The Sessions Movie Review

One of the universalities of being human, one important thing that sets us clearly apart from the rest of the animals, is the pleasure, both physical and emotional, derived from sex. To make that physical connection with another person is a rite of passage we set for ourselves early on. It’s a mark that nearly every teenager desperately wants to reach. What if you were stricken with polio as a boy, your body left stiffened by a disease that wreaks havoc on your muscles? You’re not exactly paralyzed in the way most of us understand that condition because you have normal sensory perception throughout your body. You just can move anything. What if you reached middle age never having felt the exultation joining together sexually with another person? This is the beginning of the story in The Sessions, a true story about poet and journalist Mark O’Brien, who was also the subject of an Oscar-winning short documentary called Breathing Lessons in the late 90s. O’Brien documented his quest to lose his virginity in an article titled, “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate.”

Project X Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

Where have all the social message movies gone? As I plumb through the films of 25 years ago I continually come up against movies that speak to the socio-historical context of the time. Many of these movies have an agenda. Maybe it’s a lack of hindsight, but I don’t see the same type of issues movies coming from the studios nowadays. More than likely the answer is to be found in the fact that the message movies have always been few and far between, but they are more likely to stand the test of time and be remembered years later.

Jonathan Kaplan’s Project X deals with the issue of animal welfare in the context of the military industrial complex at the tail end of the Cold War. It’s a real do-gooder of a movie that wants to portray the government and especially the military as cold and unsparing as you move further up the chain of command. The top officers and bureaucrats are viewed as calculating and rather inhuman while the enlisted men, serving as surrogates for the average viewer, are compassionate while they follow orders.