Sex Tape and Before I Go to Sleep

Here Diaz plays Annie, a characterless Mumsnet-type blogger who, in the opening scene, is writing a typical cougar’s lament: she and Jay (Jason Segel) have been married so long, they have “forgotten” how to have sex. And because Annie and Jay are America’s least believable couple, they decide to solve the problem in the least believable way, by making a sex tape. (Who solves anything by making a sex tape?) Only they can’t work the internet, and end up uploading the three-hour tape onto iPads they’ve given their friends.

Cue a movie! There is a desperate chase to retrieve them from Annie’s mother and Annie’s new boss, as well as from as many friends as the limping, convulsing plot requires. But how does that even work? Well, it doesn’t work at all, because nothing in this film works. It has clearly been put together by people who have been given an idea via conference call of what a film looks like and sounds like, but have no idea how to fit everything together.

Diaz is believable neither as a 20-year-old college girl in love with Segel nor as the haggard mother of his two children. Segel isn’t believable in a romcom at all, not with those revolting teeth. And that’s before we get to the technicalities of how you actually leak information onto separate iPads without the help of Lawrence’s friendly hacker. By the middle of the film, I was begging for a sign, just a tiny sign — a breath, a whisper, a genuinely raised eyebrow — that this clichéd, dull, obvious, cheap, emotionally dishonest, schlocky film wasn’t something created in a Petri dish in Hollywood by a ton of suits and filmed with the “movie” app on actual iPads.

Seriously, this is the first film I’ve watched that feels 100% put together by advertisers. The sickly jokes, the improbably slick setups and punchlines, the frankly bizarre chemistry between the gorgeous Diaz and the halitotic Segel, plus lighting more cheesy than a Senokot advertisement, never let you forget for one second that it is completely fake. It isn’t even redeemed by the appearance of Annie’s boss, played by Rob Lowe, now the go-to man for walk-on creeps.

Lowe is there to a) copy Diaz’s make-up and b) articulate the film’s attitude to sex, which is that it’s basically unwholesome, troublesome, not conducive to business; a closed-off, reactionary, right-wing attitude in one of the least sophisticated films about sex ever. And the weirdest thing is that someone in Tinseltown will probably be jumping for joy at Lawrence’s misfortune, because you couldn’t really pay for better publicity than that.

There’s more sex, lies and videotape in Before I Go to Sleep, a tightly wound thriller featuring Nicole Kidman. She comes to the film clearly begging for forgiveness after the saccharine horror that was Grace of Monaco. Or, at least, she returns to what she does best: victims. By which I mean real victims, rather than European princesses with charity commitments and power wardrobes. Kidman is Christine Lucas, a woman who cannot remember anything following an accident 10 years earlier. Christine’s mind “resets” every night, and she has to learn everything again in the morning, helped by her husband, Ben (Colin Firth).

I’m not sure I buy the whole “resetting the memory every 24 hours” thing as science fact — it sounds a bit specific, like an underworld punishment, or a movie pitch — but at least the machinery of the plot isn’t quite as appallingly clunky as Sex Tape’s. The film is based on a novel by a former NHS worker, SJ Watson: it was a huge success when it came out in 2011 (selected for the Simon Mayo Book Club book of the month). Yet some of the novel’s more serious aspects have not translated well.

Lucas starts seeing someone called Dr Nash (Mark Strong) to make sense of her condition. Nash secretly brings her to a hospital where he has an absurd computer that flashes “recall a past memory” as per the observation deck in Red Dwarf. He uses long words such as (pause for honking laughter) “countertransference” and “confabulation”, while she goldfishes. Then he makes a pass at Christine, only for her to run out of the car and down a pier. Seriously, a pier? Always there when you need one.

The scene is funny not only because of the tastefully arranged pier, but because it is such a blatant and lazy reference to Hitchcock. This is a good film with three good performances, but it is made by a director so frightened of taking risks that nearly everything — the house, Kidman’s wardrobe, the final scene, with its idiotic nonstop violence — feels like a Sunday- night drama. Even Firth, an actor of such quality that he expresses more when he’s not talking than when he is, seems swamped by the surroundings.

Then there is the issue that a far more stylish film has already been made about memory loss. Memento spends zero time explaining how the memory loss works, and maximum time showing Guy Pearce tattooing information on his body. Kidman’s character keeps ahead of things in a more suburban way, with a video camera, on which she records messages every night before she goes to sleep. The result is a perfectly serviceable thriller, with a few good twists and some properly frightening moments. It’s just: how do you make a story as weird and claustrophobic as this feel quite so vanilla?

Sex Tape
15, 94 mins

Before I Go to Sleep
15, 92 mins