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by Gwynne Watkins
Get your Paris Hilton doll here!

The Screengrab
by Bilge Ebiri
Today on Hooksexup's film blog: Snakes on a Plane, Species 4, Beerfest, and other, less highbrow, fare.

Boys Will Be British
by Stuart Sandford
Friends, lovers and others. /photography/

Open House
by Natasha Papadopoulou
The artist and her mother, naked. /photography/

Naughty Crosswords
by Jorge Stafford
This week: "Easy to Swallow" — drinks that go down smooth. /quickies/

Sex Advice from . . . Stay-at-Home Moms
by Shana Liebman
Q: What's the best remedy for a stagnant relationship?
A: A vacation, communication and a vibrator. /regulars/

Strangers
by Futoshi Miyagi
Snapshots of brief encounters. /dispatches/

Miss Information
by Erin Bradley
This week: My boyfriend is so amazing in bed that it's killing me. Plus, the new rule on rejecting a rejection. /advice/

Drama!
by Gwynne Watkins
Neurotic actors ��including Rachel McAdams and Paul Gross � spar and screw their way through Slings and Arrows. /tv/

Body Work
by Stephanie Serizy
At an upscale massage studio, I sold � and found � myself. /personal essay/ *secrets & lies issue*

Horoscopes
by Neal Medlyn
Your week in sex. /regulars/

The Henry Miller Awards
by Various
Vote for your favorite literary sex scene! This month: lawn care, tulip eaters and one hot tomato. /fiction/

Texas Star
by Julie Mitoraj
"Sex addicts have key phrases, as integral to the act as genitals. My key phrase was 'I like . . . ' followed by the other person's key phrase." /fiction/ *secrets & lies issue*

REVIEW: The Road to Guantanamo

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Your average teen road-trip movie subjects its hapless and trusting protagonists to a series of humiliations before dumping them out on the other side, bedraggled and weary. Eclectic auteur Michael Winterbottom's new film, half documentary and half recreation, is a bizarro version of one of those movies. The Road to Guantanamo's teenage subjects are as wide-eyed as a Jason Biggs character, but the punishment they receive for their naïveté goes far beyond the humiliation of getting caught with your dick in a pie. In Fall 2001, as the United States bombed the Taliban out of Afghanistan, British kids Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhul Ahmed wandered into the besieged country from a vacation in Pakistan, with the vague goal of offering humanitarian aid. A few wrong turns later. they were captured by the Northern Alliance, flown to Guantanamo and imprisoned for more than two years without trial.
It's the holiday from hell. That phrase may sound glib, but it's Winterbottom's, not mine. And as a reference point, it works in the movie's favor, normalizing our perceptions of the victims as they chat with each other in Pakistan, then thrusting them into a surreal nightmare. Though Bush and Rumsfeld only appear in brief news clips, the film's a firm rebuke to the rigid neo-con dichotomy of "them" and "us": them's us. Winterbottom has made a sharp political movie with almost no explicit politics. He simply puts us in the shoes of his characters and then explodes their world. — Peter Smith

DATE DVD: The Princess Bride: Buttercup and Dread Pirate Editions

Sometimes, you just need an excuse to watch a favorite film for the fourteenth time — something other than "Well, TNT's showing The Breakfast Club again with seventy-five commercial interruptions and no curse words." And that won't work on a date anyway. But these will: The Princess Bride: Buttercup Edition and The Princess Bride: Dread Pirate Edition. The sets are packaged with comic documentaries about Robin Wright's lovely Buttercup and Cary Elwes' courageous Westley, but you won't watch them. It's the movie itself that counts: you and your date saw it as kids and can still quote half of it without thinking, from Billy Crystal's "Have fun stormin' the castle!" to Mandy Patinkin's "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." But the romance is what makes this a great movie. Alongside all those slapstick bits and wisecracks, it's packed with over-the-top romantic lines that only swashbuckling silliness like this can deliver. My favorite is probably the moment Wright tells Elwes, "We'll never survive," and he says, "Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has." And he's right, of course. Wesley seemingly dies and then returns to Buttercup, demanding to know why she didn't wait for him. "Well, because you were dead," she deadpans. "Death cannot stop true love," Wesley purrs. "It can only delay it for a while." — Logan Hill

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