Anybody also see the movie 'Closer' ...

... and get the idea that the Natalie Portman character could have been Marty from "Beautiful Girls," a half-decade older?

"BG" is set in the winter of 1995; "Closer" is set from roughly 2000-2004, although the exact timeline is a bit hard to follow sometimes.

The NP character in "Closer," who calls herself "Alice" throughout the movie, is very very similar to Marty: self-consciously cute, very self-referentially "hip," seemingly older for her years, full of arty/literary references, also very flirty at times (and in that movie, a rather ruthless sexual warrior in some cases).

It's not hard to imagine Marty, 5 years after "Beautiful Girls," getting out of high school, then blowing town from Knights Ridge, going to NYC, getting involved in stripping, then ending up in London as she basically tries to run from her past.

One thing at the VERY END of the movie (SPOILER!!! for anybody who hasn't seen it yet), it is revealed that her name is not "Alice" at all, but "Janie Jones," which also seems like a name a teen girl running away from a place like Knight's Ridge might adopt just to cover her tracks.