Scenes of a Sexual Nature

Wednesday afternoon on Hampstead Heath park in London where the main topics are loneliness, meeting people, splitting up, hopes, love, sex, family... Simply relationships at all ages and on all social levels. Simply put, this is a sort of artsy Love, Actually. A likeable looking picture with an interesting idea and several famous faces in some of the roles. A project like this logically depends heavily on the actors and the script. But unfortunately the movie finds no support in this area. The individual scenes are either good, or some are at best somehow imperfect, while most scenes are just plain boring. Only a bare minimum of them catch the attention. Director Ed Blum should have realized that less is sometimes more and reduced the number of stories to stop them seeming like a mass the same thing over and over. It is also disappointing in terms of acting. On the one hand, some characters seem quite naturally acted, while most of them are like: “Here I am in front of the camera, saying something, but when’s lunch?" and some performances seem like parodies on acting. For instance, Sophie Okonedo really is indescribable. If you liked her in Hotel Rwanda that she had an Oscar nomination for, you will probably never want to see her on the silver screen ever again. And the same applies to the entire movie. (05.12.2007)