WTT Dispatch #24: How to Have Sex & Live Wire
If only Mia McKenna-Bruce had run into Pierce Brosnan in Crete
How to Have Sex, which is much less instructional than the title would indicate, invites us on holiday with Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake), and Em (Enva Lewis) a “gang gang gang” of besties. These teenaged brits land on Malia, Crete and dive straight into the Mediterranean. They find rather cold. Despite their tender ages, they are invested in having an MTV Spring Break-style debauch with an older crowd. You won’t confuse them with culture vultures, as the gals never even set eyes on the renowned Minoan Palace of Malia. Tara and Co. are not interested in the Bronze Age, though they’re keen to get bronzed and plow through Windex-blue scorpion bowls while doing it.
Their fateful decision to insist on a pool view room puts them in contact with the lads lounging in the balcony across the way. Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) is handsome if depthless young gent who pals around with mates Badger (Shaun Thomas) and Paige (Laura Ambler) (she’s not technically a lad, but instead a helpful love interest for Em).
Despite the girl’s less than academic pursuits, they’re not completely un-Shakespearean—after all, Skye calls out, “Romeo, Romeo, where is ya?” to Badger one afternoon. The young ladies come across the way for a vodka-fueled pre-party and give each other instructions on proper comportment before going out: “You need to cover your bits.” Skye needles Tara for being a virgin, putting her in contrast to Paddy and his lusty companions.
As the camera focuses on her, we wonder are Tara’s gifts beyond beauty and youth? It’s not karaoke or grades or geopolitics (she is unable to name Britain’s Prime Minister when asked). She does look quite fit (despite an unfortunate overreliance on lime green attire) and tells some decent dad jokes: “Why do you never see pigs hiding in trees?” she asks a sozzled Bader, nodding off on the toilet bowl. “Because they're pretty good at it!” she answers. Her (slightly) more academically inclined friends soon to depart for university but Tara might not pass her exams. Best to put those concerns aside with nonstop partying.
For me, the funniest moment in the film occurs when Paddy wanders in the morning after a big bash with a fresh palm tree tattoo on his pec, still under Saranwrap. He tries to win over Tara with the simplest statement of fact, “You’re proper beautiful.” I found Badger more charming, because I understood how he, even while viciously hungover and on the edge of retching, watched his favorite side play footy on his phone.
What is writer/director Molly Manning Walker trying to say with this film? There is a certain core emptiness to the girls that makes true engagement difficult. Perhaps that is the director’s point. But given the lavish attention paid to every gradation of emotion on McKenna-Bruce’s heart-shaped face, I think Manning Walker was looking for a larger wallop. The drama is whether Tara will have sex and whether it will be (or even can be, given the blood alcohol level of all involved) a consensual encounter. The film does intrigue on a sonic level, not just the harsh accents but the vocal tics, the usage of “was” versus “were,” and phrases like, “Last night was very jokes.”
The weekend culminates, as most awful things do, with a huge white party, where Tara tries to get that festive feeling back when it all feels a bit crap. We see an accumulation of club-entrance wristbands on her arms and feel the hard miles on the liver. After spending a night out by herself, Tara’s friendships have grown frailer: “It’s fine,” she says shortly when Em tries to draw her out.
From my aged perspective, I was fascinated to think of what my life would have been like had I considered such a vacation enjoyable. I suppose I would enjoy the all-carb diet: pasta, grain alcohol, cheesy chips. But how can anyone could possibly recover from those headaches and go back out the next night? Maybe Tara really can get over anything.
2.5 out of 5 stars
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How to Have Sex is now in theaters. Not rated. Running time 1:38.
You want to know someone who needs no instructions on how to have sex? Shit hot Washington bomb squad agent Danny O’Neill! He’s played by Pierce Brosnan with so much sensuality you smell that man musk coming through the screen.
In the remarkable 1992 misfire (or is hot fire?) Live Wire, screenwriter Bart Baker cooks up a great premise: What if drinking water…could kill you?! It’s a potboiler in which the victims are like boiling pots! Thanks to the evil plotting of Mikhail Rashid (Ben Cross)—my god movie terrorists used to be fun!—there’s a rash of unusual assassinations of elected officials in D.C. A U.S. Senator has a sip of water, his eyes get a bit red and ka-boom—we’ve got flecks of politician decorating the wallpaper.
You’ll be shocked to learn that Danny doesn’t always play by the rules. At the start of the film, he’s confined to less important cases than the congressional kablooeys. We see him gazing up the miniskirt of a woman in a convertible that’s rigged to blow. After some bantering admiration of the view, he cuts the right wire. It’s hot out, so he doffs his shirt to increase our admiration of his talents.
Danny chats with another bomb squad guy, Rogers (Brent Jennings), the bomb squad nerd trying to figure out what’s happening with the inexplicable explosions. Danny offers sage advice: “Keep digging…people don’t just explode.” In a cute recurring bit, Rogers is trailed by a bomb sniffing robot that’s always trying to get in Danny’s ass. From time to time, Danny pays call on his estranged wife, Terry (Lisa Eilbacher), who nags him so much he can’t even enjoy a beer by the pool. There’s an unhinged flashback of their shared trauma that had me cackling.
Even though Danny spends some time down bad on the banks of the Potomac, his bachelor pad is pretty sweet. He can leaf through the 1990 Sports Almanac (just like I did), sip plenty of brown liquor, and sport ahead-of-their-time flat-front chinos. After some careful thought, Danny figures out the victims are the device in Rashid’s plot.
His finest victim has to be Senator Thyme (the one and only Philip Baker Hall) he knows the score, “you got balls calling me here.” Suspects something is awry but it’s 90 degrees and the A/C isn’t working, how about just one sip of water…uh oh. Rashid’s assisted by devoted sidekick, Al-red (Tony Plana), who dresses as a clown in a memorable scene with Danny. And it seems there’s no downside to the criminality. If you get pinched for blowing up a senator, you go to trial and simply blow up the judge and the key witness.
For whatever reason, Terry’s now dating Senator Frank Traveres (a pig-in-shit Ron Silver), your classic oily, pulp Pacino-inspired snake. Even with Danny back on the scene, Traveres grows more concerned, given Rashid’s pledge to just keep killing off the upper chamber until he gets what, in all fairness, is a fairly reasonable amount of money (given the efficacy of his product).
It’s hard to believe Brosnan was James Bond just three years after this magnificent nonsense hit theaters. It’s less hard to believe that director Christian Duguay directed this picture in between Scanners II: The New Order and Scanners III: The Takeover.
What I love most about Live Wire is the narrative, which has been cut to the fucking bone. We never go more than ten minutes between shit blowing up, but it maintains coherence. Happily, what Duguay probably cut from the script was a fuller Danny-Terry-Senator Traveres love triangle, which is the least interesting thing about the picture. Instead, we feast on flavorful action sequences punctuated with sweaty guffaws.
4 out of 5 stars
P.S. Thanks to the inimitable Mark Pagán for inviting me to a Live Wire screening—if he recommends something you better just get your ticket. Check out his expertly curated film screening series Hubba Hubba and follow his ‘Stack!
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Live Wire is available to rent on the internet. Rated R. Running time 1:25.