This movie will take you on a trip and bring you back. Amid swimming pools, nightclubs and booze, it's immersed in a sleazy world, ruled over by LA porn film maker par excellence, Burt Reynolds. The film itself seems trashy, as cheap as the lives around Burt (Jack Horner), but the intermingling disco and classical music and the smooth, slick, hallucinogenic scene changes, are interesting. Enough to compensate for the broken people and the orgy of fuckups? Dunno. The cast is spectacular, including Mark Wahlberg (whose vicissitudes as porn celebrity anchor the story), Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. So it’s a great cast, and Reynolds was nominated for an Oscar, but I still don’t get it. The film features failure, frustration, ambition, drugs, murder, and a sort of redemption, and was more about these than about porn. While there was a lot of purported porn, the relentless cutting away of anything juicy was bothersome. I think of the trend toward non-simulated sex in mainstream movie—e.g., The brown Bunny and Shortbus. Would this movie be better had it gone that route?
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