Release Date: April 24, 2018
Director: Thomas Baldinger
MPAA Rating: NR
Run Time: 75 minutes
The adult film industry gets a consistently bad rap in how the “mainstream” entertainment represents it from up on its high horse of assumed moral superiority. When cinema suited for the multiplex takes an interest in its filthy unsimulated cousin, from the pretensions of criminal seediness levied in Paul Schrader’s Hardcore and PT Anderson’s Boogie Nights to the shaming for comedic purposes of Trey Parker’s Orgazmo and Luke Greenfield’s The Girl Next Door, the reason is always to look down on it somehow.
Now I’m not here to plant my proverbial flag in defense of this industry or deride these past depictions for fuelling a biased narrative against it because at the very least they were responding to specific periods and they came from a place of competent insight. I was merely highlighting these films because they’ve earned the right to look down on porn while the micro-budgeted, sterile, nothing comedy tangentially related to the subject Who’s Jenna…? absolutely does not.
Pornography factors into the life of financial advisor Jonathon Burke – not through his consumption or enjoyment of it, but instead from the script’s contrived methods of forcing the bland, uninteresting Jonathon to interact with the idea because, as we all know, porn is inherently funny. The titular Jenna is his current relationship and his roommate/coworker Andy – the lowly, virginal nerd archetype with an encyclopedic knowledge of porn that he proudly flaunts whenever he can – swears he has seen the busty blonde in adult films.
Compounded with this growing sense of dread that he might not really know the person he is dating as well as he thought, his Italian caricature of a boss is holding his promotion hostage unless he personally drops a client due to his disgust over their choice of profession. Yes, that profession is indeed adult films because this is that kind of wacky script that thinks it is building a connection between its plot threads while what it is actually doing is raising serious questions about why pornography as a concept features so prominently or at all when it barely matters.
There are no moral implications or tangible dilemmas to be raised by the film’s numerous name checks to porn because Jenna’s passing resemblance turns out to be just that, and the account of the delightfully named Kevin “The Hammer” Steele is proven legitimate. The only reason director Baldinger sets his thinly conceived romantic comedy in such close proximity to adult films is so he and the other (hopefully) few people with his ribald sense of humor can get a hearty chuckle at the very idea of people having sex on film.
Frequent cutaways to porn sets all with hack pun titles like “James Bondage: License to Fill” and “The 12 Lays of Christmas” confirms that Baldinger thinks adult film never progressed past the 1980s, when an unattractively hairy man like Kevin Steele can be considered a superstar like Ron Jeremy and all filming is of a comically low budget. It all amounts to a string of convenient half-jokes that amount to little in relation of the plot because, ultimately, the real narrative is much less interesting.
The actual drive of Who’s Jenna…? plays like a bawdy Scorsese film if, before beginning production, the director was beaten upside the head with a cudgel. Jonathon and his Italian boss meet with the heads of the firm, who are somehow more of an Italian stereotype than the boss, and the dialogue becomes polluted with widely gestured “ayys” and “ohhs” and more casual racism and homophobia than the plot knows what to do with. These bosses and heads of the firm being loudmouthed Italian stereotypes, drifting extremely close to being mafia parodies, amounts to nothing beyond an excuse for Baldering to add a couple more uses of “fuck” to his pitiful script.
The film is actually about Jonathon’s struggle to resist his boss’ wishes and gather enough proof of his blackmailing him to take legal action, but Baldinger’s scripts drags its heels through a lot of weak attempts at mobster comedy before we can get anywhere close to that resolution. Time wasting is second nature to Who’s Jenna…?, having to sit through several montages set to public-domain music; for a film that doesn’t even hit the 80-minute mark this is unforgivable.
I may have gotten on a soapbox about this film looking down on the adult film industry, but that is because, if I am to be completely honest, I have seen adult films that look and function more like “real” movies than Who’s Jenna…?. The technical issues that plague this production are too numerous to mention, but the most prominent had to to with the lifeless sense of set design and the apparent confusion over how sound mixing works.
The levels between characters speaking would fluctuate wildly as if half the cast was recorded using the mic on a DLSR camera while the other half was recorded clearly through post-production ADR. All while these characters share their incomprehensible dialogue, Baldinger shoots them in barren, featureless sets that ironically resemble the bare bones functionality of pornography sets. If I wasn’t so sure this decision was born out of a strained budget and lagging inspiration, I would almost say that was an intentional touch of character to an all-around dreary looking film.
Who’s Jenna…? has all the wooden acting, impoverished design and low ambition of porn but without any of the payoff. To imagine that Baldering thinks his work is more legitimate or respectable than what he mocks is almost too insulting to consider because his efforts here portray a laziness that sinks his film before it can last beyond the 30-minute mark.
None of its low-hanging fruit jokes at the expense of adult films land; the plot feels arbitrarily divided; and for having such a short run-time, it still manages to overstay its welcome well before it should. Never thought I would say this in a review, but you could honestly find better examples of cinema on PornHub than with the lowly Who’s Jenna…?
