Body Shots

Yes, Body Shots is pretentious all the way, well done, but it's also entertaining, sexy and surprisingly funny. Ron Livingston is hilarious as Trent. There's also some highly steamy sex scenes. Overall, the movie never bored me, it's a perfect example of a guilty pleasure. *** (out of four)

`It's not a huge deal to figure out who you want to f--k but who you want to love, how do you figure that out?' I believe that you have to be in a certain state of mind to view a film like this. It isn't something that you just pop in and kick back for. One has to be willing to accept as fact what they are seeing and base it, not on themselves, but what they have come to terms with as being routine and normal. This film is much like the birth cycle. We open with two characters, which then divides into three and finally multiplies into eight. Once all of the characters are set and ready to escape their personal pod of existence a story pushes its way through that is sometimes disgusting to watch but uncharacteristically real. We learnt that maybe Darwin was a bit off when making his theory of evolution. We see that mankind definitely formed from apes, but how much we have evolved is put into serious questioning. Eight human beings (four males and four females) off all different size, shape and occupation emerge from everyday life for a wild night of clubbing with sex on their minds and drinks on their tabs. The film opens with a scene of Rick and Jane lying in a bed (clothed). The opening line may simply be the best line to come from a scene like this. Upon awakening Rick asks `do you have any Tylenol baby?' Then enters Sara in a drunken state of self-loathing, bloodied at the face, telling of how she was date raped by Mike. But in the interrogation room Mike's alibi implies that it was consensual sex and Sara was freely open to receive. The first half of the film takes place in the everyday lives of our eight individual minds. It shows us the before effect (labelled here as `foreplay'), the preparation and the journey to the club. The second takes place after the alleged rape. After following the looking into the actual criminal intent of the rape the climax is unlike you would expect from a film of this nature. IT is inconclusive, insignificant even, but this is not a problem for three reasons. First, two people are so drunk that neither of them can remember the full truth of the matter so why should we? Not only should we not know who did it for the simple fact of it would become nothing more than a battle of the sexes film, but would shouldn't even care if it happened or not. Second, the whole idea of the rape is not what this film is about. It is merely a device used by Hollywood writers to show that the film is moving in a forward fashion and does have some bit of story to provide. The final reason is because this film is about a deep yearning inside that some people posses to find a common medium between unconditional sex and unconditional love. . IT is also about alcohol and how it desensitizes us and robs us of our natural ability to decipher between wrong and right. Lastly it is about consumerism. I'm sure people reading this who have already seen the film will think that I am crazy but it really is. The film is not about consumerism in story or method but in the way it is set up. The film runs much like an infomercial. All of the characters talk openly into the camera, realising its presence yet never really feeling the need to acknowledge it, grabbing you attention just long enough to sell you a little slice of their reality and maybe even set you inline with your own. But the question is how can we put such an idealistic price value on sex? Buy me a drink and I will sell you a blowjob, buy me a room and I will sell you my soul. That famous Sprite commercial says `Image is nothing, thirst is everything. Obey your thirst.' That is a great consumer statement but this film wants to counter by asking, what if it is that image you thirst for? All of these men and women have an image and it is that that draws them to each other. They all have a thirst for living like animals, being treated like animals and dying like animals, until one day they can all realise that they have drank their life away. `He hasn't tried to kiss you because he respects you, can't you handle that?' If you haven't guessed it the answer was a big, fat no. That is why these people desire alcohol so much. It is a controlling factor n their lives that feeds their image while lightening up their brain mass. I am willing to bet that for every twenty people that see this film there will be at least one who will view this as a huge waste of time. Their reasoning? That they are nothing like these characters. That in itself would be statement enough for me. For one film to make use of an external source, in this case you, is quite simply a technique we haven't seen since the release of Kids. Because we belong to the `obey your thirst generation' we are to ignorant in ourselves to admit that these people, as trashy as they are, are just like everyone else living on this planet. The ideology is that movies are made to entertain us, but when one hits a little to close to home we are first to dismiss it as unrealistic and unbelievable. Personally I marvelled in truly human these characters are. Being as this is Hollywood and everything must be formulistic the second half throws a bold curveball that sets both the idea of the alcohol controlled universe and the search for more for redemption in love are place into subtext while the idea of date rape takes over. That does not make these two issues any less important though. Alcohol is a cancer that eats away at the mind until nothing is left but the body and all decisions are left up to chance. I think the running theme of the alcohol in this film is that it's funny how people think that they are living the high life when put under its endurance yet what do you really gain from it. Is being raped a contributing factor to your idealistic dream world? What is the point in sex when you aren't even going to remember it the next mourning? Rick on the other hand, in all his drunken splendour, seems to be reaching out for help in Jane. The first scene in the bedroom is truly a great piece of description towards the films entire theme. `Did we do anything last night?' Asks Rick. After hearing the answer no his reply is `good.' `Good, why good?' Asks Jane. `Because I would hope that if we did do something that I would have remembered it.' This film could have taken a turn in the downward direction were it to pit the two groups against each other in a battle of the sexes, which I was praying would not happen in the end. For the most part it wasn't. We are allowed to examine both sides of the sexual coin from the very beginning and the account is surprisingly unbiased. The acting in this film is nothing that will stir up any talk around the table come Oscar time. All of the actors do a good job of making the characters just slimy enough to be believable and just likeable enough to hold the audience. Other than that it is nothing really less than you would expect from an underground film such as this. I must hand it to director Michael Cristofer and writer and David McKenna for the way they did this film came out. Films like this are very hard to do because they often find themselves walking the line between compelling and voyeuristic. Yet this film seems out to challenge the voyeurs of the world. Instead of analyzing the lives of a specific group of characters we seem to be analyzing ourselves, we just don't realize it because it appears in the form of a film. Probably the best film of this nature would be Kids. It thrust us into a day in the life of a group of teens bent on sex, drugs and living a free life. This film is very much like Kids, the scene in which the females are discussing the art of oral sex while getting ready for their night out seems to be taken right out of Kids. Yet it is not copyright infringement rather I felt that we are allowed to see that some people just don't know when to grow up. These people, all on the paths to mature adulthood, are still not content that they are all grown up and that my friends is a scary thought.

