Hillary T., Here…

Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz star in ‘Sex Tape’ from Jake Kasdan. Segel and Diaz play a happily married couple with two kids and a great life. They have everything all the gadgets they need to run their life, a fabulous house, and she writes a “mommy blog” the local world knows about.

The movie opens with Cameron, who plays Annie, recounting on her blog, how things are in the beginning of a relationship, all the sex, all the touching, all of the hidden caresses. And then she asks, “When does it all change? When does being intimate become so hard?” She wants to rekindle that missing spark within her marriage, but how? (this exposition is rushed, by the way)

Her blog is so successful that a wholesome family value company wants to buy it and so she decides she will pack up the kids to her parents, and she and her husband Jay (Jason Segel) will celebrate alone. This is where is should get ridiculous, and totally funny- and yet, the laughs here are forced, and obvious. They can’t seem to find their groove, so, Annie suggests making a sex tape and they are gonna use their new iPad.

There is a lot of talk in this movie and not enough of the showing. They talk about the tape, don’t really show it. And it seemed rushed. The best part of the of the movie is discovering that the movie is synced to anyone who has received an iPad from Jay, and this includes the mailman and Annie’s would-be boss, Rob Lowe in a role that steals the entire movie.

It’s nice to see him in a movie about a sex tape, and in a place where he plays a character so completely not what he seems that it surprises you. Jack Black also pops up as a greasy internet porn tzar with a hidden message, and it slows the movie down, but hey, the obvious laughs are still funny. I give ‘Sex Tape’ three out of five stars, merely because the movie could have been more if it had shown more.

3 out of 5 Stars

– Hillary Thomas