Daniel Waters has unitary of Hollywood's most challenging resumes. After writing his first
movie, Heathers, Waters trolled through the Hollywood meat mill, writing some of
the '90s worst big-budget movies: Demolition Man, The Adventures of Ford Fairline, and the
widely-razzed Hudson Hawk.
Waters dropped out of Hollywood for well-nigh a decade before restorative himself to write
and direct the largely disregarded Happy Campers. After some other six year hiatus he returned
again with Sex and Death 101, which has the distinction of reuniting Waters with He
athers star Winona Ryder... who's been through her own travails, as well.
Sex and Death 101 gives a man named Rod (Simon Baker) wHO receives an email that lists
non just every women he's ever slept with, but every fair sex he will sleep with. Turns
taboo there's hundred and one names on the list, which is disconcerting, since Rod is set to be
married to #29 on the list in a matter of weeks. He dismisses it as a jest but ends
up "unintentionally" doing a stripper at his unmarried man party. The marriage is soon terminated,
and Rod ends up with #31 on the list (a centerfold wHO loves pudding), and it's downhill
from there.
Rod is roped into a pristine white sleeping room where holy types explain that this is
all a goof-up on behalf of "the machine," urging Rod to destroy the list. Think he
does? Well, would you? Naturally, the list begins to take control Rod's sprightliness. He
can't meet a woman without checking to see if her name's on the list. When he tries to
"bitchiness" the list and germinate a relationship with a lovely veterinary (Leslie Bibb),
it doesn't work out. The list can't be beat.
As for the death side of the title, that comes into play when #101 approaches, and
it's revealed the diagnose is the real nickname of a serial cause of death nicknamed "Death Nell"
(Ryder), who sleeps with hands then offs them. Somehow these two fates ar intetwrined,
and we'll chance out how in the end.
It all sounds better on paper than it really is, as Sex and Death 101 presently devolves
into the adolescent fantasy that any flick based on a hombre sleeping with 101 girls
inevitably becomes. It all plays out like an excuse for Waters to put his pecadilloes
on film (which, in a making-of documentary, he essentially admits).
Maybe the biggest trouble is that it's simply not possible to feel sorry for the poor,
poor hero, who stumbles through see after encounter with beautiful women, then
discards them and crosses them off his list. The whole Death Nell subplot is underdone,
and the whole affair precisely feels genial of slapped together with tape and spit. Waters'
ham-fisted naming of his characters -- there's a pair of lesbians named Miss Kidd and Miss
Wint -- is around as learned as the movie gets, and the monologues near the sincerely
odd termination make you wonder whether Waters had an extreme fever when he was finishing
up the script. If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this exercise in sexual perversion hadn't
been made by another Waters. John, I mean.
That aforesaid, it's perpetually fun to see Winona Ryder in a motion picture again.
The DVD includes comment from Waters and a making-of featurette.
You get my meaning.
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