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Film
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Film Appreciation 101
The trick to enjoying Daniel Waters and Winona Ryder’s reunion flick is to expect a comedy-drama nowhere near as great as their 1989 counterculture classic Heathers.
Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 11:00 AM
By Brent Simon
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Anchor Bay Entertainment
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Writer-director Waters
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In 1989, Winona Ryder appeared alongside Christian Slater in Heathers, written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehman. The result was akin to a bunker-penetrating bombshell, ergo something that bore results with a bit of time.
A darkly comedic attack on the cozy pieties present in most teen flicks, Heathers assayed popularity, teen suicide and downright sociopathic behavior with equal, cold-water-to-the-face irreverence. Today, it still offers a more wickedly canted take-down of adolescent social cliques than its most recent descendant, Mean Girls.
Though Heathers grossed only a bit above $1 million in theaters, it became a sensation in the rental and nascent sell-thru market, the very definition of a cult hit. Waters has since gone on to script some of the more memorably lambasted movies of the past couple decades (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Hudson Hawk, Demolition Man), but also nurture a reputation as a funny, successful, idiosyncratic script doctor.
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Anchor Bay Entertainment
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Garnered back-to-back Oscar nominations at ages 23-24
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Ryder, meanwhile, has skirted commercial superstardom; her films average around $26 million domestically, but only if you're including the gimmie putts of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Adam Sandler's Mr. Deeds and her collaborations with Tim Burton, which have accounted for her biggest box office hits. Even as she descended into her mid-'90s run of mostly tony, period piece pabulum, Ryder still had a loyal fan base and sterling reputation in the industry.
Since then, of course, there have been setbacks both personal and professional. Alien: Resurrection was anything but, while Girl, Interrupted, a project Ryder helped develop, was all about only one girl - up-and-coming Oscar winner Angelina Jolie. Along with other mostly forgettable films (Lost Souls, Autumn in New York) and a 2001 arrest and conviction for shoplifting, it all added up to higher-profile studio fare drying up. Since Ryder was a “prestige draw” rather than marquee box office, it was for the most part easier for Hollywood studios to simply avoid taking any risk with a Ryder-fronted project.
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Anchor Bay Entertainment
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Living a Tom Leykis regular listener's wet dream
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The R-rated Sex and Death 101 represents a reunion between Ryder and Waters. While she isn't the lead, per se, it is the most many fans will have had an opportunity to see from a “real” Ryder in some time, after several indie flicks, a small role in the anthology comedy The Ten and a prominent part in Richard Linklater's rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly. Weird, funny, engaging and spiritedly thoughtful even if not always successful, the pairing seems to celebrate a certain reunion of like minds.
Waters' first film behind the camera since 2001's Happy Campers (his only other directing credit), Sex and Death 101 centers around Roderick Blank (Simon Baker), a successful advertising executive who, just weeks before his marriage to Fiona (Julie Bowen), gets a mysterious email that contains the names of everyone he's ever had sex with, 101 women in total. The rub is that it doesn't end with his wife-to-be -- in fact, she's nowhere near the last name.
In the midst of this “sacrilegious epiphany,” and finding no relief from a trio of bizarro-world comptrollers (Robert Wisdom, Patton Oswalt and Tanc Sade) from whom the list originated, Roderick throws himself headlong into the sheer, delicious variety (centerfolds, bisexual astronauts) of his predicted future. But he soon finds matters dulled without the thrill of the chase, and even worse when a new, true love (Leslie Bibb) turns out not to be on the list. All this is crosscut with and eventually complicated by, meanwhile, the story of a woman, known only as “Death Nell” (Ryder), who's gaining a media following as a murderous femme fatale, putting all sorts of bad men in comas.
From start to conclusion, Sex and Death 101 is an exercise in wheel-spinning hijinks much more than any analysis. (“I'm sure there's some logical explanation for all this, but I'm not going to wait around for it,” says Roderick at one point.) Waters has in the past described his personal sensibility as “Bunuel meets Caddyshack,” and that description aptly captures some of the wild tonal shifts that mark Sex and Death 101.
This is a movie that includes a gross-out bait-and-switch reminiscent of Stifler's clandestine closet hook-up in American Wedding, but also sincere questions and insight about the existential crises to be found in knowing beforehand one's lovers (and, by extension, non-lovers). How much of life, and the appropriation of our time, is in pursuit or purchase of these tangible acts?
While Baker is the lens through which the story is told, Ryder is its scythe-bearing, no-BS conscience, and a late diner scene in particular offers up powerful proof of (no pun intended here) her ability to kill softly. In the end, Sex and Death 101 isn't so much profound in and of itself as it is a fun, sloppy treatment of a profound premise. It's a movie that feels like it should be reverse-adapted into a book.
| As a reunion project between Waters and Ryder, though, one which earned the former a Best Director Award at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, it feels right, leaving one wanting for thirds. |
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