# Opposite of Sex, The (1998)

### reviewed by
Andrew Hicks

    THE OPPOSITE OF SEX
    A film review by Andrew Hicks
    Copyright 1998 Andrew Hicks

    (1998) ***1/2 (out of four)

Christina Ricci was always a little weird. I mean, you'd have to be to play a convincing Wednesday Addams and hang out with Casper the Friendly Ghost. But in the past year, most of her movies have seen a turn from sitcom remake queen to a messed-up whore. Last year's THE ICE STORM saw her seducing a junior-high kid, but that was just the beginning. THE OPPOSITE OF SEX is one of the most twisted, amoral films of the year, and also one of the best.

Ricci plays a teenager whose home life gets so bad that she heads to Indiana to live with a gay half-brother (Martin Donovan) who teaches high school. Life isn't so great for the brother, either. His lover has just died of AIDS and, worse yet, his ex-lover's sister is Phoebe from "Friends," and she won't go away. Actually, Kudrow has for once chosen a role with brains. She's been ditzy funny in ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION and MOTHER, but here she rattles off some of the most intelligent one-liners in the film.

Clever one-liners are the backbone of THE OPPOSITE OF SEX, as is the cocky narration from Ricci. Rarely does the "Yeah, I know this is a movie" approach work, but when Ricci's character advances the story like someone who has seen hundreds of conventional movies and wants to keep her biography from being anything but, it's a new and witty approach. And, more importantly, it fits with a movie about unstable, abnormal people.

As Ricci comes to visit Donovan, her brother has a new boyfriend in the overly handsome Ivan Sergei. She makes some smalltalk about "homos" and what-not before deciding Sergei is only gay because he's never had a real woman and, as all Internet perverts know, Christina Ricci is definitely a real woman. It doesn't take much prodding before Sergei decides to forsake the out-hole for the in-hole and join the heterosexual team.

That's about the time Sergei realizes the biggest drawback of the straight life -- having your girlfriend tell you she's pregnant. Yes, Ricci is with child and Donovan is pissed, kicking them out of the house. So they swipe $10,000 of his money and head to L.A. while an ex-boyfriend (Johnny Galecki, David from "Roseanne") demands to know where Sergei is. When Donovan doesn't help him out, he tells the cops that the teacher molested him in high school.

THE OPPOSITE OF SEX continues in true Springeresque fashion through one crazy plot development after another. Most of them are guaranteed to offend at least one audience member, although this product of writer-director Don Roos' imagination always manages to be elegantly sleazy. There are only a few ways to successfully approach horrendous storylines (blackmailing your half-brother by holding his dead lover's ashes hostage, Lyle Lovett as a love interest, etc.) but this movie does it well, and kept me laughing throughout.

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