Men

Men

For a brief period during the early to mid-'80s, Sean Young seemed to have a bright future ahead of her. Two things, however, stood in the way of superstardom: her well-publicized erratic behavior and her almost complete lack of talent. Now 40 and reduced to starring in an endless stream of direct-to-video dreck, Young is the fuzzy, zombie-like blur at the center of Zoe Clark-Williams' Men, a wretched, ambiguously feminist drama in which the actress who would be Catwoman plays a disaffected, sexually confused young woman who rejects society's conventional morality. Consequently, she endures a long stream of random, uniformly depressing sexual encounters with a slew of sweaty, unpleasant men. Young embarks on a voyage of sexual discovery that takes her from New York to California, where she beds, among others, a charming restaurant owner (John Heard), a melancholy alcoholic (Dylan Walsh), and an obese drunk (Glenn Shadix). A dumb, nearly plotless throwback to the independent cinema of the '60s and '70s, when filmmakers regularly made narcissistic, self-indulgent films about poorly conceived characters looking for, you know, America and/or themselves, or something, Men flirts for a while with at least one genuinely trangressive idea: that it's alright for a woman to be as sexually assertive as a man. Sadly, however, Clark-Williams and her screenwriters chicken out toward the end, as Young's untethered libido ends up pretty much killing off every man she has ever loved. Young maintains the same vaguely robotic expression throughout Men, delivering all her lines in a dull monotone that makes her character seem at times like the world's most sexually experimental android. To make matters even worse, she seems at least a decade too old to be playing the film's post-collegiate protagonist, a simpering non-entity who learns the hard way that the lessons of Women's Studies 101 can't always protect you from that most common of maladies: a broken heart.

 
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