sex tape - Sex and the selfie

                  It takes directorial ineptness on a monumental scale to screw up a sex comedy.
Particularly one that stars ‘Her Hotness’ Cameron Diaz. In the nude. But Jake Kasdan
contrives to do it, with an unfunny and unbelievably farcical film that’s guaranteed to put
you off sex and perhaps even comedy for a long time.

                 But then, the problem with *Sex Tape goes beyond the limitations of the director.
Its storyline itself reeks of over-the-top implausibility to the point where it becomes
abundantly clear that the screenplay writers (who include Jason Segel, the lead actor) saw
the plotline as a mere prop, a limp sex toy, to set up some extended sit-com silliness.

                 Which is a shame because the kernel of *Sex Tape has enough meat in it for a
sophisticated adult comedy yarn to be spun around it. The idea of a sexually jaded married
couple (with two kids) looking desperately to get their carnal juices flowing again has a
certain universal appeal to it. And even the decision of the protagonist couple Annie and
Jay (Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel) to rev things up by videotaping their enactment of
every acrobatic act in *The Joy of Sex manual isn’t entirely unauthentic. This is the sex-and-
the-selfie generation, after all, as the profusion of home video clips on pornographic sites
will testify.

                  But having set up that forgivable storyline contrivance, Kasdan loses the plot.
Very quickly, the storyline goes on a downward spiral of unsexy, unfunny farce as Annie
and Jay learn that the video has ether-eally slipped into the Cloud. And since Jay has a
habit of giving away synchronised, hand-me-down iPads (of which he seems to have
several, since he’s something in the music industry) to family and friends—and even the
neighbourhood milkman (yeah, right!)—their three-hour sex romp is now in the public
domain. The rest of the film revolves around Annie and Jay’s slapstick-y efforts to retrieve
the gifted iPads and demolish the servers of a porn site to which a young Blackmailer (don’t
even ask) has uploaded it—before their shame is revealed to the world.

                 If these scenes had been genuinely funny, one may have been more forgiving of
the uber-silliness and the sheer implausibility of it all. But all that *Sex Tape does is to
graphically capture the joylessness of a badly made sex comedy. And beyond a point, the
film’s shameless plugging of Apple merchandise grates.  more. >>