Slant Magazine

FILM  MOVIE REVIEW

The Oh In Ohio 0

by Dan Callahan on July 11, 2006   Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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In the implausible, weirdly depressed comedy The Oh in Ohio, Parker Posey plays a non-orgasmic, wilted Cleveland glad girl married to a self-loathing schoolteacher (a gone-to-seed Paul Rudd). The film details her search for sexual satisfaction, moving from low point to low point, the lowest being a sequence where Posey stumbles through a business presentation with a vibrating cell phone down her pants. There's some freak casting that never enlivens the glum mood, including an unbilled Heather Graham as a lesbian sex store worker, a blond and terrifying Liza Minnelli as an emphatically sibilant sex instructor ("Claim your clitor-ish! Chri-shen it!"), and Danny DeVito as an unlikely but likable sexual savior. The idea of Posey in a comedy about a woman who has never had an orgasm seems promising, but the film lets her down at every turn. She has far too many close-ups where she mugs cutely and uncertainly—she tries to be adorable, but she's betrayed by her burned, skeptical eyes. The sound recording is hollow and muddy, the cinematography underlit and sometimes blurred at the edges, and the whole thing has the dreary feeling of a bottom-of-the-barrel, clammy '70s sex comedy. Its emphasis on sex is joyless and prurient and there isn't one laugh in it. "This is bullshit," DeVito says toward the end, and he's right.

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• Director(s): Billy Kent
• Screenplay: Adam Wierzbianski
• Cast: Parker Posey, Paul Rudd, Danny DeVito, Keith David, Mischa Barton, Liza Minnelli
• Distributor: Cyan Pictures
• Runtime: 91 min.
• Rating: R
• Year: 2006

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