Movies Reviews The Tattoo

Even sex can’t save ‘Body Shots’

BRISTOL, Connecticut, U.S.A. — There’s “foreplay.” Then there is “good sex and bad sex,” followed relentlessly by “afterplay.” What’s left is a pathetic comedic drama that passes as a thinly veiled 60-year-old Hemingway novel. They call it Body Shots.

The film details one wild night in the lives of eight horny heterosexual twenty-somethings. Using a series of intimate confessionals, disorienting flashbacks, and skewed camera angles, you delve deep into the lives of these mixed-up Gen Xers.

Only we find out that it isn’t so deep at all. Each professes to understand the difference between love and sex. They know they want sex, but they may not be ready to love.

After an excruciatingly long, although visually interesting, night club scene, the crew pairs off to get exactly what they can’t stop talking about. It’s looking like they are all about to get what they deserve, when one intoxicated pair has to mess up everything by bringing up the issue that sex may not be the answer if it isn’t consensual.

In the end, as viewers, we are praying that the last sexless couple can come together and save love in the 90s as we know it. But they can’t because no one knows how to love anymore. The characters have gotten what they wanted, but they are still aren’t happy. Now they are unhappy and confused.

It seems Hemingway said the same thing years ago when he had his characters traipsing around Italy, drinking and chasing women in The Sun Also Rises. They too found that, even when they saw just what they wanted before their eyes, it wasn’t enough. Only Hemingway, sadly enough, said it better.

After all is said and done, the film falls quite short of defining the past decade as it alludes to on its posters. Even sex is not enough to sell this picture.

Amanda Lehmert is a Reporter for Youth Journalism International.

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