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Reviews
Virtual Sexuality (1999)
Starts out funny enough...
While the premise of this film has been done, it starts out with enough freshness and humor to keep you watching. Justine's early escapades inside the body of her own "perfect man" are quite humorous and Rupert Penry-Jones as Jake does a great job portraying a man, with the "personality" of a teenage girl, Justine. But past the halfway mark this film loses complete direction. We grow to really like the endearing Jake, but we discover that Justine is also a separate entity to him, (i.e. the machine made a double of Justine as a man, so there are two of them, one male, one female). And then the film follows Justine in her efforts to snag Jake, (as she doesn't know he is really her). The movie tries to make her the central character again, and fails because we really don't care anymore -- she's hardly as interesting. It also takes a detour at the moment when some intriguing and more controversial issues are about to be raised. Jake is being seduced by a girl at school that everyone calls, "hoover",(take a guess why), and after she spends sometime kissing him on the street, we never see her again. It raises an interesting question of sexual preference, i.e. justine inside a man's body being attracted to a woman, but the movie skirts the issue, wanting instead to regress into a high school soap opera. At the close of the film Jake is deleted in a quick wrap-up effort to make this a movie about loving yourself and waiting to lose your virginity to a "nice guy," who may not have the looks, but has the personality. Its hokey sub-plot about the scientists trying to recapture Jake to perform scientific experiments on him only hinders the movie even more, making certain scenes into a slapstick comedy. Its unfortunate that something could start out interesting enough and plummet so quickly. But the first half-an-hour is worth watching, if for nothing else than Rupert Penry-Jones (Jake)as he "explores" his new masculine body.
It (1990)
Don't Skip the Book!
While the acting in this version of Stephen King's It, is for the most past good, (who can argue with Tim Curry as the clown), it none the less was stripped of a lot of its themes to be put to television. It follows the general premise of the book but omits huge sections of the occurrences that happen to the children, some of which are vitally important to the character development and plot. We lose some of the most beautiful aspects to their relationships this way. Also, the structure of the novel, which although overwhelming, is supremely successful, and is again lost in the film. While they could have made it much worse, I must urge people to read the book first. It's scarier, deeper, more complex, and a far better story.