Sex and Death 101 DVD Review
Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 07.11.2008
After watching this one, I'll take the latter, thanks
Sex and Death 101 DVD Review
Directed by: Daniel Waters Written by: Daniel Waters
Starring: Simon Baker - Roderick Blank Winona Ryder - Gillian De Raisx Leslie Bibb - Miranda Robert Wisdom - Alpha Tanc Sade - Beta Patton Oswalt - Fred Mindy Cohn - Trixie Dash Mihok - Lester Neil Flynn - Zack Thom Bishops - Malcolm Corinne Reilly - Lizzie Sophie Monk - Cyntha Rose Marshall Bell - Victor Rose III Rob Benedict - Bow-Tie Bob Julie Bowen - Fiona Frances Fisher - Hope Hartlight Natassia Malthe - Bambi Pollyanna McIntosh - Thumper Indira Varma - Devon Server Cindy Pickett - Roderick's mother Jessica Kiper - Carlotta Valdes Keram Malicki-Sanchez - Master Bitchslap
Domestic Gross: $23,563 Worldwide Gross: $971,250
DVD Release Date: 7/1/2008 Running Time: 100 minutes
Rated R for strong sexual content and language
Comedy is all about finding the right subject to laugh about, and there’s little that is funnier then sex. The obsession that America has with the supposedly taboo subject of sex is astronomical, and one need not look any closer then the American comedy to find this to be true. Sex has been the subject of comedy in the movies as far back as 1959’s Rock Hudson/Doris Day film Pillow Talk. Of course, the more risqué sex comedies wouldn’t come until later, with films like National Lampoon’s Animal House, Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds being among the forerunners in that category. The entire romantic comedy genre has been taken over by the topic as sex has slowly become less taboo to talk about, and true screwball sex comedies are a rarer thing these days, with the exception of films like American Pie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and the abysmal Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.
Meanwhile, along came Daniel Waters. Waters is no stranger to Hollywood, being the screenwriter of the best teen dark comedy to come about in the 1980’s, Heathers. The Winona Ryder/Christian Slater-starring film failed in a limited run at the box office, but has found prominence on home video and in critics’ and audiences’ black hearts ever since. Waters then moved on to write the painfully bad Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Hudson Hawk before bouncing back with Batman Returns and Demolition Man. After the Stallone/Snipes film hit in 1993, Waters took an almost decade-long break before coming back with Happy Campers in 2001, in a similarly black comedy vein to the film that won him fame. Happy Campers also had the distinction of being the first film Waters directed, a feat he would attempt a second time with Sex and Death 101. For this, Waters reunited with Ryder, writing a part in the dark sex comedy with her in mind. A limited theatrical run in April proved even less successful then Heathers initially was, and now it finds its way to DVD.
The Movie
The film stars Simon Baker (The Devil Wears Prada, George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead) as Roderick Blank, a smooth executive of a sexed-up fast food restaurant chain named Swallows. The chain is sort of like McDonald’s meets the Spice Channel—don’t worry, you don’t see it often. What’s important is that he’s very successful, and about to get married to the supposed love of his life. He gets an email, read to him by his lesbian secretary Trixie (Cohn), which details a list of one hundred and one women. The first twenty-nine are the women he’s slept with in his life, in chronological order, ending with high-stress, type-A personality Fiona (Bowen), his bride-to-be. The theory, they surmise, is that the remaining seventy-two are the women he will sleep with. Rod shrugs it off, keeping a copy of the list in his jacket as an amusing reminder, until he realizes that the stripper at the bachelor party his friends throw him is Carlotta Valdes (Kiper)…woman number 30. Needless to say, the deed is done, and Rod finds himself throwing his marriage-to-be away as he decides to go make his way down the list. This brings him to the attention of three individuals—Alpha (Wisdom), Beta (Sade) and Fred (Oswalt)— who sit in a white room and seem to know everything about the fate of the world. They explain that the list is, indeed, the 101 women that he is destined to sleep with.
Meanwhile, an avenger of women stalks the streets of the city. Known as Death Nell (Ryder), she dresses in a variety of outfits, many of them the sort of pseudo-goth sexy get-ups one might find in a Hot Topic, and seduces misogynists before sending them into comas. Nell has become a hero to women, and she appears out of nowhere several times in the film, luring scumbag men to their comatose semi-dooms. As she does, Rod makes his way down the list with ever-decreasing gusto, getting bored with just sex and looking for intimacy. He comes to realize that the list is really a curse; he can sleep with these women, but not connect with them. Those women that he really wants relationships with that aren’t on the list, he can’t get into bed. What should be, in theory, every man’s dream becomes a nightmare for Rod; can he find love before he crosses paths with the vengeful Nell?
