Sex and Breakfast
Jun. 13th, 2013 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckro“Black comedy” is a pretty good way to categorize this film. There are plenty of things to laugh at, and doing so will often leave you uncomfortable. For a movie with “sex” in the title, this movie isn’t particularly sexy. It’s introspective, sure, and there’s an argument for it being romantic, but mostly it’s sad. It’s about two relationships that are breaking down, and that theme carries even through the sexy parts. (Yes, I know, they managed to make a movie where Eliza Dushku has group sex fairly unsexy. I’m impressed, too.)
Though Macaulay Culkin “officially retired” from acting in the mid-90s, things he’s done for fun since then are generally reliable as interesting, if not necessarily blockbuster material. (See also, Saved, which is glorious.) He’s actually a good actor, something you wouldn’t realize if you’d only seen his child acting career.
Alexis Dziena is presented as a 20-something with her own apartment. Granted, this is influenced by my last seeing her play a teenager on Invasion, but she looks 15, and that hurt my immersion in the movie. She’s not a bad counterpoint to Culkin (who only looks 20-ish himself), but I felt vaguely dirty watching her being awkwardly sexy, especially with Becker and Dushku, who do look their ages.
Eliza Dushku, incidentally, is a middling actress with an amazing ability to seek out projects with serious potential. The hit rate for delivering on that potential is 50/50 at best, but I’m willing to at least try anything she’s connected to. And it’s not that she’s a bad actress, it’s just that the weakness in her performances comes out when she’s up against someone who’s a level above her—Sarah Geller when Buffy and Faith body-swap, or several of the other Actives in Dollhouse.
Tracie Thoms appears in one scene as an unnamed character, but she is worth everything they paid her and more. Now I want to see an entire of movie of just Tracie Thoms Snarks At Everybody. It can double-feature with River Tam Beats Up Everybody.
Now, the concept of the movie (“group sex therapy” that helps couple revitalize their relationships) is a stretch to my suspension of disbelief—not that people wouldn’t do it, but that it would actually work more than one time out of 100, and that Dr. Wellbridge would still have a license to practice psychiatry. All that said, she specifically tells them she doesn’t match newcomers to experienced couples, because they can be “a little intense”. So she just puts new couples in a room together and tells them to go to it. How is anyone supposed to learn anything useful when nobody has a clue what they’re doing? Heck, if Heather hadn’t initiated things, they probably would have sat around for an hour making awkward small talk and checking their smartphones. (For that matter, they might have been doing it wrong—“group sex,” which was advertised, and “partner swap”, which is what they did, are not the same thing.)
Wouldn’t it make more sense to match up new and experienced couples, have several group sessions so they can get comfortable with each other in a controlled environment, then put them in a room? Or is the entire point of this exercise supposed to be that sex with virtual strangers vetted only by an unethical psychiatrist somehow helps your relationship?
Overall: This is an interesting movie in that it gave me things to think about. I’m not sure it manages to be “art”, and it’s too depressing to be a popcorn flick, but the characters are solid, and there’s a spark of something there.
Though Macaulay Culkin “officially retired” from acting in the mid-90s, things he’s done for fun since then are generally reliable as interesting, if not necessarily blockbuster material. (See also, Saved, which is glorious.) He’s actually a good actor, something you wouldn’t realize if you’d only seen his child acting career.
Alexis Dziena is presented as a 20-something with her own apartment. Granted, this is influenced by my last seeing her play a teenager on Invasion, but she looks 15, and that hurt my immersion in the movie. She’s not a bad counterpoint to Culkin (who only looks 20-ish himself), but I felt vaguely dirty watching her being awkwardly sexy, especially with Becker and Dushku, who do look their ages.
Eliza Dushku, incidentally, is a middling actress with an amazing ability to seek out projects with serious potential. The hit rate for delivering on that potential is 50/50 at best, but I’m willing to at least try anything she’s connected to. And it’s not that she’s a bad actress, it’s just that the weakness in her performances comes out when she’s up against someone who’s a level above her—Sarah Geller when Buffy and Faith body-swap, or several of the other Actives in Dollhouse.
Tracie Thoms appears in one scene as an unnamed character, but she is worth everything they paid her and more. Now I want to see an entire of movie of just Tracie Thoms Snarks At Everybody. It can double-feature with River Tam Beats Up Everybody.
Now, the concept of the movie (“group sex therapy” that helps couple revitalize their relationships) is a stretch to my suspension of disbelief—not that people wouldn’t do it, but that it would actually work more than one time out of 100, and that Dr. Wellbridge would still have a license to practice psychiatry. All that said, she specifically tells them she doesn’t match newcomers to experienced couples, because they can be “a little intense”. So she just puts new couples in a room together and tells them to go to it. How is anyone supposed to learn anything useful when nobody has a clue what they’re doing? Heck, if Heather hadn’t initiated things, they probably would have sat around for an hour making awkward small talk and checking their smartphones. (For that matter, they might have been doing it wrong—“group sex,” which was advertised, and “partner swap”, which is what they did, are not the same thing.)
Wouldn’t it make more sense to match up new and experienced couples, have several group sessions so they can get comfortable with each other in a controlled environment, then put them in a room? Or is the entire point of this exercise supposed to be that sex with virtual strangers vetted only by an unethical psychiatrist somehow helps your relationship?
Overall: This is an interesting movie in that it gave me things to think about. I’m not sure it manages to be “art”, and it’s too depressing to be a popcorn flick, but the characters are solid, and there’s a spark of something there.
