Bree Mills has been trying for realistic, serious dramas of late, and this collaboration with actress Jane Wilde is dead serious in tone as it depicts her entry into porn, starting off as a webcam girl. In failing to dramatize situations (to make them more interesting), the movie just lies there, terminally boring.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, though "Stars" is the title of the movie. It's in the flashback script by Wilde and Mills, filled with cliches and relentlessly uninteresting dialogue. Some characters, like Tommy Pistol as an exploiter who flies Wilde out to California to presumably do a sugar daddy number on her, talk in such an empty headed manner as to bring back memories of '80s Valley Girl like, you know, speak. And the requisite four XXX scenes are standard porn performances, replete with standard pornspeak.
At 18 years old Julia (Jane Wilde) finds an entree to webcamming via an internet search, and hooks up with Kevin (Seth Gamble). He agrees to be her mentor and teach her all about being a webcam girl. As played by Seth Gamble, wearing shades and bearing some chin stubble in character, Kevin is a stereotypical pimp, a fake hipster who is really mindless and transparently sinister (despite Julia looking at him with stars in her eyes blinding her judgment). Cue some rap music on the soundtrack, and later have him pepper her with QAnon type conspiracy bullshit about lizard people and the like. He also auditions her with casting couch sex.
He buys her some sophisticated camera equipment and she's off to performing on camera for tips from her web fans, a boring depiction of the phenomenon. A boyfriend (Oliver Flynn) visits and Julia broadcasts herself having sex with him, getting her in big trouble with Kevin as it violate the website rules.
Out of the blue she gets a free trip to L. A. from Chris (Tommy Pistol), and goes to his "estate" with her attractive friend, an androgynous person (Cam Damage, a self-identified non-binary actor). After listening dutifully to Chris's moronic talk she find him blithely having three-way sex with Aiden Ashley and Ryan Reid, and realizes she's gotten herself into potential trouble. Rebuffing his obvious sexual come-on afterward, she and her pal are ready to fly home, and she manages to resist a dumb "why don't you stay?" come on from Ashley. Dramatic potential of this lengthy segment of the movie is completely resisted, it coming off as just dull.
Back home she's webcamming again but getting bored and depressed, just as the movie becomes boring and depressing. Kevin won't answer her calls and has stopped paying her the share of her webcam tips income she's entitled to. A bit of bathos is introduced when her dad (Dale Savage, a middle-aged Gay Porn actor known for "Gramps" roles) call her with news that grandma's dead, after which she comes clean about her recent stint as a webcam sex worker.
Dad encourages her to notify her website of her problems (i.e., not getting paid) and Kevin turns monster, threatening her and then dropping her like a hot potato. Julia's solution is to search for Porn industry contacts and soon we have a true if who-cares Happy ending of her flying to Chatsworth for an audition opposite Robby Echo, directed by no less than Bree Mills herself, playing a no-nonsense gonzo porn director. Bree renames her discovery Jane, and as they say, the rest is history.
This sugarcoating hit me as just another iteration of porn propaganda -making the case for the thousandth time of how wonderful the Adult industry can be. Sure, Jane formerly Julia suffered some hard knocks, but look how successful and glamorous she's become! To paraphrase Pistol's character: Wow! Let's party!
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