Roderick (Simon Baker) gets great service from the ladies.
Roderick Blank gets erotic action left, right, sideways and in multiples in the new comedy Sex and Death 101.
The rub comes when Roderick (played by Simon Baker in an old-style metrosexual playboy role out of the Cary Grant or Rock Hudson playbook) receives an e-mail list of not only every woman he's ever had sex with but also every woman he will have sex with.
This isn't a bad comic clothesline on which to string 90 minutes of complications.
For a while at least, Sex and Death 101 zips along in the sex farce style of a Blake Edwards movie like 10.
And the surprisingly comically nimble and likeable Baker gets busy with a series of funny, beautiful women of all varieties played by Leslie Bibb, Frances Fisher and, especially, Natassia Malthe and Pollyanna McIntosh as a jet-setting pair of lesbian authors.
Winona Ryder as Death Nell
But writer-director Daniel Waters has other fish to fry, spinning out webs of bigger themes and unexpected plot threads, the most interesting of which involves Winona Ryder as a vengeful serial killer named "Death Nell."
The satiric laughs stall when the movie veers off in too many directions, and the sex farce stuff, in this era of Judd Apatow, feels raunchy without being particularly sharp or smart.
The final section of the film, though, which finally links Baker and the little-used Ryder (who looks great), leads to a surprisingly sweet, rueful conclusion; both actors shine in these scenes.
Daniel Waters turned a lot of heads by writing and directing the 1989 black comedy classic Heathers, a film that helped turn the young Winona Ryder into a very big deal.
It would be great to be able to say that Sex and Death 101 marks a return to form for both but, sorry, not this time.
