Love and Sex

Love and Sex contains little love, and little sex. And very little else. Writer/director Valerie Breiman makes her debut, and she has almost nowhere to go but up. Love and Sex chronicles the trials of Kate Wells (Famke Janssen, X-Men, The House on Haunted Hill), a magazine writer. Her current assignment is to write an article on finding the perfect man, which allows her to reminisce on past relationships. Most of these relationships failed, because underneath it all, Wells is a shallow person.

The man of her dreams is Adam Levy (Jon Favreau, Rudy, Very Bad Things), an artist. They lived together for a while before getting sick of each other. Love and Sex relies on its dialogue to push the movie forward and keep the audience engaged. Breiman writes lines for Janssen and Favreau that try to come off as romantic, but end up annoying. Levy and Wells first coo at each other. The relationship deepens, and the two lose their initial infatuation and begin to argue. They are truly meant for each other, but both people are too dumb to realize the fact. The bulk of the movie deals with Levy and Wells. The rest contains snippets of Wells' other relationships. They are with comedians, actors, and other people who could be interesting but end up as boring. It also does not help that Love and Sex follows the very predictable course of a movie like this. Two people meet and fall in love, then a stupid argument causes them to break up. By the end of the movie, everything will be fine.

Wells is unlikable because she is so immature. She enters relationships for bad reasons, which come back to kick her in the butt when the relationship ends. Love and Sex does not mention her age, but her mental age has to be at least a decade younger than she is. Levy is better. He admits his inexperience, and Breiman has his character grow up by the time the movie is over. But Favreau is so grating and pathetic that no one wants Levy and Wells to get back together. What happened to Favreau? Remember Swingers? That was witty dialogue. Love and Sex is just banal and dry, with no substance too it.

Mongoose Rates It: Pretty Bad.
1 hour, 27 minutes, Not Rated but contains language and adult themes and situations, would probably be a PG-13 or R.

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