Stanley at his most pretentious, and failing badly

Presaging a similarly structured but 100 times the budget Brad Armstrong for Wicked clunker starring Jessica Drake titled "Underworld", "Breathe" has Vivid contract star Kira Kener on an operating table in hospital for the duration, voicing over nonsensical monologues as she awaits the birth of her baby, her life hanging in the balance.

Stanley's writing, as usual, is so pretentious it's a wonder that Adult Cinema fans sat through his features willingly. I've watched dozens of his videos recently, but back in his heyday a decade or so ago I never saw one, assiduously avoiding both Wicked and Vivid releases as I found them to be slick and idiotically tending to be mere vehicles for their contract ladies.

The scenes not taking place in the operating room are abstract beyond the pale -no sets whatsoever but instead blank white backdrops and soft- ish focus to apparently represent her mental images, not reality. Her self-pitying diatribes are hard to take, blaming everything on her husband TJ Cummings, who (like everyone except Kener) has no role to play. Taking "star vehicle" too literally, Stanley has made this something of a one-woman show for Kener, not a great actress but rather a great body with a great following (back when) among porno fans.

The delightful April offers some refreshment as Kener's sister (poor casting given their differing ethnicity) with whom TJ cheated on her, and in a typically beyond-delusional sequence she plays "Mother Nature" to Eric Masterson's "DNA", failing to impress me with Stanley's supposed erudition as they hump on a cheap alley-set. 

This nonsense continues, with crummy rhythm music score, for a mercifully brief 73 minutes, until a contrived, unconvincing Happy Ending is superimposed. Just before that finish (though the baby's fate got mislaid somewhere in David's script), we're treated to a typical audience-insult sequence, with Kener voicing over: "My life was just as dull and uneventful to me as it was to all you pathetic strokers out there, living in your parents' basements, whacking your dicks to this, wasting away, waiting to die. It must have looked boring to you as you fast-forwarded through it". 

Other than the basement cliché, the pathetic matter here is Stanley wasting his life and talent in porn, rather than pulling his socks up at some point and turning his florid penmanship toward mainstream screen writing, where rejection looms, unlike the contracts with Vivid or Wicked which permitted him to shoot any old thing his heart desired, irrespective of quality.

The drama genre is a broad category that features stories portraying human experiences, emotions, conflicts, and relationships in a realistic and emotionally impactful way. Dramas delve into the complexities of human life, often exploring themes of love, loss, morality, societal issues, personal growth, with the aim to evoke an emotional response from the audience by presenting relatable and thought-provoking stories.

Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)

While a young woman is giving birth, she finds herself flashing back to key moments in her life. Most of these revolve around sex and the choices she made.

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Breathe

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