2 out of 5

Director: Michael Grecco

Porn is interesting. Whether or not it disgusts, so many different aspects of the business or the psychology of viewers / participants offer topics ripe with potential for a film. Unfortunately “Naked Ambition” doesn’t take this too far, instead acting more as a vehicle to hopefully drum up some interest in photopgrapher Michael Grecco’s coffee table book of the same name. After Grecco attends an AVN awards ceremony, he becomes caught up in the weird divide of glitz and grime that the world of porn offers, and seeks to capture it with his camera. So he tells us again and again, as he photographs stars any casual porn fan will probably recognize. And there is something interesting floating beneath the surface, something Grecco keeps poking at as he tries to get his various models to balance between humanity and sexuality in the photos, stopping to snap pics of the oddly beautiful dildo or strangely contrasting sex-toy manufacturer and their product. But over the course of 81 minutes Grecco keeps mentioning that he can’t quite get the hook for his book yet, and the film feels the same. There’s respect for the industry here, but it doesn’t push it far enough to juxtapose the human / sex-fantasy elements in any intriguing way, feeling like an E! cover (or even more washed down than that) of AVN. The movie attempts to build a narrative around the one or two stars it focuses on, but it’s forced, and an “outburst” by Evan Stone later in the film, while probably out-of-context and seeming sort of hypocritical, does underline that Grecco’s worry about not having that hook is why the movie doesn’t matter either. It’s just a commercial, and a pretty poor one. It’s not one star because there are moments that do feel genuine, that do broach, perhaps, what the photographer was hoping to achieve, but it never congeals. And as mentioned, though it strays FAR from the dark corners of porn, it’s nice to see a film that tries to treat the industry normally.