Review of Love & Sex

Introduction

Love & Sex is another of those films that I`d never heard of before. It didn`t really look like my cup of tea either, but I always sit down and watch with an open mind, eagerly awaiting to be surprised and delighted when an unknown film turns out to be a screen gem.

There are a few favourable quotes from "critics" scattered across the cover (which is not always a good sign!), but the film itself seems to have received some rave reviews around the world, so how does it fare?

Video

The film is presented as 1.85:1 anamorphic, and on the whole it looks very good. Shot in and around Los Angeles in about three weeks, but it doesn`t suffer from that. There are some bits of dirt on the print here and there, but colours and brightness are good and there`s nothing to complain about here.

Audio

A DD2.0 stereo and a DD5.1 soundtrack are on offer. I picked the DD5.1 and wasn`t let down. There`s not a great deal for all of the channels to do, surround effects are used in a few crowd scenes, but they do sound a little false at times. Dialogue is clear and understandable at all times.

The musical soundtrack itself is excellent, from the brilliant instrumental opening (which also plays briefly over the menus), through plenty of great tracks by lesser known artists during the film (Chucklehead, The Merrymakers, Velvet Belly and Over The Rhine), to the final song over the closing credits.

Features

The back cover lists "Extra`s" including "Animated Menu`s", which is not a good start! My copy was a preview copy so I hope that they`ve fixed these basic grammatical errors for the final release!

There are only two real extras on offer here. First, filmographies for the principal cast and the director. Famke Janssen has actually starred in a lot more films than you might think. I could only recall Goldeneye and X-Men, but there have been plenty more in between.

Second is a 30 minute "home video" style clip featuring the director and her experiences with the film at the Sundance festival. There are quite a few "luvvie" moments here, but there are also some very amusing moments, during interviews after screenings of the film at the festival. A very worthy extra.

There`s also the trailer which isn`t very exciting, although it does give a very brief glimpse of what must be a deleted scene, as there is a small clip of dialogue which doesn`t appear in the film. There`s also supposed to be a music video, which I was rather looking forward to, given the great music in the film. But it`s not there. I searched high and low, and it`s nowhere to be seen. Maybe another error on the preview packaging crept in?

Conclusion

I`m afraid that this film is pretty awful, and I really didn`t enjoy it at all. I was pleasantly surprised at the performance of Famke Janssen, who managed to do a good job in such a bad film. I was reminded of Julia Roberts at times - and that`s supposed to be a compliment, not an insult. I`m not a big fan of Ms. Roberts, but she has turned in the odd good performance now and again, and Famke Janssen reminded me of those moments.

But back to the film in question. The whole opening is pointless - being asked to write an article for a magazine is supposed to be the spark which ignites the story (I`m not giving anything away here, this is on the back cover!) But it`s a pointless spark as the story doesn`t need to be set in any kind of context, given that it`s just a woman recalling her past loves and relationships! And this whole counting past lovers thing died out with "Four Weddings and a Funeral" didn`t it?

I didn`t really believe in the characters or most of the things that they did. There was some witty dialogue now and again, and as I`ve already mentioned the soundtrack was fantastic. But when the songs are better than the film then something`s wrong. And when the very brief extras are better than the film, something`s very wrong indeed.

It`s all a bit predictable, you just know what`s going to happen in the end, and you just end up wishing that they`d get on with it. It`s not very original, it`s not very funny.

I cannot recommend this film at all, but I can highly recommend the soundtrack, which I will be buying very soon. So it`s not all bad news!