Right from the get-go, Sex and Death 101 suffers from major issues. The movie starts off as a sort of sex farce, the sort of light-hearted sex romp comedy that we’ve seen done before. Suddenly, it veers into a goofy sort of science-fiction with the introduction of the white-roomed trio. As time goes on, it gets darker, and then tries to be sentimental when Rod starts looking for love over lust. Waters can’t seem to decide exactly what he wants his comedy to be exactly, and the result is a horrendously uneven sort of film. The film seems to flit from tone to tone like an attention-deficit-disorder butterfly, not remembering what it was trying to accomplish moments before. The sex gags are all tired and uninspired, with some of them lifted directly from other, better comedies like the American Pie movies. And the women on Rod’s list are, for the most part, little more than caricatures, where they would have been better off being more fully developed to make for a more interesting story. For Rod’s part, the script and Waters’s direction makes him look like a blatant and largely unsympathetic ass for the majority of the film. It’s difficult to sympathize with a man like Rod, who clearly knows what he’s doing is wrong, but does it anyway because hey, what guy wouldn’t, right?
In the hands of a better actor, Rod could have been pulled off tolerable. Unfortunately, Simon Baker is not that actor. Baker has the good looks and roguish charm to pull off a guy who can bed all these women, but he doesn’t have the acting depth to make Rod a sympathetic character. As the movie progresses, caring about Rod’s fate becomes harder and harder, and when he starts to look for something more, it’s not a switch that Baker can pull off believable. The man has obvious potential as an actor, as shown by some of his previous roles, but that potential is far from realized here. As the other two major characters, Trixie and Nell, Mindy Cohn and Winona Ryder do a much better job with their screen time. Cohn, best known as Natalie on The Facts of Life, gives the spirited lesbian role a better performance than it deserves. For her part, Ryder is clearly having a lot of fun as Nell, using the creative freedom that her fall into near-has been status has given her to take risks she might not have done otherwise. They are performances that are largely wasted in a film that merits far less. The role-call of women that Rod beds, from Leslie Bibb to Sophie Monk to Natassia Malthe and Pollyanna McIntosh, are adequate fir what the roles require, which are to look hot, be charming, and simulate sex. They all deserve better than this.
One of the worst things about Sex and Death 101 is that it’s an independent film that doesn’t bother taking risks. Free of studio-mingling, this film could have gone all-out and really tried to make something of itself. Instead, Waters neuters his film by making the sex extraordinarily un-sexy, and the sex gags tired and unremarkably unfunny with how lamely PG-13 they are (the only reason for the R rating is the nudity). The dialogue is laughably bad and unrealistic, which is a shame coming from the guy who provided such witty banter in Heathers. The result is a film that’s to prurient to find mainstream acceptance, yet too safe to be considered visionary. The result makes a uniformly forgettable experience that, by the end of the film, makes the viewer hope that Nell really does do Rod in. At least then it’ll be over.
Film Rating: 3.0
The Video
Presented in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, there’s certainly nothing remarkable about Sex and Death 101’s video transfer, either good or bad. The movie doesn’t require anything spectacular, and doesn’t get it, either. The colors are serviceable if not particularly vibrant, and the blacks are all even without distortion. Image definition is good yet not perfect, and all in all, it’s about the level of video transfer the film deserves.
Video Rating: 6.0
The Audio
Much like the video, the audio track, a 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound, is serviceable without really doing the film any favors. The dialogue, ambient sounds and music is leveled decently, and there’s nothing really to complain about. It’s an understatement to say that this film will test the limits of even the most basic sound system, but there’s no distortion or crackling sounds in the track, and one finds nothing to complain about. A 2.0 Dolby track is also included, and is similarly unremarkable. There are no subtitle options.
Audio Rating: 6.0
Special Features
Commentary with Writer/Director Daniel Waters: This is one of those commentary tracks that proves more enjoyable then the movie track itself; this is not to say it’s particularly good. Daniel Waters talks non-stop throughout the film, and while it’s kind of fun to hear him blather on about how the film was inspired by the sex comedies of the seventies or point out references to other films, two things become increasingly clear. One is that Daniel Waters is clearly a man who’s very full of himself, and the other is that what little originality one might have thought the film contained, really weren’t that original.
101 Perversions: (17:11) Daniel Waters manages to come off as an arrogant dweeb, putting down American Pie (which he blatantly stole from) while billing his film as "the next great American sex comedy." They're a lot of fluffing Waters up by the cast and producers, which comes off as cheap and insincere. They put some focus on the various women, during which Waters makes the crass observation that he cast Australian women because they walk around nude all the time anyway. I'm not sure if he was joking or not, because he seemed serious; either way, it rather belies the earlier comments that Waters is so respectful of women and his female characters. The entire featurette seems as weakened and useless as the movie.
Trailer: (2:17) The theatrical trailer, which basically only does a great job of making Robert look like an asshole. Outside of that, it’s only moderately amusing.
Also on DVD: (2:31) A trailer for Hollywood Residential, which tells nothing about what the show is, and one for Heathers, which reminded me how much I enjoyed that movie (and how far, sadly, Waters has fallen).
Special Features Rating: 4.0
The 411: Daniel Waters is a talented writer, but not without his misses. Sex and Death 101 is, most certainly, one of them. An uneven sci-fi dark comic sex farce with as little respect for its characters as the lead has for his conquests, it suffers from bad dialogue, weak and half-hearted plot devices, and a lack of originality. While some of the actors give off tolerable performances, Simon Baker is unable to provide a centering for the film in the role of Rod. An unremarkable video and audio job neither help nor hurt, and the special features just make one dislike the film even that much more. Waters is capable of more then this, and he'll hopefully show that the next time around, because this one is a complete waste of time.
