Title: Time for Briana Studio: Vivid Director: Chi Chi LaRue Cast: Briana Banks, Lanny Barbie, Erik Everhard, Julian, Nicole Sheridan, Chris Slater, Even Stone, Texas Presley, Voodoo Genres:: Feature, Blondes, Blowjobs, Porn-star Condoms: Sometimes Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

“What is Time? A measurement? A dream? Does it even exist at all?,” asks Briana after the title sequence. “I’ve always been fascinated by the passage of time,” she reads off the script. “How we structure our lives around the movement of the clock’s hands.” Then, she quickly segues into the equally general category of Memory: “I can close my eyes remembering experiences I’ve had in the past, and suddenly…it’s like I’m there all over again.” Briana reclines on the bed, below a giant prop-clock and remembers……getting railed by Erik Everhard!

Time For Briana is really a selection of five scenes that Banks “remembers” while she is thinking and journaling about the concept of Time. That’s lots of Briana, and the entire DVD banks on the hope that you find her attractive and want to watch her have sex. If you don’t, you’re out of luck. How did things get this way?

Steven Hirsch founded Vivid and released his first video in 1984. It was called Ginger and starred Ginger Lynn. Lynn was signed to an exclusive contract with Vivid. The motivation behind this was completely market driven. If you, as a pornography fan, really liked Ginger, then you’d have to succumb to Vivid Entertainment. Hirsch based his idea loosely around the old studio system, when studios would have contracts with certain bankable stars. This way you came back for the stars and the style, Hirsch wants you to trust Vivid like your parents (or grandparents) trusted Warner Brothers or Universal. This is a double-edged sword, because porn is a fickle business and what is in one day is out the other. Finally, this cliché fits all too well: Different strokes for different folks.

This film is all Banks, all the time, and with that you get a lot of the same. Each of the five scenes involves five elements: cunnilingus, blow job, missionary, doggy-style and cum shot. In a silent admission that the stars were working off the same structure, the DVD even has a feature where you can just watch the clips of any of the five elements, so if you want to see five scenes of doggy-style in a row, you get it.

The three post-Everhard scenes pretty much run the gamut of normal porn. Scene two with Texas Presely features a dark-haired Briana in a pool-hall; the formula is above. The only slight variations are the addition of a second man (Chris Slater) in scene four and a second woman (Lanny Barbie) in the last scene.

The first scene was, by far, the favorite. Everhard starts vocalizing like he’s about tp shoot his wad (and his career) into Banks, doggy-style. They are different from other Everhard pre-ejaculatory sounds. Briana notices it, turns around and smiles at him. Everhard tries to resume, but in a clever cover, yells: “Shit!” spanks her and goes to finger her ass. The shot lingers on Briana and a faint smile returns.

That’s fun! That’s the edge that is missing in the other scenes, the element that makes Briana more than another blonde porn star. One humanizing moment that makes the sex that much hotter.

Briana isn’t doing for Vivid what Humphrey Bogart did for Warner Brothers, but she’s doing the deed the only way Briana knows how, and if that pushes your buttons, then return to Vivid. However, she is dealing with a system unknown to the studios of old, a nation-wide, billion dollar industry in a time when actresses bouncing from studio to studio is the norm. In the 80s, when Vivid was signed, they were dealing with VHS tapes with a public that couldn’t download hundreds of porn videos right to their desktop. Where the Hollywood studios of the golden age learned to adapt to a free-agency market with wider distribution, the likes of Briana seem frozen in Time.