A Nice Girl Like You

This movie’s idea of humor is repeating the names of certain parts of the human body out loud – preferably within senior citizens’ earshot –, and in that sense this film talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. It raises the (rhetorical) question, can a sex comedy be entertaining when it’s the audiovisual equivalent of a eunuch? According to IMDb, “After being accused of being too inhibited by her ex-boyfriend, a violinist [played by Lucy Hale and also named Lucy, perhaps to avoid confusion among the intellectually challenged cast and crew] creates a rather wild to-do list that sends her on a whirlwind journey of self-discovery.” How “wild” is this list? Per one if its items, Lucy must go to a strip club, which turns out to be the kind that exists only in the movies and on TV; that is, where the strippers don't really strip (later Lucy says that if one is "naked enough" it doesn't matter how badly one dances. Two things; 1) as I just pointed out, these women aren’t naked, and 2) nudity is an absolute. One is either naked or one isn’t). It’s one thing to be sexually inexperienced, but must Lucy be dumb as well? She and her friend and fellow musician Pricilla (Mindy Cohn from The Facts of Life) are hired to do a gig. At some point before this, Lucy has procured herself a set of Ben Wa balls. There's nothing inherently wrong with the latter, but why would Lucy decide to, so to speak, go balls to the wall right before she has to play in public? And the answer is so that the balls can fall out of her cavity with supposedly hilarious results (“this is not funny!” Lucy tells Pricilla, and we couldn't agree more). I’m not saying A Nice Girl Like You should have been obscenely explicit or overly graphical, which wouldn’t do in a comedy anyway; sex can be fun, but it’s only funny to children and immature people – to put it in perspective, a film like American Pie has a lot of fun with sex because, for as much out of their depth as its characters are, they at least have a basic understanding of the mechanics of the sexual act; on the other hand, a movie like Sex Tape fails miserably because it was made by people who apparently lack the slightest notion of how intercourse works, and who think a woman doing a triple front flip onto her acquiescent husband’s member is somehow a laughing matter. As for A Nice Girl Like You, we're meant to believe that its heroine has undergone a sexual awakening because she goes from having sex in her pajamas to doing it with her bra on – and even then we’re not really sure she went through with it, seeing as how the movie cuts to an outside shot where computer generated fireworks are going off in the night sky (CGI fireworks? Really? Guess that means he wore a rubber).