Waste of time

That was an excellent one.

Admirable film.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Woody Allen has spent decades showing cinema-goers he's not only a funnyman. Let's take a look back at when he wasn't so fussy...nor that funny.Based off David Reuben's bestselling answer book about sex, Allen's film is a collection of comic riffs relating to assorted sexual curiosities. Reading these reviews reveals most people think there's at least one good sketch, and widespread disagreement as to which that is. Comedy is subjective.For me, the class amid the crass is the third episode. Allen plays a stylish Italian trying to get his wife (Louise Lasser) to achieve orgasm. Nothing's working. A friend asks if he is "small.""Small?" Allen replies indignantly. "Like a French bread!"Funny as that is, it's funnier in Italian, which is how the whole sketch is played. With nods to stylish Italian cinema, wry quips, and a happy ending, it's the one bit that worked for me.The rest of the time, Allen flails at finding a balance between adult concerns and childish wisecracks. The bits sometimes have promise, like a final episode taking place inside a man's body as he gets lucky on a date. We get to see the various parts of the body spring to action, including Allen as a frightened spermatozoon, while Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds as managers in mission control try to avoid "failure.""We're missing her ear and blowing into her nose," Randall reports.But this sketch does go on too long, as do the others. Even the Italian one could lose five minutes.The funniest 30 seconds in the entire movie is Gene Wilder's wordless reaction as a cool doctor who discovers his patient loves a sheep. But then the sketch goes on and on from there, to depict the doctor's own romance with the sheep, with bad jokes about his wife smelling lamb chops and him drinking Woolite when the sheep finally disappears.Other sketches include a quiz show, "What's My Perversion;" and a man who gets caught wearing his hostess's dress. Most of the jokes here are of the groaner variety. Watching Allen play a jester trying to have sex with a queen plays up the idea of getting his hand caught in her chastity belt, while he jokes about hurrying up before the Renaissance.As much as I love early Allen, before he became America's most famous foreign filmmaker and was still going for laughter, "Everything You Always Wanted To Know..." demonstrates his limitations. He's not Mel Brooks, able to simply set something up and riff on it. He needs context and character development.What you get here is goofier, scattershot, and ill-focused. He's trying too hard to be both offensive and likable. He does the former better than the latter; I was offended by the missed opportunities and the overall waste of time.

The Three Acts:The initial tableaux: The film is an anthology. Each story is about an aspect (or several) of sexual behaviour.a. Chastity belts and aphrodisiac potions in medieval times in England.b. Gene Wilder as a respected physician who falls in lust with a patient's sheep.c. Italian-speaking Woody Allen trying to be as macho as possible, but cannot initially find the key to his wife's satisfaction.d. A middle class man experiments with women's clothes.e. A game show, filmed in grainy black and white, has panelists attempting to guess the perversion of the guest.f. John Huston as the mad scientist rejected by Masters and Johnson. He's out to prove his strange theories. As a side effect (second part of the vignette), a giant mobile breast is created that terrorises the countryside. Allen and MacRae play a scientist and a journalist covering the action.g. Tony Randall quarterbacks the male brain's attempt to manage bodily resources during a hot romantic date.Delineation of conflicts: In each case, some aspect of sexual behaviour is explored. The vignettes are self-contained. The common thread, though, is that some private behaviour can become public, with consequences varying from embarrassment to jail to death.Resolution: The surfacing of private sexual behaviour is done for comic effect.

ADAPTATIONS OF ANY literary work is usually a complex transition from the print medium to that of the screen. By necessity, moving an established work from one medium to another will, by necessity, inevitably leave many details out. Even worse, rewriting for purpose of adaptation often leads to the horrors of R-E-V-I-S-I-O-N!! WITH THE COMING of this Woody Allen film, only the title remains. Topics that were subject of chapters of American Physician, Dr. David Reuben, were transformed into a series of episodic vignettes patterned on and titled by the particular chapter subject matter. This format's visual realization results in what could best be described as series of disparate comedy shorts that only are bound together by their subject matter (S-E-X!!) and the film's writer/director/performer, Woody Allen.BEING ONE OF Mr. Allen's true fans of his earlier work, we rank this very high on the list of his movies. It may have even come at the period of time when he was at his cinematic best. It was then that he gave us titles such as: THDE SLEEPER, BSANANAS, TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN and LOVE AND DEATH. OUR FAVOURITE SEGMENTS are those which featured Gene Wilder, John Caradine and Woody (himself) as a para-trooping sperm cell.

In the late 1960s one Dr David Reuben released a book entitled EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX *BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK. Woody Allen's 1972 "movie adaptation" uses the questions of Dr Reuben's question-and-answer format as the titles for 7 comedic sketches all on sexual themes. This was Allen's third conventional film, and his growing importance in Hollywood is evident from the film's all-star cast.The opening "Do Aphrodisiacs Work?", set in medieval times, has Woody Allen as a court jester who seeks to seduce the queen. Most of the humour here consists of anachronism: the jester's jokes are too bad for even a borscht belt comedian, and the dialogue consists of Elizabethian stylings mixed with sexual terminology and crude slang from the present.The following sketch, "What is Sodomy?", is for many viewers the very best. A New York City general practitioner (Gene Wilder) is visited by an Armenian shepherd who begs the doctor to restore the magic to his relationship with a cherished sheep. What ensues, with the doctor descending ever deeper into madness, is made hilarious by Wilder's committed performance and the dialogue is immensely quotable. Another high point of the film is "Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching an Orgasm?". Shot in black and white and with an Italian dialogue, the segment is Allen's homage to the cool ambiance of Antonioni and Fellini. Allen plays a suave, sunglasses-wearing film director who cannot manage to satisfy his wife, played by Louise Lasser, until they begin having risky sex in public places. The fun comes not only in the challenges the man must face in making his wife happy, but also in Allen's ridiculous accent while speaking Italian.In "Are Transvestites Homosexuals?", Lou Jacobi plays a man who sneaks upstairs while at a dinner party in order to wear his hostess' clothes, and subsequently gets himself deeper and deeper in trouble. It's humorous enough, but one wonders if this segment were stronger when the film was first released. Judging from its high frequency in big Hollywood films of the 1960s and early 1970s, cross-dressing must have once been a much funnier concept in that era. The following "What Are Sex Perverts?" is a parody of the game show What's My Line? where a panel of minor celebrities try to guess the perversion of a contestant, who wins $5 for every wrong guess. This is quite funny, but far too brief, as the concept could have been stretched out a bit more."Are the Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate?" is a Frankenstein parody where Allen and Heather MacRae play recently acquainted sex researchers who meet a great sexologist (John Carradine), only to discover that he's a diabolical madman. The first half of this segment is pretty funny, as Allen and MacRae make their way through the doctor's castle of horrors. But the second half, when the pair seeks to defeat a giant breast ravaging the countryside, is some of the lamest humour I've seen in some time.The characters of the last segment, "What Happens During Ejaculation?", are personifications of the organs as a man goes on a date with a woman. The brain is depicted as a NASA mission control, with Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds struggling to coordinate bodily functions. They call down to the stomach (men carting off a newly-arrived load of fettucini), and the genitals (blue-collar joes working an enormous pump), as well as other places. Much here will make you chuckle, such as the captured "saboteur" of the man's sexual ambitions, his conscience, depicted as a priest in a Roman collar, and Allen's performance as a sperm cell terrified of making the leap into the unknown. All in all, however, I find this quite dated as well.While my overall impressions is that EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX is quite dated, it's funny enough, and the portions with Allen as an Italian lover and Wilder as a befuddled doctor make it worth seeing at least once.