The Opposite of Sex

She's a smart-assed, foul-mouthed tramp who can wrap just about anyone around her finger. She steals dead people's ashes and sleeps with gay hunks and religious fanatics with equal indifference. She's Dedee Truitt (Christina Ricci) and she's not your typical sweet 16-year-old. Escaping her rotten Louisiana life, she flees to the suburban Indiana home of her half-brother Bill (Martin Donovan), where she proceeds to seduce his hunky live-in boyfriend Matt (Ivan Sergei), steal $10,000 and lead a cast of devious characters on a frenetic cross-country chase to Los Angeles. Bill is joined in the hot pursuit by an embittered spinster (Lisa Kudrow), a lovelorn local sheriff (Lyle Lovett), and Matt's jilted ex-lover (Johnny Galecki) as they race to discover the paternity of Dedee's baby and maybe, just maybe, discover a lasting, loving and committed relationship - what Dedee calls "the opposite of sex." The Opposite of Sex is a scandalous, sexy romp, peppered with hilarious one-liners and insp Christina Ricci had a great year in 1998. The young actress continued to cast off her youthful image from the Addams Family movies and made a big splash on the independent movie scene, especially in this scathingly witty comedy in which Ricci has the central role. Here she plays Dedee, a buxom, sexually precocious teenager who's pregnant, cynical, and looking for a volunteer father for her unborn child. This takes her to the home of her gay half-brother (Martin Donovan) whose current lover (Ivan Sergei) becomes Dedee's latest target for seduction. That's just the start of the mischief that Dedee so masterfully orchestrates, and Lisa Kudrow (from TV's Friends) is also on hand to deliver some of the movie's most quotable dialogue while fending off the affection of a local policeman played by Lyle Lovett. If all this sounds rather sordid, rest assured that the movie's got a warm heart (well, sort of) beating beneath all of its sharp-edged sarcasm. Writer-director Don Roos (Single White Female) injects most of the movie's appeal and humor through Dedee's voice-over narration, which constantly reminds us that even the most familiar movie clichés can be cleverly overturned. As a result, The Opposite of Sex is the opposite of boring. --Jeff Shannon