'Pornography: A Thriller'

Writer-director David Kittredge bit off more than he could chew in "Pornography: A Thriller" (2010). He mixed together three stories, doubling the actors in two of them. None of the three has a satisfying or clear ending, which might not bother some viewers, but which bothered me.

Cinematographer Ivan Corona provided a different look, both in color tonality and in lenses/frames for the three, and deserves considerable praise. Given that the plots are so murky, I won't "spoil" them, but will only mention their setups.

In the first, Mark Anton (Jared Grey), whose first gay porn movie was a big success, is lured by $40,000 (in late 1970s dollars) for a videotaped interview, which turns out to be conducted through a voice-disguising machine (echoes of "Videodrome").

Fifteen years later, a graduate student in culture studies, Michael (Matthew Montgomery), is researching '70s gay porn (which he much prefers to present day, mechanized couplings on screen). Many of the performers are dead, and many of those still living don't want to talk to him. By an epic coincidence, Michael and his boyfriend move into an apartment in which Mark Anton was filmed, and finds a tape of what looks like a Mark Anton snuff film, which melts down almost immediately.

Later still, in the San Fernando Valley, an aging porn star, Matt (Pete Scherer, "Long Term Relationships"), whose contract is up, wants to direct the Mark Anton story with himself playing Anton. The viewer sees dialogue already heard in the first story being written, a line reading, and a scene of shooting. As a reward for those who are like Mark Anton's presumption of his audience, there is full frontal nudity at, and near the end, of the third section. (We heard "This is what you want to see, isn't it?" in the first story.)

The actors are pretty good, particularly Jared Grey and Pete Scherer (both of whom were in "The Art of Being Straight" before playing Mark Anton here), Walter Delmar (as the boyfriend in the second story, and co-star of the movie within a movie in the third) and Wyatt Fenner (as a student, not in his silent part as an angel, though its pretentiousness is not his fault).

The doubling of characters, the murkiness of storytelling, and the unsatisfying ending may remind some of David Lynch. In a bonus interview, Kittredge says he drew on the work of many others, with homages to Lynch being less than to Brian De Palma. The fascination with changing technologies and the overall menace seem to me to echo David Cronenberg, especially (but not only) "Videodrome."

The "making of" feature stresses that the multilocation, triple-storied movie had to be shot in 16 days. I'm not convinced that more time or a larger budget would have solved what seems to me the major problem, which is the murkiness of the script. Time spent producing an ending would have cost less than another two weeks of shooting.

I have to admit that I don't remember how "Boogie Nights" ends, and I know that some viewers did not like the ending of "The Fluffer" (I thought it was perfect). Perhaps I will remember characters from "Pornography" years from now, as I do five (Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Mark Wahlberg, Don Cheadle, and, unfortunately, Philip Seymour Hoffman) from "Boogie Nights." I guess that time will tell, but for right now, I am frustrated by the non-endings in this movie.