TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

flickhead Alan Rudolph is a poor man's Robert Altman with a Henry Jaglom production value–and yet he manages to entice excellent talent to his projects. His films have never fared well at the box office, and only two (Mrs. Parker and the follow-up Afterglow) received much critical acclaim. So how he managed to spend eight million dollars on this mess is anyone's guess. It was obviously shot (predominantly) in a single location, and the wardrobe and set decoration is hardly extravagant to have merited high budgeting. While likely scripted, it has all the discipline of a free community improv class. It's perhaps apt that a movie about masturbation should prove so masturbatory in its inception: the cast are allowed free reign to over-reach in almost every scene. There is no sense that the characters are true to the time frame portrayed on screen, and yet it is not completely pointless. Some of the improvisations work, and most don't, but there is some comedy to be had in the less over-wrought interactions. When it tries, it fails, but when it fails it sometimes triumphs. I only wish there had been more happy accidents–like the camera being in the right place to capitalize on the focus of the scene. It is sadly rarely so.For a much better take on a similar subject see Joaquin Oristrell's Unconscious, instead. For a better use of an ensemble cast in a barely scripted acting exercise, see Nicholas Roeg's Insignificance. The only honest performance is Neve Campbell's, and the only subtlety is that of Terrence Howard. Nick Nolte seems like he's acting in two different movies, Alan Cumming deserves more camera time, and Jeremy Davies is completely against type.Rudolph's greatest success is that this film released in 2002 looks like a 1970s European skin flic. I am probably over-crediting him, here. But the film has its moments. It's probably best to run in the background while you do something else and cross it off your list.

Robert J. Maxwell My usually reliable TV guide gave this only one and a half (out of five) stars and, judging from the lurid title, I expected either (1) a dated rehash of "The Vagina Monologues" or (2) the sort of trashy and episodic soft-core porn that is commonly seen under titles like "Sex Games in Cancun" and "Women Who Love Horses." Actually it was better than that -- funnier, nicely acted and directed and edited, and thoughtfully written.Its chief disadvantage is that it's going to come across as a stage play, which, I was amazed to find, is not how it started out. (That it began as a French novel was a lot less surprising.) It's stagy. And, as in most plays, there's not a heck of a lot of action and little change of location. It mostly depends on talk and teamwork for its success, and thus it's likely to seem boring to anyone with barbed-wire tattoos anticipating a series of violent rapes.Basically, it's a story of a "research group" of half a dozen or so university students in the 1920s who have been funded by Nick Nolte to have serious, frank discussions of human sexual behavior, with an eye on psychoanalytic interpretations. The original participants include a super-polite black kid in evening dress; a Brit with squinty eyes and a monumental jaw; a nerd who finger paints and whose hair reaches straight towards heaven from his scalp; a young, stern German; and Dermot Mulroney, never a fave of mine, as the deadly, intense leader. They agree that only sex will be discussed -- no love or philosophy or joking around -- and they hire two stenographers, blond Zoe, who later reveals animal impulses, and dark Alice, who wears wire-rimmed glasses and begins and ends as innocent as her namesake.The first one or two discussions are about what you'd expect from a class of intent young students. All the words are as Latin as Havelock Ellis's, except, I suppose, "the little man in the boat" is mostly Germanic. At first the two stenographers are ignored. They're initially flustered and embarrassed. Zoe occasionally throws a smutty glance or smirk in Alice's general direction.Then I'm forced to admit the play or the movie or whatever it is begins to lose its focus, its organization. Nolte shows up, a huffing, growling ancient wreck with wild straw hair, dragging along his wife, Tuesday Weld, whose accent touches bases with both Omsk and Canarsie. Other characters show up half-way through. We watch an avant guard film by one of them -- "Sentenced to Life," with blurry images of jail cells, shackles, and a winged seraph doing a fan dance before absorbing a man the way an amoeba engulfs a food particle. Nolte gets drunk and begins crawling all over the chuckling body of Weld like a giant, hairy tarantula. One couple don pigeon masks and bill and coo behind the drapes. Things fall apart. The center does not hold. The dramatic climax comes when Mulroney and Neve Campbell, who is Alice, feel a glandular attraction to each other but he sends her on her way, preferring the ideal figure of his masturbatory fantasies.Alan Rudolph has done a good job of directing this jumble of incidents. There may not be much action in the plot, though there is some -- a copulation and a fist fight -- but there's plenty of liveliness in the cutting and reaction shots, enough to maintain our interest. There are some very interesting lines in the screenplay too. Weld carelessly throws out, "Sex is always the same. Love is my delusion that one man is different from another." And there is a reference to "Billy the Kid gloves," which someone must have had fun writing.The production designer and set dresser must have had a jolly time too. You have never seen such surrealism. The decor is a radical collection of mutually repulsive junk, more radical than that of Dicken's "The Old Curiosity Shop." The plastic elephant trunk rising chin-high in desolation out of the floor kind of leaps out at you in phallic fashion. An ordinary arm chair is wrapped and tied with stuffed burlap so that it resembles a human figure with a head. Well, I'm not sure that's "surrealism." Maybe it's "dadaism." I don't know the difference. (I think Man Ray was a leader of one movement, while Ray Man led the other.)Sometimes the film prances along and sometimes it mopes. And it's mostly those with a taste for the slightly bizarre that will get the most out of it. But it's worth more than one and a half stars.

gunstreetgrrrl As a volunteer at the Denver Film Festival, I was given the opportunity to attend a screening of this movie tonight, and I am very happy to have done so. At times I think I was the only person in the theater laughing, but I found this movie hilarious, yet relatable. The ensemble cast has wonderful chemistry, including great performances by Alan Cumming, Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Robin Tunney and Neve Campbell. Though the film might seem farfetched, it is actually based on real events, and I especially enjoyed Robin Tunney's performance as a woman with a refreshingly healthy attitude towards sex. Neither a "virgin" nor "whore," she has slept with a few men, knows what she wants and how to get it, and rather than begging the man she goes to bed with to love her and marry her, she simply asks him not to analyze it to anyone, whether it lasts or not. Another special treat is a series of films-within-the-film, shot in black and white and made (apparently through a very complicated process) to look as they would have looked in the 1920's. A lovely character-driven film that is quite different from most things you will see these days. Go see this if you get the chance.

Josh Mapes Directors need to learn that audiences watch a film for the characters, and they need to understand the characters. "Investigating Sex" illustrates characters that are so narcississtic the audience is annoyed from first frame to last. I saw the film at a screening with Alan Rudolph with a discussion afterwards, and he didn't even really appear to know what the film was about either. He just used the phrase "sexually compelling" a bunch of times. I didn't care about the characters, I frankly didn't the film had any characters to offer. Just a lot of actors spreading paint on themselves and turning into donkeys and mules in order to say something profound about sexual relations and sexual attraction. Robin Tunney is great as usual, and the other actors do what they can. If you want to try to beat the meaning out of a movie and read into things that aren't there, this movie is for you. If you actually want to learn something or see a great film, don't watch "Investigating Sex." Because it certainly isn't entertaining. It's really pretty ridiculous.