[Christina Ricci] has signed on for the porn-tinged comedy ["Born to Be a Star"] that Adam Sandler co-wrote and is producing...I'm going to go ahead and take a wild and crazy guess that, since this is a comedy and an Adam Sandler production, Born to Be a Star will not include any commentary on the exploitative nature of the porn industry (like, say, Boogie Nights did), except, perhaps, to show how hee-larious it is when men are objectified like women in straight porn.
The story centers on a small-town nerd who stumbles upon a family secret: His quiet and demure parents were famous porn stars in the 1970s. This motivates him to leave Northern Iowa for Hollywood, hoping to follow in their footsteps and fulfill his destiny as the biggest adult-film star in the world.
Ricci, the female lead, is the guy's innocent girlfriend.
Despite Sandler and Giarraputo's involvement, the movie is not a Happy Madison production but rather by porn title-friendly entity Miles Deep Prods. (Link)
Which I point out in order to note that films made in the Sandler universe (like this one, or the recently-reviewed Rob Schneider shitfest Big Stan) are not merely not feminist, but explicitly anti-feminist, in the sense that they consistently cast men into situations experienced predominantly in real life by women (sexual exploitation, rape) while diminishing the emotional gravity and upping the laughs.
In Sandler universe films, gender roles are reversed so that women become sexual aggressors, men live in mortal fear of rape, dudes are sexually exploited, and it's all played for laughs, while women's experiences are rendered invisible. Because, of course, women's real experiences of sexual aggression, rape, and sexual exploitation aren't funny. Which is to say nothing of the casual homophobia and erasure of the constant threat of attendant gay-bashing in all of these films, usually in furtherance of the predatory gay trope.
The end result is a steady service of misrepresentations about sex-related issues packaged specially for young men at precisely the time they're beginning to embark on the beginning of their sexual lives. Weaned on a diet of rape apologia, victimless sexploitation, and aggressive gays, it's no wonder that most American straight men have not even the most rudimentary understanding of the realities of our sexual culture for women and gay men, nor a stitch of empathy for either group.
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