Sex Tape: A limp noodle

Sex Tape (2014) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for nudity, strong sexual content, drug use and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang

Homemade porn (so I’ve been told) tends to reflect the amateur skills of its makers: jittery camerawork, clumsy editing, terrible performances and — needless to say — no plot.

Ironic, then, that a so-called Hollywood comedy about this phenomenon should mimic all these shortcomings.

Annie (Cameron Diaz) and Jay (Jason Segel) discover that, contrary to her original request,
their rather enthusiastic sex tape remained on his master computer, from where it then
migrated to several other tablets in the possession of various friends and family members.
Worse yet, one of those individuals is threatening to post the film to the Internet...

Sex Tape arises from a premise with plenty of potential, to give scripters Kate Angelo, Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller at least that much credit. Annie (Cameron Diaz) and Jay (Segel), during their younger years relentless pursuers of recreational sex, have found that their mutual passion has chilled after 10 years of marriage and two children.

Hoping to re-ignite the flame — and with common sense dulled by too many tequila shots — they park the kids with grandma and film themselves performing every single maneuver in Alex Comfort’s groundbreaking 1972 manual, The Joy of Sex.

In a single three-hour session.

That seems ambitious, given that Comfort’s book is large and rather inventive. But we’ll let that slide.

Mission accomplished, Annie instructs Jay to erase the film (unseen? really?), but of course the amiable lunk forgets. Cue the rumble of ominous drums.

In a rather blatant example of cinematic product placement, Jay — who works in the music biz — traditionally gifts friends with old iPads, when he upgrades to newer models. But the tablets are only part of this generous act; they’re also equipped with copies of the impressive music library he has built over the years.

You know what’s coming: Thanks to Jay’s ill-advised use of an aggressive cloning app, their sex film winds up on every recently donated iPad. The recipients include Annie’s mother, the mailman, best friends Robby and Tess (Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper), and — most damningly — Hank Rosenbaum (Rob Lowe), CEO of the wholesome multinational toy company Piper Brothers, which has made a lucrative financial offer to sponsor Annie’s “modern mommy” blog.

Assuming she maintains appropriate family values, of course.

(I can’t help wondering if the scripters deliberately riffed on the controversy that erupted back in the early 1970s, when Ivory Snow model Marilyn Chambers — who posed with a baby beneath the tag line “99 & 44/100% pure” — became a porn star with the release of Behind the Green Door. Needless to say, Procter & Gamble dropped her like a hot coal.)

The Invention of Lying: The truth hurts

The Invention of Lying  (2009) • View trailer for The Invention of Lying
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.8.09
Buy DVD: The Invention of Lying• Buy Blu-Ray: The Invention of Lying [Blu-ray]


This one's a 15-minute stand-up monologue with delusions of grandeur.

Although the premise of The Invention of Lying — written and directed collaboratively by Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, and starring Gervais — is intriguing, and no doubt would make a fascinating topic for theological discussion, this 100-minute film runs out of gas long before the halfway point.

Despite his newfound wealth and prestige, Mark (Ricky Gervais, right) still
can't prevent Anna (Jennifer Garner) from preferring the superficial physical
attributes of the pompous and insufferably vain Brad (Rob Lowe).

Much of the blame falls to the direction and many of the performances, which are oddly flat and uninvolving. Gervais is his usual amusingly understated self, and co-stars Jennifer Garner and Rob Lowe bring much-needed sparkle to these proceedings. But everybody else seems to amble about in a perpetual Valium haze, their line-readings delivered with a neither interest nor conviction.

The Invention of Lying takes place in a parallel world precisely like ours, except that people are wired in such a way that they're incapable of anything but the absolute truth. Thus, a standard greeting — "How are you today?" — invites a wealth of excruciating detail, and spontaneous encounters are likely to be quite deflating. ("My, what an ugly baby!")

Somehow, all this raw honesty never leads to violence, as if this world also has been flensed of anger and wounded pride. The moment this penny drops — roughly, oh, five minutes in — the seams of this script begin to spring other leaks, as well. A full-length film, particularly one this languidly paced, gives us far too much time to ponder its many logical flaws.

Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a screenwriter for the Lecture Films Motion Picture Studios, known by its motto: "We film someone telling you about things that happened." Fiction also doesn't exist in this realm, because fiction is untruth: thus, no novels or dramas of any kind. Movies and TV are nonstop documentaries, and Mark is having serious trouble finding anything "fun" to write about in his given assignment of the 13th century.

A blind date with Anna McDoogles (Garner) doesn't go terribly well, because she candidly admits that she probably won't want to see him again. Things get worse when Mark loses his job and is one day away from being evicted from his apartment. In desperation, he heads to the bank to empty his account; the computers are down temporarily, but of course the teller is willing to take his word for how much remains.

And he lies.