Unlovable

I knew I was in deep, deep trouble at the outset of David Stanley's "Unlovable" when the video's title was displayed on screen with an "AKA the loneliness of the long-distance pornographer". Yes, dear Stanley was about to foist on his most serious (perhaps ill-advised) fan a film school exercise.

Sure, Tom Courtenay in Tony Richardson's 1962 classic movie being riffed in that AKA gave one of my favorite performances of all-time. But pornographer Stanley invoking it is merely pretentious on his part.

So we get a true mish-mash up there with the most self-indulgent Stanley videos extant. He opens up with a parody of Silent Filmmaking, as the stars Tawny Roberts (Vivid contract girl) and Eric Masterson are in period costumes in a black & white silent scene (with rinky-tink piano aping a piano player at a movie house in the Silent Era) mugging at the camera cutely.

This is followed by the video proper, a hoary yarn (in the BTS short subject included as Bonus on the DVD Stanley describes it as a "chestnut') of a jilted bride. But it's all an excuse for David to show off his attempts at cleverness, which are merely irritating, especially for me at approximately the half-way point of wading through his 100 or so video and DVD features.

Low point perhaps is when in an intimate conversation scene (shot with overly extreme close-ups) Tawny tells Eric "I'm not like those other bitches like David Stanley used to date a fu*king bitch named Ash". Having suffered through many an indulgent movie by Woody Allen or Henry Jaglom I'm prepared for self-referential nonsense, but Stanley hit a new low.

Evan Stone is worse than usual, wearing novelty store buck teeth to make a nuisance of himself at a cafe early on (rude to the waitress played by an actress stage named (per the end credits) "Agent Aeon". He's playing Eric's roommate, while Tawny is cast as porn star Tawny Roberts (but of course a fictionalized alternate version of herself), and Eric turns out to be a big fan. They meet-cute when he and Evan are drunk, Tawny sharing a taxi ride with the boys and her friend Holly Hollywood.

Evan gets to hump Holly of course, but Eric is only permitted to verbally express his undying love for Tawny. He has a stack of her VHS shows for Vivid lying around his apartment including a cheap plug for Stanley's feature "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World", so the two of them watch her in a favorite scene, which turns out to be original material instead, shot on the third and last day of making "Unlovable" (we discover from the BTS documentation).

Eric gets cold feet and bolts from their wedding leaving guests (including easy to spot among the extras Voodoo and Randy Spears) hanging. He heads to the stretch limo with the "Just Married" sign on the back and is driven away, cuing an asinine erotic fantasy in which David Stanley himself shows up directing a lesbian sex scene on Eric's lap (!) of Tawny humping Holly.

The wedding guests at a party, sans Eric, have sex, Voodoo of course humping his real-life wife Nicole Sheridan (who hopes he will marry her) and Randy Spears cuddling with uncredited guest star Sharon Kane (handy, as she's the show's production assistant). Tawny isn't left out, as she gets to have a threesome with Chris Cannon and Rick Patrick, while covering herself with wedding cake, the icing of which on her breasts mingles with the boys' cum.

Eric returns to fetch Tawny at the end and we get another bit of crummy Silent Movie parody of them, leading to final intertitles cynically reading: "and they lived..." - "until they didn't". Yes, David Stanley the long-distance pornographer is not just a movie buff but also a self-taught philosopher about life, death and the human condition. Instead of my usual wondering why he never got a shot at making a mainstream film, I guess I should have contemplated why he never won a Pulitzer Prize.