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Featured review
A PT debacle
At first seeming pretentious, Paul Thomas' "Acting Out" soon devolves into utter filler, a complete waste of time. What was evidently thought of as an experiment proves merely embarrassing.
It was released as just another Mercedez vehicle for Vivid Video, and she does okay in sex performer mode for two scenes, evidently delivering enough to keep her fans happy. But what PT has created is an obvious contradiction - a movie that self-consciously cancels itself out. If porn companies had standards and operated more like mainstream distributors, this feature would never have been released.
The premise is to have porn actors attending a "school for porn", sort of a camp (though physically it seems just to be someone's house and backyard) where they rehearse porn scenes' dialogue and then have sex after memorizing and "mastering" these brief set-up scenes. There's five scenes and five couples, with Mercedez performing two of them, making for a cast of nine.
Verite camera and seemingly natural lighting are part of the documentary style, which amounts to little more than minimiazing any budget to the bare bones. What could go wrong? Everything.
The dialogue for all the scenes is trite and uninteresting, the acting poor and the sex mechanical. With Paul Thomas's voice on the soundtrack interviewing the actors, the first scene lets Mercedez and co-star Tony Tedesci defend dialogue and story in porn as enhancing the central sex footage, pointing out that a couples audience appreciates watching a movie with a story plus sex rather than just watching people have sex on screen. I heartily agree, but this PT feature makes the lousy rehearsals and repetitions of lousy dialogue naturally boring, evidence against rather than supporting that argument. Plus the documentary approach makes any involvement with these "characters" impossible.
PT uses "Charlie Lords" and "Bo Edwards" pseudonyms for his directing and writing here, but he's guilty of skunking his loyal fans.
By a very odd coincidence, right after watching this video I randomly tuned onto PBS on my tv and watched the 2016 movie "Miss Stevens", which is about youngsters (plus adult Miss Stevens the chaperone) attending a drama competition where they perform scenes akin to an audition -basically the same starting point (without explicit sex of course) as PT's "Acting Out". The contrast between PT's amateur night self-indulgence and a real movie was staggering.
It was released as just another Mercedez vehicle for Vivid Video, and she does okay in sex performer mode for two scenes, evidently delivering enough to keep her fans happy. But what PT has created is an obvious contradiction - a movie that self-consciously cancels itself out. If porn companies had standards and operated more like mainstream distributors, this feature would never have been released.
The premise is to have porn actors attending a "school for porn", sort of a camp (though physically it seems just to be someone's house and backyard) where they rehearse porn scenes' dialogue and then have sex after memorizing and "mastering" these brief set-up scenes. There's five scenes and five couples, with Mercedez performing two of them, making for a cast of nine.
Verite camera and seemingly natural lighting are part of the documentary style, which amounts to little more than minimiazing any budget to the bare bones. What could go wrong? Everything.
The dialogue for all the scenes is trite and uninteresting, the acting poor and the sex mechanical. With Paul Thomas's voice on the soundtrack interviewing the actors, the first scene lets Mercedez and co-star Tony Tedesci defend dialogue and story in porn as enhancing the central sex footage, pointing out that a couples audience appreciates watching a movie with a story plus sex rather than just watching people have sex on screen. I heartily agree, but this PT feature makes the lousy rehearsals and repetitions of lousy dialogue naturally boring, evidence against rather than supporting that argument. Plus the documentary approach makes any involvement with these "characters" impossible.
PT uses "Charlie Lords" and "Bo Edwards" pseudonyms for his directing and writing here, but he's guilty of skunking his loyal fans.
By a very odd coincidence, right after watching this video I randomly tuned onto PBS on my tv and watched the 2016 movie "Miss Stevens", which is about youngsters (plus adult Miss Stevens the chaperone) attending a drama competition where they perform scenes akin to an audition -basically the same starting point (without explicit sex of course) as PT's "Acting Out". The contrast between PT's amateur night self-indulgence and a real movie was staggering.
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- lor_
- May 28, 2023
Details
- Runtime1 hour 30 minutes
- Color
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