This is an entertaining movie with a lot of potential. The acting is great, and the directing is flawless. This is a film that I was not looking forward to seeing, but I was thoroughly impressed....It is the story of eight twenty-somethings, and their night on the town. They are all looking for some action, and that is exactly what they get. This movie is fast paced, and witty. The only time it drags is when the Director uses this film as a vehicle to offer social commentary on date rape...This movie is definitely worth your money, even if it is just to see Ron Livingston who steals the show.

I watched this at first cuz I am a huge fan of both Tara Reid and Jerry O'Connell. It's all about the 90s club scene, how screwed up people can be, how easily things can happen, and how different memories can be when it comes to court. Plus Tara Reid gets naked, so I love it!

Since it's so far apart between seeing good acting, you really get surprised when it just kinda' sneaks up upon you and shows you what difference it makes.

Hollywood has spent years of making movies with bad dialog and acting whilst trying to cover it up with special FX, one-liners and retouched images of whatever actor/actress is the flava of the month. In `Body Shots' you get an incredibly knit-together group of Americas finest, all young actors that has yet to become too big for their own good. That is to say, they can still take on riskier projects that perhaps a bigger actor would be forced to turn down by their management because it would not `go with the audience'.

My personal thanks here to Sean Patrick Flanery and Amanda Peet, whom on earlier occasions showed me that they dared (or did not get any other offers, who knows :) commit to smaller and often much more rewarding ventures.

Tara Reid hasn't really impressed up till now with movies like American Pie and Urban Legends, but here she really gets a chance to act out. Usually, dramatic scenes are edited into smithereens, but all over `Body Shots' you get long, really intense sequences, with all of the cast-members showing their thespian caliber. I was also pleasantly surprised to be taken in by Chris O'Donnell's portrayal of the horny party-jock, since the last time I saw him was in the abysmal movie `Dungeons & Dragons' which kinda' put him on my black-list.

Ron Livingstone is just plain weird, and therefore, marvelous. (That Alka-Seltzer-bit is going to haunt me for a while :)

The editing is first class. In basically all movies, when you see a club-scene, you're not convinced at all. YOU know what it feels like to be in a steamy, crowded club, surrounded by (and being) people in various stages of intoxication. It's seldom portrayed with as much realism as it was here, much thanks to the clever editing. The layout of the story as a whole is also refreshing - not saying that messing up the timeline hasn't been done before - but the cut-scenes between the girls gang and the boys gang, the constant meta-perspective of the actors relaying their personal views of the meat market, and the flashbacks helps to make this movie what it is.

But what struck me most of all was the sex. I can't think about when I last saw a movie with such convincing sex-scenes. It was all the small things YOU do, but they never seem to be able to put into a movie. The sucking of fingers, the difference of intensity in kissing, the touching, the grabbing of genitalia. Now, I'm not saying that showing more always is the best way to portray sex. But when it's called for by the script and the context, then hell yes! And if you're going to attempt to make an honest movie about eight hormonally hyped twenty-something's, then most definitively so.

All in all, I was very impressed. The story has been done before, but not with such pathos. Movies like these make me hopeful of the future. Perhaps we're going away from only producing predictable storylines, uninspiring actors that deliver lines like they have a nail through their kneecap and dialog that you'd never hear outside of the screenwriters head.