The Loss of Sexual Innocence

The movie was awful. Simple as that.

Oh, and for the record, "cliche" serves as both a noun and adjective and, as such, "cliche" the adjective is a synonym of "hackneyed." Best not to be pompous about grammar and language unless you have a singular clue what you are talking about.

Neither hackneyed nor cliche serve to be particularly descriptive of this film though. Open your thesaurus at "crap" and continue on from there. In fact, forget the thesaurus and spend two hours thinking up synonyms for crap and you'll have a better time than you will watching this movie.

really really really really bad... not to mention long and boring...a shocker... I don't know what Mike Figgis was thinking about when he thought to do this one

I don't recommend this to anyone...give it a miss

Although the images were very beautiful and creative, they didn't link together in any cogent manner, sometimes even taking away from the movie. The editing is very poor, making the movie seem ten times slower than it was. The themes were an attempt at universality, but the poor direction and lack of dialogue just made it alienating. I was very disappointed because the trailer made this movie look intelligent, lush, and fertile, which it isn't at all.

I do not understand how one can call this a bad movie. I like it from the first up to the last scene. Beautiful pictures. Sensual narrated by a very talented director. I guess you have to be a sensual human being to feel sympathy for this movie. I feel lucky that i do.

Mike Figgis' "Loss of Sexual innocence" is another of his undertakings into the world of film art. It's not quite art, and it's not quite entertaining. The film is expressed in a series of vignettes concerning the sexual maturity of a character called Nic intertwined with other bits that are supposed to represent Adam and Eve and the beginnings of sexual discovery and other bits that either mean something or not. The problem, though, is that the bits don't really add up to anything, not schematically, not thematically. Every time the Nic character reappears at a different age, you don't even get a sense of it being the same person; it always feels like Figgis is starting from scratch all over again with a new set of players.

Figgis is a talented filmmaker, though. He knows how to build a segment for dramatic impact and how to compose a shot for effect, and in those rare moments, it feels like it's not all worthless and Figgis is getting across to the audience on some level. The sketch of Nic and his family stopping at a roadside gas station is a good piece, as is the woman in the see-through cotton dress at the train stop. There is an implied sexuality there, the sexuality that hums all around us, that we experience without really feeling. That's when the movie scores, when it's not just another lame coming-of-age story. But those moments are all too few. On the other hand, the Adam and Eve bits are trite, and one scene where a man carries a shopping bag with a liquor bottle spout protruding (obviously a metaphor for the male penis) is kid stuff, junkyard symbolism at its worst. Where this movie fails is not is in its structure on the screen, but in the mind.

One postscript: After watching it, I put on the director's commentary on the DVD to get maybe a better understanding of what he was trying to do. Figgis narrates with a not-exactly-arrogance but with a tone certainly descending from the mountain. When he spoke the words "we trucked in a load of red clay to recreate the Kenya of my youth", I knew I was done for. I turned it off and switched back to my Sunday Sports Center. 1 1/2 * out of 4