Beauty and the Beast.
(2014) Romantic Comedy (Columbia) Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper, Rob Lowe, Nat Faxon, Nancy Lenehan, Giselle Eisenberg, Harrison Holzer, Sebastian Hedges Thomas, Timothy Brennen, Krisztina Koltai, Randall Park, Joe Stapleton, James Wilcox, Jack Black, Dave Allen, Melissa Paulo, Erin Brehm, Jolene Blalock. Directed by Jake Kasdan
In America, we really have some very odd reactions to sex. Our attitudes towards it are pretty puritanical compared to the rest of the world, and yet it is such a large part of our culture; we use it to advertise, to promote and to entice. We consume enormous amounts of pornography and send dick pics and boob pics to one another with abandon, yet we keep all that compartmentalized and safely hidden from view. Even discussing sex can bring a flush of embarrassment to our faces.
Annie (Diaz) and Jay (Segel) have been a couple since college. At first their attraction was nearly 100% physical – they went at it like proverbial rabbits. Eventually the lust grew into something deeper and the two eventually married and had a set of kids.
Once Annie had given birth and Jay had seen a baby crowning during the process, the magic fled screaming into the night. Exhaustion – both of them working and raising babies into kids – left them no time for themselves or each other. Soon sex came more as an afterthought when it came at all, and even though on the outside this was a happy loving couple, both of them felt that uncomfortable feeling that there was something missing in their relationship, something important.
Frustrated, Annie arranges to have her mother (Lenehan) watch the kids and turn the night into a sex fest. Dressing up as a slutty car hop, she roller skates into Jay’s home office. Naturally, he’s all for the idea but the two of them are woefully out of practice and they grow stressed out the more that their attempts for shagging are unsuccessful. At last Annie comes up with the brilliant idea of taping the proceedings. She even comes up with the idea of the two of them performing every position listed in The Joy of Sex
The idea works and three hours of non-stop exertions later, the two lay satisfied in the arms of the other. Sleepily, Annie asks Jay to erase the tape and Jay agrees. However, he decides not to do it without telling her – he wants a memento of the occasion.
That’s all well and good but when you use your iPad to record something, there’s always the danger of it automatically uploading to your cloud and if you have your cloud synched to other iPads you’ve given away – to virtually everybody since your job entails that you regularly get new iPads – suddenly your sex tape has the opportunity to go viral. When Jay gets an instant message thanking him for sharing the video, he realizes he’s in deep doo-doo.
I can see why the studios greenlit this. Prurient interest is a big motivator – who doesn’t want to see a sex tape with Cameron Diaz in it, after all – to audiences in theaters. Certainly the studio was counting on a big young male audience; after all, when you think about it, the business of essentially watching sex tapes on the Internet generates billions and billions of dollars. Which is not how Carl Sagan ever imagined that term would be used.
I have to give Diaz credit where credit is due. For whatever reason, I’ve never been a huge fan. Not that she’s a terrible actress – she’s done some very impressive work in her time. I just haven’t connected with her. However, this is a role that calls for extraordinary bravery on her part. She literally bares herself for the part – from the back – but also emotionally speaking. Americans and American women in particular sometimes have a difficulty talking about sexual issues and of things not going well in the bedroom, but Diaz gives Americans – and American women in particular – a starting point to conversations that are healthy and necessary. There’s a lot to be said for that.
She also has been a terrific comedienne for years and this is some of her best work in that department. There’s a scene in which in order to distract her boss (Lowe) in whose house Jay is searching for a wayward iPad for in which she snorts cocaine in order to appease him and give Jay more time to find the iPad (which is interrupted by the appearance of a belligerent dog) and her reaction to the drug is priceless, one of the funnier sequences of any film so far this year.
Segel, who paired with Diaz and director Kasdan in the black comedy Bad Teacher a few years ago, has lost a bunch of pounds and looks fit. His low-key demeanor counterpoints Diaz’ manic behavior very nicely and the two play off of each other well. That they have the great Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper from The Office supporting them as their best friends (who use their tape to spice up their own married life) is definitely an added bonus. You also get Jack Black making a cameo as the owner of an amateur porn clip host site called YouPorn as he gives relationship advice to Jay and Annie which is normally not a bad thing but I got the sense that even Black thought the platitudes he was vocalizing were beneath him.
There are, sadly, too many shark-jumping moments. When you find out who is blackmailing Jay threatening to release the tape onto the Internet, you may well kick the seat in front of you regardless if its occupied or not. A lot of the jokes are of the immature variety and this never really rises above the level of a sophomoric frat house snigger-fest.
I do think that a truly great sex comedy has yet to be made, one that can be funny and sexy and prurient but smart all at once. Just because we’re talking sex doesn’t mean we have to dumb down the conversation. In short, I’d love to see a sex comedy for adults instead of the usual ones we get for teens, of which this one appears to be. It’s a sad waste of a performance by Cameron Diaz that deserved a better movie for it.
REASONS TO GO: Cameron Diaz.
REASONS TO STAY: Giggly-naughty in a puritan sort of way.
FAMILY VALUES: A goodly amount of sexual content and some nudity, brief drug use and a whole lot of foul language, much of it sexually-oriented.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: These are Cameron Diaz’ first official nude scenes.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 8/11/14: Rotten Tomatoes: 18% positive reviews. Metacritic: 36/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Porky’s
FINAL RATING: 5/10
NEXT: Hercules
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