If Stephen Dorff’s career never soared as high as he might have liked, the fact that it’s getting more interesting all the time must be some consolation. For someone who might not be considered a big movie star, Dorff has the distinct movie-star habit of seeming to play himself, even when he’s playing a big movie star. In Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and now in Brake, he appears to be the same flannel- and faded jeans-clad heartbreaker from the Aerosmith years. Dorff had the persona in place from the start; it’s the pictures that got small.
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It's not like Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star aspires to be Citizen Kane, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail or even Wedding Crashers. All it wants to be is a silly, raunchy comedy about the rise of an extremely unlikely adult-film actor. That it fails so spectacularly in this regard makes it almost something special -- not only is Bucky Larson incredibly unfunny, it's also squeamish in a manner that makes you wonder if either writers Adam Sandler (who produced the film via his Happy Madison company), Allen Covert and Nick Swardson (who plays Bucky) have somehow never actually seen porn, or if they subcontracted the script out to a group of 8-year-olds with only the vaguest idea of what it entails. The latter would explain how incidental sex is to what's theoretically a movie all about it, from an early scene in which we learn that our hero has never masturbated or even heard of the concept, to the porn career he establishes, in which he never actually comes into contact with his costars.
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In order to catch Stephen Dorff and Nick Swardson during Comic-Con, Movieline had to brave the converted parking lot Camp Playboy, an artificial turf-lined space where dozens of scantily clad Playboy model types (day players, mostly) flitted about during our chat about Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, in which Swardson plays the world's unlikeliest porn star. In other words: The perfect setting.
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