ambient music. Thankfully, as this is a dialog-driven movie, voices are clear and easy to understand.

WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

The Center of the World DVD offers a few noteworthy special features. Primary among them is an audio commentary by director Wayne Wang and postproduction consultant Patrick Lindenmaier. This commentary isn't feature-length but rather a "select scene" track that focuses on seven film sections, which you can access from a commentary menu. The discussion is technical in nature, dealing primarily with the challenges of shooting in the digital medium, as opposed to film. The two participants show the differences between shots filmed with a Beta Digicam and those filmed with smaller handheld MiniDVD cameras, and also talk about post-production tinkering such as color saturation and black-level adjustments. I actually enjoyed this track more than the film's primary audio track. In the end, the two talk for more than an hour, leading me to wonder why they didn't just go ahead and record a full commentary. (The movie is less than 90 minutes long.)

Next up is a 4-minute featurette called Behind the Cyberscenes. I expected a behind-the-scenes piece about the movie, but this focuses on the creation of the film's Web site. Enticingly, actual strippers are interviewed, and they talk about how the site re-creates the experience of being on the receiving end of a lap dance. There's much nudity and moaning. In a way, this little piece is more erotic than the actual film.

A selection of alternate endings proves fairly redundant. All three alternate scenes are relatively lengthy and yet are very similar save for minor differences. I preferred some aspects of these scenes to aspects of the finished film's ending.

You also get trailers—an anamorphic-widescreen teaser (which is surprisingly and bluntly erotic) and a fullframe trailer. The DVD also offers music samples as DVD-ROM content.

The premise is enticing, but the execution is frustrating. I wanted to shout at the screen, "Come on, you want to push the envelope, you don't care about the film's MPAA rating, then go for it! Let's see some sexual fantasies!" But no, this movie is mostly talk and gives off very little heat.