The Worst Film Ever

Good start, but then it gets ruined

A lot of fun.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

This Australian rom-com deserves some credit for portraying a relationship in a sincere, mature manner, not idealizing sex nor demonizing it; the story itself is surprisingly realistic and very easy to relate to. Also commendable is the fact that Jonathan Teplitzky is quite able at writing both woman's and man's dialog, equally and realistically.Teplitzky is an able writer, but he made far too many mistakes in the movie to make it a good one. The taxi driver's character is a complete misstep, that comes off pretentious and clumsy, the music is irritating, and the voice-over telling us what the characters think comes up in arbitrary moments and leaves us confused as to what the characters thought and what they actually said. The dialog is realistic most of the time but the delivery - especially Susie Porter's - is often flat and lacking in emotion, which is especially painful when she delivers lines like "I want sex. I love sex" or "I love you" (while getting it from behind, no less) completely deadpan. It doesn't help that the two leads - while they're by no means bad actors - have no on-screen chemistry whatsoever and their emotions are never believable.Most jarring of all are the random interview segments, on cheap generic backdrops, that seem like a cheap rip-off of When Harry Met Sally and Annie Hall, and serve no purpose. The people being interviewed aren't interesting, and they don't make any comment of interest about relationships and sex; instead these segments rely on the oldest relationship clichés in the book - Men leave the toilet seat up? Women take a long time to get dressed? Men like getting oral sex? Really? That's the big problem with the movie - Teplitzky wanted to make a relationship movie about experiences we can all relate to, but he made it so generic that he forgot to add anything of his own.

"Better Than Sex" is yet another mostly bedroom two-hander on a relationship, like "About Last Night" and "Breaking Up," but is quite charmingly done in a frank and funny tone.With a gimmick of a time-bound, three-day relationship setting the limits, the talking to the camera by the two lovers and their friends works as a way to show what's going through their heads. This technique is especially useful when dealing with the visual problem foreign movies have grappled with but American movies have avoided since "Klute" (especially "Pretty Woman"): how to show when sex changes with feelings.There is a touch of magic realism with a bemused cab driver, but she also could be their whimsical thoughts.The Australian actors are not of the pencil-thin/gym worked-out American variety, but are lustily and cheerily robust as we see quite a bit of them.What was confusing was the order their days together are presented -- did my projectionist mix up the reels or was the print I saw mixed up? At one point one character says "We've already had our first fight," which hadn't happened yet, and he leaves with a bag he hadn't brought over. But then later both the fight and the bag appear. I also got confused as to what was which with an indication of "The Third Day" vs. "The Last Day." There's a possibility it was shown out of order for emotional effect, but then I think the changed red sheets didn't appear at the end.The Aussie pop songs are nice, but incidental and hardly noticeable.(originally written 11/17/2001)

Well it's not Gone with the Wind, that's for sure! This movie features a woman with one change of underwear who apparently never leaves her apartment, and a bloke who looks better in a wedding dress than I ever did. Plus a mystic cab driver with nothing better to do than hang around waiting for them. And they don't eat in three days.But leaving aside the practicalities, I enjoyed it immensely, although I'm not sure I can define why. My teen age kids bought me this DVD for Mother's Day - or to be more exact, I bought it and instructed my kids to give it to me. My motives are probably too murky to discuss here. But having only seen David Wenham previously as Faramir in The Lord of the Rings, in drag as Audrey in Moulin Rouge and as the dubious Carl in Van Helsing ( a movie of quite excruciating badness), it was rather disconcerting to hear his real accent. I mean I knew in theory that Wenham was Australian, but hearing him sound quite so much like Richie Benaud, the cricket commentator whose dulcet tones take me straight back to childhood and my late father's obsession with the thud of leather on willow, was almost more than I could handle.But I'm digressing. The movie. Lots of fun sex, which is always a good thing if well done, and this is pretty well done, especially towards the end of the movie as the couple really get into each other, lots of comments on men and women, (if a little clichéd), and a happy ending, and it never takes itself too seriously. It is a little heavy handed in places - I'm thinking here of the close ups of the women's mouths prior to the blow job in bath scene. Not subtle. Not a great work of art, but mildly erotic, entertaining and quite funny. And when evaluating their various past relationships, the script never plunges into the kind of overwrought pathos that would be obligatory in Hollywood. When Cin discovers the photo in Josh's wallet, I was horribly afraid we'd get an explanation of the "love of my life killed in a tragic auto wreck" variety. Instead we get a quite refreshing "she messed me about so I moved to London" line. Real life, for all that it's mundane.David Wenham does "bemused everyman" to perfection as Josh, and is obviously an actor of huge range. Susie Porter (who is gorgeous) is both vulnerable and tough where necessary as Cin. They look like real people, and seem just as dim-witted as the rest of us. I shall watch it again.

True, this movie did make you feel as though you'd had indulged in reading the forbidden secrets of the opposite sex via some skeezy mag ( ieCosmo / Maxim ), but it was refreshingly honest, and grotesquely intimate. I like how up close and personal the camera gets..... celebrating every glorious flaw.The cheezy backdrops during the mock interviews and the disappointing use of the taxi driver were minuses, but the accurate and equal argumental voices given to both the male and female was a crisp break from the "sex and the city" type shows out there that propagate the weak and ugly male and the insecure and scheming female stereotype.Recommended.