WhatzUp

Body Shots
by Derek Neff

Posing as yet another ultra-hip, ultra-knowing, ultra-annoying twenty-something battle of the sexes a la "Sex and the City" or "Ally McBeal," director Michael Cristofer's Body Shots turns out to be something a little different and a lot more interesting. On the surface, Cristofer uses the same elements as these aforementioned TV shows: all the characters are attractive, professional, single, they like to wax mock-philosophical about sexual politics and apparently spend all their free time hanging out with each other at nightclubs, where the occasional, cynical tryst is to be found. But Cristofer, working from a strong screenplay by playwright David McKenna, does more than simply romanticize these characters' rather vapid lifestyles. "Sex and the City" seems to have been made by people who actually live and love this kind of life; Body Shots, on the other hand, comes down pretty hard against such goings on. Its tone is dark and even sometimes downright moralistic. "Sex without love is violence," one character intones during a scene at a dance club, and we can see how, in the blur and heat of all these thrashing bodies, he could come to this conclusion. Already infamous for a certain explicit and comical scene involving a group of women at a sexual techniques class, Body Shots is an uncommonly frank, unflinching movie. There is a kind of poetry to the nastiness and vulgarity of these jaded men and women. Despite the fact that Body Shots deals with a milieu already thoroughly over-explored, Body Shots, unlike its predecessors, refreshingly seeks to be more mature than the characters is portrays.