“Movie Review: “Second Chances
Second Chances, co-directed by Eddie Powell and Jacky St. James from a script by St. James, continues and improves on a series of thoughtful, professional, and often touching Romance porn movies.
The Romance genre had built up a head of steam even before someone sat down to name it. In the early years of the 21st century Stormy Daniels, riding high on appearances in Judd Apatow movies and even briefly running for Senator from Louisiana, wrote and directed a series of ambitious Hollywood-lite pornos for Wicked Pictures, high-concept vehicles for strong actors (like Steven St. Croix, whom St. James used so well in her Torn) who could handle the more-meaty-than-usual-look-I-said-meat scripts.
St. James picked up the ball and, with her production partner Eddie Powell, has put together a string of excellent ensemble pieces that ask a population not known for its acting chops porn performers to tread lightly, to handle scenery delicately, and to make us believe them. If it’s all an experiment, Second Chances shows us that the formula works!
Madison Presley (Carter Cruise, playing a woman whose name is inexplicably according to the Internet Adult Film Database not already a porn name) has never gotten over Josh (Chad White), the frat guy who broke her heart freshman year, even though her dorm room has a poster for New Sensations Romance Series movie The Friend Zone in it. Didn’t she even watch the movie and accept its teachings In my experience, the only real people who hang posters of porn movies in their real-life bedrooms are porn directors. Otherwise it’s just characters in New Sensations or Wicked movies.
Regardless, Josh Rochette is a dick and now Madison’s a senior, slinging drinks in a college bar. Cruise, with a Joey Lauren Adams scratch to her voice and a delightful red beans and rice didn’t miss her-ness, looks like the quintessential college bar waitress, and is another credit to St. James casting choices.
Commiserating with bartender Dean (Brandon Miller) and his distracting earrings, Madison tells the lovestruck oaf that Josh’s frat hazing directive had been to Get a girl to fall in love with him, with her, and then dump her.
What a yuppie shitstick, cries Dean, who then busts a move on Madison.
They do not take the relationship any further because Madison is too neurotic and because Dean has those earrings. But what is set up is a triangle suggested by the title that resolves in a very satisfying, forward-thinking way, especially for porn. There is even a nod to the radical notion of Not Fucking Girls:
MADISON ()
The ones that like you refuse to with you, and the ones that don’t like you with you and then donate to your charity three years later!
DEAN (with his earrings)
No, the ones who like you respect you.
(DEAN carries MADISON to bed, neither having sex with her nor taking off her shoes because he is used to a world filled with clunky unnecessary things)
Madison runs a pet rescue charity with her roommates Josh (Logan Pierce in the Dane Cross role, albeit without the dumb earrings because Dean is wearing them) and Olivia (the delightful Jessa Rhodes). The two of them hook up in a scene remarkable for the time it takes, accurately painting a picture of fuck-buddy sex in the era of hookup culture with its undercurrent of real longing and faux casualness. I loved this scene.
Meanwhile Josh has hooked up with Allie Haze, who in this movie is supposed to be a bitch. Haze mocks Madison’s pet rescue campaign and even calls her fat! But Josh, three years on, is beginning to see the mistake he made in letting this one go.
Another refreshing example of the time this movie takes is the briefest glimpse of Haze and Josh acting out that old Truly Tasteless Jokes bit of rolling someone in dough and going for the wet spot (‘Found it!’ says Josh).
It is no fault of Haze’s that this is the one role in Second Chances that doesn’t ring true. It’s essentially the fault of the Porno-Industrial Complex that demands each sex scene be of a quality that can be extracted from the movie and recompiled elsewhere. So if Haze’s character is a sorority bitch with an evil heart, we can’t see that reflected in the sex scene unless New Sensations plans to release a 4-hour comp of Evil-hearted Sorority Bitches. The upshot is that we are treated to a movie full of character development interspersed with interchangeable sex scenes where all that character flies out the window, and this happens in every porn movie. In a perfect world, the beautiful and sexy Allie Haze would have a shitty, ungenerous sex scene that would further convince Josh that he shouldn’t have treated Madison so cruelly.
Your vagina is as cold as your heart, Sorority Bitch, Josh might say, coming inside her, getting her pregnant, and ruining her life.
(Similarly, you can watch the four sex scenes of Second Chances on this site all by themselves, divorced from their larger context. The pictures we provide in our reviews are posed from the sex scenes though I added a few non-sex screen grabs which further discourages your appreciation of the movie as a whole as opposed to a collection of penetration shots. Oh well. This is not my Jerry Maguire moment; I’M JUST SAYING.)
You must watch the movie to see how it all turns out, but know that you’ll be rewarded throughout this sweet film full of puppies, bits of business (there are asides that St. James compares to Family Guy, but this is a much kinder movie than that) and to my surprise characters that grow on you. By the end, I had almost forgotten about Dean’s earrings because he was such a nice guy.
