Are We in Love

Kelly Kline is gorgeous and empathetic in "Are We in Love", but filmmaker David Stanley does a terrible job with rom-com material so corny and bathetic to suggest he's merely thumbing his nose at the audience. It wouldn't be the first time in his checkered and now seemingly past-tense porn career.

It amounts to the XXX equivalent of watching one of those awful Nicholas Sparks screen adaptations - a groan-a-thon in the making. We're presented with the lovey-dovey couple of Kline and Chris Cannon, with the movie bookended by scenes of them cuddling in bed in which Chris enunciates the title phrase. What transpires in the overlong 109 minutes between (Stanley several years earlier at Vivid Video was able to churn out this sludge in concise 70-minute helpings) is a look at the ups and downs of romance, as viewed by a true cynic. I didn't sense an ounce of sincerity at any point in the proceedings.

Stanley's continuity is poor, headed up by a totally random interjection of a lesbian sex scene starring wonderful Mia Smiles and blondie Kim Kane right in the middle of a stupid "brothers chatting" scene between Chris and director Stanley himself. The editing is so bad it plays like a mistake.

In the "All Access" Making of featurette on the DVD, Stanley reveals that he was inspired by his relationship with his own brother to toss in a couple of scenes wherein he hams it up with an impression of how his brother talks, as if anybody in the audience could get the point. So we watch him in the second meeting with Chris swear a lot and deliver verbal nonsense that makes sense only to himself and has nothing to do with the other characters or story. Just as he did at Vivid, Stanley takes his Wicked contract (fortunately both have long since expired) as a license to steal or at least indulge - providing silliness for self-amusement that those biggie porn companies tolerated as long as he handed the requisite number of XXX scenes to make up a video for release.