Eighteen-year-old Angelina (Ashley Hinshaw) lives in Long Beach, U.S.A, is bright but has no patience with school, and stays with her sister, her alcoholic mother Phyllis (Lili Taylor) and her mother's partner, a perpetually furious bully who cannot stand that Phyllis can barely look after herself without Angelina's help. In spite of her family's dependence on her, the girl is keen to escape to the big city; she gets a hint of how she could do so when she is alone with her boyfriend and after spending some time getting amorous he suggests she could make a lot of money by taking her clothes off in photographs.
This should render the movie with a note of authenticity, and it's true when Angelina gets around to fleeing her old life and is finally persuaded to not only to doff her togs but indulge in sexual acts for the camera there was a convincing evenhandedness about the scenes, where we could understand that the makers did not wish to condemn those who worked in this business. However, if everything was fine and dandy then that did not generate much narrative tension, so for all the perhaps refreshing depiction of porn as a way to earn a respectable living, that way was unavoidably established as something of a desperate measure for most of those involved if our heroine was anything to go by.
Even if you hadn't seen them before, the plotline here did come across as hackneyed and you could find very little to surprise you as Angelina's mother tracks her down and proves an embarrassment, or she gets a slightly sleazy lawyer boyfriend who eventually disapproves when she decides to have actual sex on camera, said boyfriend played by James Franco with a degree of inevitability. A more original note was struck by porn director Heather Graham, who is in a lesbian relationship which moves towards pointing out how being in this line of work can put a woman off men forever, but then she gets to play out an angry sex scene with the actress playing her girlfriend where again you're not sure how you're supposed to react. A less original note was Dev Patel as the gay best friend who ends up understandably confused what with chastely sharing Angelina's bed. What you were left with was a very deliberately paced yarn remaining steadfastly unilluminating, sort of like Showgirls without the laughs, and in spite of the subject matter was curiously dull. Music by Jeff Russo.
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