“The End of Sex,” now playing in theatres, stars Emily Hampshire and Jonas Chernick as a couple looking to spice up their stale sex life while the kids are off at sleepaway camp.
Emma (Hampshire) and Josh (Chernick) shared their first kiss as teens, and have been partners in life ever since. Two daughters later, they’re in a rut, but it’s a happy enough rut. They’re still in love, creating a happy, loving life for themselves and the kids. But one thing is missing. Their sex life.
“Our sex has become mechanical,” says Emma.
“So,” says Josh, “let’s surprise each other.”
With the kids away for the first time ever, they have the house to themselves. Without the prying eyes of the little ones watching their every move, they have a chance to reevaluate their “mutual apathy and shared disinterest in sex.”
As the pressure to have a “normal” sex life mounts—there’s a ménage à trois tinged with obsession, extasy popping and an embarrassing visit to a sex club—their sexual odyssey doesn’t quite go as they hoped.
Despite the provocative title, “The End of Sex” isn’t really about sex. Ultimately, it’s about trust and togetherness. And an awkward threesome. An exploration of long-term marriages, it places its characters in mild relationship jeopardy as a way to dig into what it really means to spend one’s life with another person.
We see examples of that long-term commitment in the shorthand between Emma and Josh. It’s in the easy way they communicate (most of the time) and the understanding of things that are left unsaid between them. We see the hurt that comes from complacency—”The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about sex,” says Emma. “You’ve been thinking about sex with people who aren’t me,” replies Josh.—and the often ridiculous lengths couples will go through to spice things up.
It’s all a bit predictable and a bit heightened, but is buoyed by funny cameos from Melanie Scrofano, as the Emma’s obsessed friend, and Colin Mochrie in an unlikely situation.
As a date night movie “The End of Sex” offers up an earnest portrait of the intimacy and connection necessary for a couple to weather the storms of an on-going relationship. It’s no “A Married Couple”—Alan King’s legendary 1969 documentary about a marriage in uproar—but it does deliver some insights into what makes relationships tick.
Gamers will recognize Raccoon City as the name of the once prosperous home base of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corp. That we’re talking about it on this page can only mean one thing, a new “Resident Evil” movie. The seventh film in the series, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City,” now playing in theatres, reboots the videogame-inspired franchise, taking the story back to the beginning.
Raccoon City once thrived. A company town, from the 1960s to the late 90s the Midwestern city grew and prospered as pharmaceutical giant Umbrella set up shop there, and invested heavily in infrastructure and the townsfolk, who made up the bulk of their employees.
Everything changed in 1998 when a genetically-altered organism named Queen Leech attacked the facility, kicking off a series of events that left the city a desolate wasteland with a zombie problem.
It’s into this world director Johannes Roberts drops college student Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) and rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia) on one terrifying night in Raccoon City. Claire has come to the dying city to locate her brother Chris (Robbie Amell). The T-virus, Umbrella’s top-secret biological weapon isn’t much of a secret anymore, and the infected residents of Raccoon City are now terrifying zombies. Over the course of one night Claire, Chris, and others from the video game series like Leon (Avan Jogia), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) and Albert Wesker (Umbrella Academy’s Tom Hopper), fight to survive.
Adapted from the first and second “Resident Evil” games by Capcom, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” returns the series to its video game roots. The previous films emphasized action over horror. This time around Roberts reverts to scary vibe of the videogames, paying homage to both the games and vintage John Carpenter for the atmosphere of dread that builds throughout. Stylistically, as a videogame tribute, that approach works quite well.
As a movie, however, it comes up lacking. Despite some good gooey and gory zombie action and some fun action scenes, it takes too long to get where it is going. While we wait for the going to get good, we’re subjected to dialogue straight out of the Handbook of Horror Clichés and too much exposition.
The opening feels long winded and the ending rushed, but, especially for gamers looking for Easter Eggs, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” has enough moments in between to satisfy fans of the series.
