Wednesday, March 14, 2018

SEX, MARRIAGE, AND INFIDELITY (2014) ½ *


Emily (Brooke Pascoe) catches her husband Charles (writer/director Richard Finger) cheating on her with his secretary (Alana Jordan).    To get back at Charles, she starts her own affair with a coworker (Charlie O’Connell, Jerry’s brother).  

This might’ve been worth a damn if anyone got naked, but they don’t.  You can only stand watching people TALK about sex without doing it for so long.  It’s all tease, no please.

The amateurish actors just aren’t strong enough to pull off all of Finger’s psychobabble dialogue.  When they speak, it never feels like real people having a conversation.  The stilted performances make the dialogue even more cringe-inducing.  The longwinded narration is so wordy and chockful of needless over-psychoanalyzing that it’s almost good for a laugh, if it wasn’t so dull that is.  

Speaking of which, the comedy is the weakest aspect.  It’s one thing to have the characters endlessly talking about their sex life through boring monologues.  When they try for laughs, the punchlines land with a thud.  The running joke where characters keep saying, “Everyone has herpes” is especially unfunny. The fantasy sequence where Pascoe imagines herself turning into the Wicked Witch of the West and poisoning her hubby is the only true random WTF moment that’s memorable.

It seems like Finger was going through some sort of mid-life crisis and put all of his sexual neurosis into a script.  In his defense, making a movie was probably cheaper than the inevitable therapy bills.  I just wish he had some actual talent.

Things get particularly boring once the movie becomes a how-to manual of how to lawyer up after your secretary files sexual harassment charges against you.  While we’re on the subject of the secretary, I can’t understand why all the characters talk about her boobs, but they never show them.  What a rip-off!

The biggest name in the cast is Shannon Tweed, who plays one of Pascoe’s girlfriends.  She’s sadly only in one scene and easily outshines the rest of the cast.  Her daughter, Sophie also has a small role.  Neither of them is given enough to do to save this boring, unfunny, and forgettable mess.

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