Imagine Susan Sontag falling in love with Howard Stern. Twenty-nine-year-old self-help guru Amy Mandell (fringe feminist Julie Davis) falls hard for shock jock Matthew Starr (Nick Chinlund) and discovers that the words that made her millions only work in theory. Because Amy places so much pressure on the orgasm, she’s perpetually set for disappointment. Davis daringly takes feminism head-on and while her Amy is certainly less polemical by film’s end, she’s also every bit as headstrong. Davis suggests not that feminists need a clue but that all women need to welcome the possibility that they can have their men and independence too. Davis and Chinlund make for a cute on-screen couple yet there’s little room for enjoyment here amid Davis’s non-stop gabbing. The retrograde, sitcomy storyline is the least of the film’s problems (indeed, it’s sweet that Amy’s priest-cum-psychologist owns a laserdisc copy of “The Thorn Birds”). Davis has no real command of the visual medium, instead choosing to use on-screen space to air out her every neurosis. She’d make a great character on “Sex and the City” but she’d be a pain to listen to if Mr. Big couldn’t make her cum.
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