"Moxie" is one of writer-director David Stanley's stranger movie combinations: mixing (in the most morbid fashion) XXX content with his search for the meaning of life. No, he's not in a satirical Monty Python mood, but behaving more like a frustrated artist.
Slaving away shooting porn is an unlikely place for a philosopher or intellectual, but Stanley never got the memo. So hiding in his catalogue of over a hundred porn features, mainly for the major Wicked and Vivid labels, are nascent works of art ruined by the same XXX cliches that made their creation economically possible. McLuhan famously declared "The medium is the message", and by being relegated to the medium of porn Big Dave's work is destroyed.
So we have an anti-entertaining saga of Cheyne Collins in a hospital after a driving accident, waiting in his bloodied shirt for his brand-new wife Kira Kener to emerge from a coma. In surreal fashion we see flashbacks and erotic fantasies involving the two of them, presented and performed in cold, clinical fashion. Though the conceit of Kener playing several roles is a non-starter, it becomes clear what Stanley's trying to do. He likes to use black humor to sugarcoat his more serious messages, but overall it's a tough slog watching this one.
A sustained riff recalls that clever movie "What About Bob?". Cheyne is down in the dumps, feeling sorry for himself as his wife lays dying when an oddball character played by Tyce Bune starts chatting with him as they wait in the hospital and will not leave Cheyne alone. He drags him to a bar for drinks, where Stanley insists on inserting a reel or so of lesbian porn as busty Vivid regular Renee LaRue humps Chennin Blanc on TV, shot on a bare set with a display skeleton in the background. Then he forces Cheyne to accompany him to a back room in the bar where he pays $300 for a session with a prostitute in the seediest of surroundings -surprise: the hooker is played by Kira Kener --Cheyne's dying wife!
Tyce's tag line, repeated over and over, is "Hey, don't make me hurt you" whenever Cheyne politely tries to extricate himself from Bune's obnoxious company. However, Bune does deliver a classic scene late in the show when he reveals his erratic behavior has been caused by the death in hospital that morning of his wife in childbirth, who was sharing the room with Kener. He acts this scene of pathos superbly.
Slaving away shooting porn is an unlikely place for a philosopher or intellectual, but Stanley never got the memo. So hiding in his catalogue of over a hundred porn features, mainly for the major Wicked and Vivid labels, are nascent works of art ruined by the same XXX cliches that made their creation economically possible. McLuhan famously declared "The medium is the message", and by being relegated to the medium of porn Big Dave's work is destroyed.
So we have an anti-entertaining saga of Cheyne Collins in a hospital after a driving accident, waiting in his bloodied shirt for his brand-new wife Kira Kener to emerge from a coma. In surreal fashion we see flashbacks and erotic fantasies involving the two of them, presented and performed in cold, clinical fashion. Though the conceit of Kener playing several roles is a non-starter, it becomes clear what Stanley's trying to do. He likes to use black humor to sugarcoat his more serious messages, but overall it's a tough slog watching this one.
A sustained riff recalls that clever movie "What About Bob?". Cheyne is down in the dumps, feeling sorry for himself as his wife lays dying when an oddball character played by Tyce Bune starts chatting with him as they wait in the hospital and will not leave Cheyne alone. He drags him to a bar for drinks, where Stanley insists on inserting a reel or so of lesbian porn as busty Vivid regular Renee LaRue humps Chennin Blanc on TV, shot on a bare set with a display skeleton in the background. Then he forces Cheyne to accompany him to a back room in the bar where he pays $300 for a session with a prostitute in the seediest of surroundings -surprise: the hooker is played by Kira Kener --Cheyne's dying wife!
Tyce's tag line, repeated over and over, is "Hey, don't make me hurt you" whenever Cheyne politely tries to extricate himself from Bune's obnoxious company. However, Bune does deliver a classic scene late in the show when he reveals his erratic behavior has been caused by the death in hospital that morning of his wife in childbirth, who was sharing the room with Kener. He acts this scene of pathos superbly.