“Sex and the Single Girl” and “Down with Love”: Sometimes, the Parody is All You Need

Okay, fess up. Which one of you told me to watch Sex and the Single Girl?

Come on. I know it was one of you.

I could easily go back to my other posts and read through the comments to determine which one of you insisted I watch that piece of excrement. I could do that without taking too much time, but I want to give you a chance to do the right thing and own your mistake.

No? Fine. Be a coward. Just know that you have lost my trust forever.

Sex and the Single Girl is a “romantic comedy” except there’s nothing comedic or romantic about it. It’s a stupid, stupid movie with a cast of old Hollywood film stars who must have desperately needed a paycheck something fierce, because I can’t believe that Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall actually thought this script was good. Were they all snorting the same cocaine?

The premise is that Tony Curtis plays a tabloid journalist who wants to write a dirty expose on Natalie Wood’s character. She’s a psychologist (at age twenty-three, because that makes sense) who wrote a best-selling book called Sex and the Single Girl about women and their sex lives. He adopts the persona of his hen-pecked neighbor (played by Henry Fonda) so he can seduce this psychologist/author and find out whether or not she’s a virgin.

I can’t even talk about the gender/sex issues in this movie because the whole thing was SO BAD. Terrible acting, terrible writing, terrible car chase sequence – oh yes, there’s a car chase sequence where multiple people are trying to chase each other to the airport. There are mistaken identities and wackiness!!! There are references to the fact that Tony Curtis was in Some Like it Hot with Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis’s character is even described as looking like Jack Lemmon! Because they look totally alike! (They don’t.) There are scenes where people fall into water and try to fish each other out and it’s all the HEIGHT OF HILARITY!

It’s not. This was almost as painful to watch as Valentine’s Day. It was only marginally less painful because a) Valentine’s Day had four times as many characters making asses out of themselves, and b) my mom watched the movie with me, and her horrified looks and commentary helped pass the time. (I would apologize for subjecting her to such a movie, but I had planned to watch it by myself when she came into the room and sat down, so I have nothing for which to be sorry. It was her choice.)

Anyway, forget the gender commentary. Forget this movie, period. If you want to watch a movie with a near-identical plot but is a lot more enjoyable and clever, then check out Down with Love.

Down with Love stars Renee Zellweger as a plucky, small-town librarian named Barbara Novak who wrote a bestselling guidebook instructing women to have sex for pleasure and avoid love at all costs. Ewan McGregor plays Catcher Block, a womanizing journalist who wants to sink Barbara Novak’s reputation after she decried him on national television. He pretends to be a different person so he can romantically seduce Barbara Novak and get her to admit that she’s “just like every other girl,” i.e. someone who wants marriage and romance, not sex.

The premise is the same but the execution is different. Down with Love is winking at the movie that Sex and the Single Girl wants to be and everyone is in on the joke. Zellweger and McGregor – as well as their supporting players, David Hyde Pierce and Sarah Paulson – know exactly what they’re doing. (This isn’t to say that the performers in Sex and the Single Girl weren’t aware they were filming a comedy. They seemed to be under the impression that they were filming a good comedy, though, and that makes me embarrassed for all of them.)

Down with Love also looks at the issue of the “battle of the sexes” in a clever way, tackling the issue from the perspective of women who take stereotypical male roles and men who take stereotypical female roles. It’s not particularly cutting-edge comedy, but I enjoy watching a modern point of view permeate a 60s nostalgia movie. The film also has one of my favorite parodies of a deus ex machina that I’ve ever seen, when one character takesthree minutes to explain the plot and twist ending to another character.

Reading this, you might think, “Well, I have to see both movies, don’t I? How will I understand the parody if I don’t see the original movie first?”

Squash that instinct. There is absolutely no reason to see Sex and the Single Girl. If you want to watch Down with Love, watch it. You will understand the parody if you are even vaguely aware that the 1960s existed.

Although, now that I’ve written a post about these movies, I’m wondering if I completely misunderstood the point of Sex and the Single Girl, and if it was, in fact, a parody of romantic comedies the way Down with Love was. Have I entered a wormhole where I am unable to differentiate between what is genuine and what is parody?

I don’t know how to answer that question.