Buck Angel Superstar

Dana Vespoli once again demonstrates her ability to extend the range of Adult Cinema content with this surprisingly moody, even downbeat "portrait" of trans-male XXX pioneer and activist Buck Angel. I was expecting something on the order of Muhammad Ali starring as himself in Columbia's "The Greatest" from 40 years back but Dana outfoxed me.

What she has done is turn the biopic concept on its head, and introduced something new & serious to Adult. Buck's film work is obviously an acquired taste, as he is the mirror image of the popular TS genre, only a very masculine looking, bald, heavily tattooed and mustachioed guy who turns out to have a vagina and distended clitoris -perhaps the subject of a "Crying Game" comeback vehicle for formerly top mainstream director Neil Jordan.

But Dana is a far more interesting (for me) director than Jordan, though no one has sought fit to back her in a mainstream project. So why not cast Buck Angel as Buck Angel, just as Clint Eastwood around the same time used the real-life heroes to star as themselves in "The 15:17 to Paris".

But she carefully sabotages the "love letter" approach of such biopics by casting a dark, almost pitiful pall over Buck's existence. We see frequent aerial shots of his lavish mansion (rivaling the look of very similar "Immoral Proposal" mansion, the most-used porn location of the past decade for glamorous backgrounds) and Buck has four sex scenes with beautiful trans-female stars there in fictional vignettes.

Yet he is always tired, to the point of exhaustion, both at the beginning of each scene, and after the orgasms have subsided. What to make of this, other than Dana's fictional imagination.

She hedges all bets by casting such fabulous superstars in support, with her (and Nica Noelle's) label Transsensual bringing out the A team. Chanel Santini has two scenes, vaginal sex with Buck and then a wild threesome with him and Aubrey Kate in which Kate services both of them.

Tori Mayes, one of my favorites in the troupe, pulls a switcheroo as a groupie fan of Buck's who gives him a massage and then hands him a handy strap-on dildo so that he can do her instead of the expected vice versa. Feature ends with Buck phoning "Liz" (some Vespoli in-joke I presume) to order up a prostitute, and icon Mandy Mitchell shows up to lend a sympathetic ear to his sadness, and then polish him off with more trans-female humps trans-male sex. A world-weary Angel departs the mansion in a limo, on the road again for a very downbeat but moving ending.

Comic relief is provided by Dana herself, hilarious portraying a TV commercial director trying to coax a performance out of Buck as he hawks his real-life sex toy for trans-males. The dialog is priceless in this NonSex sequence, as Dana encourages him to play the simple stand-up spiel as a sea captain: "like Captain Ahab, only sexier", and then calls a wrap to the shoot when he merely does his wooden speech one more time. She also makes extreme fun of her status as a pretentious director, as self-effacing a cameo as Buck's willingness to present himself to the public as a depressed individual, despite his activism on behalf of LBGTQ progress and status as Adult's only trans-male "superstar".