What’s limper than a self-referential indie about an aspiring filmmaker struggling to make a movie? One set in the superdirty porn industry! Jody (Sobieski) parlays her NYU cinema degree into a stagnant noncareer out in L.A., until she gets a profitable gig working as an in-house editor. The catch is that she’s cutting smut for an adult-entertainment company, a job that makes her oh so uncomfortable because she wants a legit mainstream career and, also, is a sexually awkward bust in the bedroom.
Cue the loads of porn acronyms, hoary stage names (Jake B. Bigg? Dick Harder? Really?) and industry cameos by, among others, desperate-for-attention Ron Jeremy. In keeping with this rom-com’s sagging conventionality, such raunchiness embellishes a tender love story between Jody and Jeff (Davis), a director who’s as romantically challenged as she is frigid. Even with an overabundance of preposterous plot points, nothing proves quite as implausible as Jeff’s burning desire to produce, la Boogie Nights’s Jack Horner, highbrow porno fit for art houses. Still, it’s the wooden plotting and cornball sentimentality—and, most unpleasant of all, the full-frontal nudity of Jamie Kennedy—that truly make this AVN-themed fairy tale, ahem, hard to swallow.—Nick Schager
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