Diary of a Sex Addict (2001)

First of all, this is not deathless art nor is it a serious delving into the roots and dangers of sex addiction.It's a campy Michael Des Barres vehicle which he carries beautifully as the charming and universally liked (and lusted after) but deeply flawed main character. For his performance - 7 stars.The downsides of this movie were too much Nastasja Kinski and not enough Rosanna Arquette. Kinski's whispery phone sex voice starts to wear on the nerves fairly quickly as do the close ups of her meaningful looks in Des Barres direction. While the camera (or the camera-man) may love her, I would have preferred someone capable of a more nuanced performance.Patricia Arquette, who is the only actor in this movie with any street cred, gets stuck with the role of the insipid, clueless housewife. Frankly, she's better than that and her character should have been given more depth and complexity thus giving the movie more depth and complexity.As for the side story of the angry ticket taker, I have no idea what the point of that was. Perhaps the producer felt a stereotypical big, angry black man character was needed to spice up the movie. It wasn't.If you're fearing / hoping for lots of graphic sex - there really isn't much. There are boobs but most of the sex scenes are more alluded to than graphic. There are a lot of voice overs of various women having all manner of explosive orgasms but that's about it. I wouldn't recommend watching this in front of, or within earshot, of the kiddies.Bottom line, it's a fun little train wreck but won't likely leave you anymore edified on the topic of sex addiction than you were before you watched it.

I really tried to like this movie. It deals with an important problem in any society: sex addiction.In this story we learn that you can lose everything when you're addicted to sex. In this case, our main character and hero, for having non-stop sex with all kinds of women (crazy, kinky, neurotic) puts in jeopardy his marriage, job, and even his life.The production values are terrible; mainly the acting. Oh, you won't enjoy ANY of the sex scenes, most of them are done in very poor taste and you might think you're watching a home made flick.Second, the plot is just non sense. How could such a smart and beautiful wife stand all the nasty stuff from the husband? How could she believe him?! The threesome situation is priceless and will make you chuckle for a while.Also, the scene with the black movie theater attendant is just pointless and will leave you thinking "wtf?". Scenes like those you will find plenty. Avoid this movie. Please, avoid it; it's not soft core, it's not a documental, it's not a dramatic feature. It's a pretentious effort form a so called documentary director or whatever.Only Mrs. Kinski's legs on display are worth the watch. I caught it on HBO and I'm glad I didn't spend my money on it. But those 90 minutes of my life won't come back.

My husband rented this from a video store thinking it was suspense. (He never reads the synopsis).Well, it would be funny if the thing was watchable. It simply isn't. The same thing over and over, no intrigue, and WHERE did they find the leading man?. The leading man, Michael Des Barres, is not even feasibly good-looking, especially for this role he is given. Also, sexual harassment at work is something, if you want to see, rent Michael Crichton's "Disclosure". At least Michael Douglas looked good in the early 90's. Alexandra Paul, who is usually watchable, plays an embarrassing scene here. There are also lighting effects cheaper than your at home web cam. Don't even waste time renting this. 0/10.

Any honest attempt at portraying sexual addiction is necessarily fraught with dangers of prurience, exploitation or misogyny. In this respect the movies' faux-porn marketing material turns out to be a nice joke. "Diary" is non-genre, extremely ambitious in scope and very well acted. Seeing established actors on video means that there is an initial problem with suspension of disbelief but the overall quality of production values soon resolves this. Michael Des Barres as the charming sex addict is chillingly realistic and Arquette plays the classic self-deluding wife to perfection. Since there are very few good movies I'm prepared to watch something just because it's different; this is different but it's also good.