SEX AND DEATH 101
Running time 100 minutes
Written and Directed by Daniel Waters
Starring Winona Ryder and Simon Baker

Daniel Waters’ Sex and Death 101, from his own screenplay, reunites the screenwriter of Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1989) with its then-teenage star, Winona Ryder. Now, almost 20 years later for Mr. Waters and Ms. Ryder, they try their best to make plausible a supernatural sex farce in which Australian-born Simon Baker has much the largest part as Roderick Blank, the womanizing executive who must confront the meaning of a bizarre e-mail that lists the names of 101 women with whom he has either fornicated in the past or will do so in the future. Roderick has two immediate problems with the list. Not only is the woman he is to marry in a week not the last name on the list, but no fewer than 72 names come after her.

In an almost blindingly white-glowing office, men in white apparel explain to Roderick the significance of the e-mail list. It seems that a mysteriously infallible and prophetic machine dispenses these lists, and Roderick might just as well get on with the program immediately and indefinitely. After breaking his engagement, Roderick subsequently falls in love with a Dr. Miranda Stone (Leslie Bibb) and wants to marry her inasmuch as he believes that she is No. 66 on the e-mail list, only to discover to this horror that it is not Miranda, but a loathsome Dr. Mirabella Stone who is No. 66 on the e-mail list. When Miranda suddenly dies in a freak accident in the kitchen, Roderick begins to fear the proven prescience of the machine and its infernal e-mail list.

I frankly found it difficult to keep track of all the characters—42 on the credit list of cast members—and all the complications faced by Roderick as he kept trying to check his list, which his concerned secretary kept hidden away from him. Indeed, the film is thereby too copiously complicated to be anywhere nearly as funny as Mr. Waters’ would-be model, Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1993), with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. Of course, Simon Baker is no Bill Murray, but the script of Sex and Death 101 is an even larger part of the problem when you compare it to the marvelously inventive script for Groundhog Day.

There are oodles and oodles of babes on display for Mr. Baker to ogle or not to ogle as his mood dictates. But except for Ms. Ryder and Ms. Bibb, they tend to get lost in the shuffle. The film has its moments of wit and lucidity, but these are few and far between. Perhaps when sex is quantified to triple digits, the quality is diluted to the point of a sharp decline in eroticism, not to mention humor.

Mr. Baker does the best he can with an impossible role, and Ms. Ryder is back projecting her distinctive personality, and I am glad to see that she has finally surmounted all the self-imposed obstacles to her career. And that is reason enough to see this movie over most these days.