The Opposite of Sex Review
By Joe Lozito
"Opposite" doesn't attract
Writer-director Don Roos' new film asks the burning question: how long can an audience watch a group of people it doesn't care about? The answer: about 10 minutes. Unfortunately, Mr. Roos film, "The Opposite of Sex", runs for 103 minutes.
The film follows heartless 16-year-old DeeDee (Christina Ricci) as she walks out on her mother and ruins the life of her bland, homosexual half-brother Bill (Martin Donovan in a thankless role), his dumb-as-a-post lover Matt (Ivan Sergei) and his bitter friend Lucia (Lisa Kudrow). All four actors do their best with roles that don't go much deeper than those one-line descriptions.
DeeDee bursts into their lives under the guise of the grieving half-sister. She then proceeds, unbelievably, to sleep with Matt, steal Bill's savings, and hold Bill's dead lover's ashes for ransom. All while delivering a voice-over which makes it abundantly clear that this is just a movie and that she will not redeem herself at the end.
Ms. Ricci has enough of a wicked gleam in her eye throughout the film to make you believe that she is, in fact, as cruel as DeeDee is meant to be. But DeeDee doesn't do anything as groundbreakingly awful as Mr. Roos would like. Yes, she treats those around her, and even her unborn child, like dirt, but she does nothing that we haven't seen on an episode of "Melrose Place" or "the Jerry Springer show" (at least they are only an hour long). Mr. Roos' script does nothing to give these characters any depth or to make the audience understand why they put up with the abuse they undergo (and I mean both the audience and the characters here).
There are two redeeming scenes in the film which revolve around Ms. Kudrow's character. However, it is important to note that the only reason her character is so appealing is because she's the only one expressing what's going on in the mind of the audience. Ms. Kudrow delivers her one-liners with gusto. She is proving to be the only "Friend" worth watching on the big screen. Hopefully, she will be given a film worthy of her ability.
DeeDee's actions don't shock us the way they might of at one time, the real shock here is how the characters around DeeDee seem to so ardently care about her even after everything she has done. The way they allow themselves to be used by her with very thin, cliched reasoning at best ("she came to you for help!", "she's got no where else to go!").
Mr. Roos seems to want to challenge the audience to like DeeDee, and to point out that we have, no doubt, been walked on by people like her in our own lives. He may even want to dare us to believe that someone this awful could actually exist in life. Well, yes, I know that people like that do exist, and I still don't want to watch them for two hours.
