 |
|||
 |
 |
||
 | |||
 | |||||||||||
|
|
Starring Christina Ricci, Martin Donovan, et al. Released to DVD on October 20, 1998. ![[Photo]](/photos/oppositeofsex1.jpg) Like most of the rest of America, I was first introduced to actress Christina Ricci in Barry Sonnenfeld's The Addams Family. Ricci played cute, yet morbidly disturbed Wednesday Addams with a macabre flair. I looked at Ricci and saw a cute, naïve, innocent, little girl. Now, a scant eight years later, Ricci stars in The Opposite of Sex. Only she's changed. This isn't your standard Lauren Holly, "I dyed my hair" kind of change though. This is a far more drastic change. When I look at Ricci now, smoking like a Gary industrial factory and engaging in sex with more men than Madonna, I don't see that same little girl; I see a woman with breasts the size of my television set who is constantly clamoring for sexual attention. This frightens me for two reasons: 1) no human, other than Soleil Moon Frye, has a chest that large, and 2) having first seen her at age 10, I can't help but wondering if it is socially acceptable for me to watch Ricci's current on-screen cavorting; I feel dirty, dammit. Acceptable or not though, Ricci stars here as Dedee, a pregnant 16 year old. After a falling out with her mother, Ricci takes a bus to a small town in Indiana where her gay, half brother, Bill (Martin Donovan) lives with his lover (Ivan Sergei). And before you know it, Ricci has used her considerable feminine charm to change Sergei's sexual preference, and the two have taken off for southern California with several thousand dollars they have stolen from Bill. Bill high tails it to Los Angeles with his bitchy and sexually repressed friend Lucia (Lisa Kudrow) to set matters straight. Ricci was good in the lead, but The Opposite of Sex seemed to hum even more smoothly when she was off-camera. The near constant cynacism and occasionally abrasive complaints that Kudrow's Lucia deliver worked extraordinarily well to compliment Donovan's even tempered, quiet, and soft hearted Bill. Lucia, herself, is one of the more interesting characters to grace the silver screen in the last several years. Eons away from the stereotypical dumb blondes Kudrow has been prone to play in the past, Lucia is a thoroughly bitter individual. Initially, she is upset at the fact that her brother, Bill's ex-lover, turns out to be gay. Just as she is coming to grips with this though, her brother learns that he had AIDS. Lucia is unable to handle this revelation and, consequently, her brother's untimely death; she is left in a quandry, questioning both the values of love and of sex-it was, in her eyes, sex that killed her brother. Lucia's confusion appears outwardly as bitterness. She is never seemingly happy and can rile those persons around her with her negative attitudes. Those people who are close to her can see, and understand, where her defeatist ways of thinking came from, where as others cannot. This dichotomy between Lucia's self inflicted nastiness and Bill's reticent nature was probably the most interesting aspect of the many intriguing relationships Roos created in The Opposite of Sex. Naturally, when compared to the fluffy, barely one-dimensional characters in wrtier Scott Frank's In & Out, Frank's creations suffered immeasurably. Every once in awhile, Hollywood produces a film that is startlingly well-written and acted. The Opposite of Sex is just that; a film whose characters are perfectly real, and whose actors are in touch with the feeling and issues of their respective characters. Of the Two Gay, Indiana, High School Teacher Movies, the choice is simple, see The Opposite of Sex.
|
| |||||
![[Photo]](/photos/oppositeofsex2.jpg)
Given the semi-recent Hollywood trend of releasing films with poorly crafted screenplays and one-dimensional characters with utter disdain for the quality of the final product, it came as quite a surprise to me to find that writer/director Don Roos has created some of the most original characters this side of the Coen brothers. Roos' storyline was interesting and refreshing in its own right, but the depth and breadth of his six main characters was positively earth shattering. Not only could every actor, with the exception of Sergei, have been nominated for supporting Academy Awards, but is certain cases, Kudrow's and Donovan's especially, they should have been.