EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX...*
(*BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
**1/2
Besides being the longest title of a movie I've reviewed so far (only because I was indisposed both days Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood was in theaters), EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS... is also the only movie in this book based on a sex manual. I should know -- from the ages of twelve to fourteen, every time I was in the library, I'd sneak up to the 612.6 (by the Dewey Decimal System) section of the stacks and grab up Dr. David Reuben's sex book, only after I was sure no one was looking. It was from that book I turned my warped, misinformed view of sex into something even more mangled and twisted.
So naturally I was interested to see how Woody Allen, the world's most talented sex pervert, had adapted hundreds of pages of dry, clinical sex talk into a comedy. The answer lies in the fact that this is an incredibly loose adaptation of the book. All Woody did was take a few of the chapter title questions and turn them into separate vignettes. For a sex movie, though, EVERYTHING YOU... reaches its climax awfully early, is impotent for about half an hour, gives us a tease of foreplay, then goes into two more satisfying climaxes before we all have a smoke during the end credits and bask in the afterglow of what we've seen.
Since EVERYTHING... is such an uneven movie, I'm rating each segment individually. For those of you who don't have calculators, the average rating for each segment was 2.43 stars, rounded up to two-and-a-half for an overall rating of the film.
"Do Aphrodisiacs Work?" (***1/2) The movie's funniest segment, with Woody playing the jester in a Dark Ages court. Woody finds himself hot for the queen, who returns his feelings after he sneaks past two soldiers and slips her a mickey. (That's m-i-c-k-e-y. Why? Because he likes her.) Comedy abounds from multiple situations, from Woody trying to unlock the queen's chastity belt as fast as he can ("Before you know it, the Renaissance will be here and we'll all be painting.") to the scene where he tries to entertain the court with some awful jokes. ("TB or not TB? That is the congestion.")
"What is Sodomy?" (*) A video of actual sodomy wouldn't be too much less entertaining than what Woody gives us here, a sketch about a doctor (Gene Wilder) who falls in love with a sheep (yes, a sheep). It's more tasteless than funny, and is actually played straight most of the time, with the only mild laughs coming when a depressed Wilder drinks Woolite from the bottle and caresses his lamb's wool sweater.
"Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching Orgasm?" (**) Woody ignores the obvious answer (Because they're having sex with _him_!) and instead plays a harrowed Italian husband whose frigid wife (Louise Lasser) can only become aroused by having intercourse in public places. The entire segment is in subtitles and is mostly unfunny, a frigid piece of comedy.
"Are Transvestites Homosexuals?" (*1/2) Even more one-joke than the last segment, Lou Jacobi gets caught wearing a dress outside. That's about it.
"What Are Sex Perverts?" (**1/2) Instead of just flashing his picture onscreen and moving on, Woody recreates a "What's My Line?" takeoff entitled "What's My Perversion?" where panelists (including Regis Philbin, who himself fantasizes about spanking Kathie Lee) must ask questions to discover the contestant's perversion. This segment is interesting rather than funny, due to Woody's convincing recreation of badly-preserved kinescope reels and use of game show host Jack Barry as himself.
"Are the Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate?" (***) Woody plays an apprentice sex doctor (and author of the book "Advanced Sexual Positions: How to Achieve Them Without Laughing") who must stop a giant breast ("about 4,000 in an X cup") from destroying life as we know it. This one is funny until he crosses the taste line by having the breast squirt milk at its victims.
"What Happens During Ejaculation?" (***1/2) This one takes us inside the male body, which is depicted as a giant control center where little men in white suits (including Burt Reynolds and Tony Randall) control every activity of the body. Here, as the erection is cranked up by sweaty manual laborers, nervous sperm Woody prepares to be shot out of the body. Creative and funny, a good climax to a movie that starts out with a bang, lays limp for awhile and regains its momentum toward the end.
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