The provocatively titled "Love, Sex and Eating the Bones" is a tale about sexual frustration involving a man addicted to porn and a woman with a decidedly more conservative view of making love. The curious twist is that it is the woman who wants to get down-and-dirty in the sack and the man who finds himself unable to rise to the occasion.
Michael is an aspiring photographer who works as a security guard at a local parking garage. Jasmine is a successful ad agency executive who has sworn off both men and sex since her last abortive relationship two years ago. The two find themselves falling in love with one another but hit a rocky patch when Michael turns out to be impotent - at least when it comes to having to perform with a flesh-and-blood human being.
"Love, Sex and Eating the Bones" starts off as a sub-par, utterly conventional romantic comedy, but just when you're about to give up on it, it takes a daring and much appreciated detour into some previously unexplored territory. This is the first film I can remember to feature impotence as a major plot point and the first to acknowledge the detrimental effect that pornography can have on real-world relationships. That the film does so in the context of a romantic comedy in no way diminishes its value and, in fact, makes the topics more palatable and approachable than they might otherwise be. Moreover, the film is blessed with two extremely likable stars as its protagonists, Hill Harper and Marlyne Afflack, who tackle the tricky subject matter with charm and grace. Some may see the humor in the film as vulgar and crude at times, but I tend to think of it as realistic, accurately capturing the ways in which couples talk and deal with one another in the modern world. This turns out to be a better film than one might initially suspect.
