Love & Sex Reviews

A romantic comedy whose sour take on romance never manages to be comic. Kate (Famke Janssen) writes for a fluffy women's magazine, but aspires to be a real writer, which seems to be why she's sabotaged her most recent lifestyle articles by turning them into vulgar, embittered rants. Given till the end of the day to turn in an acceptable piece on love, sex and the modern woman, Kate indulges in a long flashback reminiscence about her own dating experiences, starting on the fifth-grade playground. It's actually mostly a reminiscence about her relationship with artist Adam (Jon Favreau), the love of her life except when they were fighting about how many men she'd slept with before she met him (helpful women's magazine-style hint for lovers: When it comes to numbers, don't ask and don't tell). Adam and Kate hook up, pass lovers' milestones (move in together, acquire cats, make silly videotapes, weather birth-control crises, fart in front of each other), break up, get jealous of each other's new relationships and generally torment themselves and one other. Already burdened by Kate's clichéd voice-over observations, the movie eventually sinks beneath the weight of Kate and Adam's utter charmlessness, a huge liability in bickering romantic-comedy couples. They're both selfish, immature whiners and the only reason you wish they'd get back together is that it would stop them from foisting their petty problems on other people. Kate is clearly meant to be wryly clever in a neurotic, Woody Allen-ish way, but her cynical platitudes just sound embittered. As Kate's brittle editor, Ann Magnuson gets off the movie's funniest, if thoroughly foul-mouthed, line; suffice it to say that it concerns her vision of the magazine's ideal reader vs. the target audience for Kate's jaundiced article on oral sex.