40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

Best movie of this year hands down!

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This 2002 josh hartnett sex comedy revolves around his character just breaking it off with his girlfriend Vinessa Shaw and not being able to get over it, so he decides to go on a 40 day vow of celibacy. Of course this is already extremely hard for any person who normally has sex (self or with another person) on a regular basis. But it becomes even more difficult and complicated when he meets the woman of his dreams. Enter Shannyn Sossamon. They immediately hit it off when they meet and the two actors do have pretty good on screen romantic chemistry. I liked most of the performances in this movie. It features Vinessa Shaw (hocus pocus) as his ex girlfriend that caused this whole celibacy thing and it also has a young Maggie Gylanhaal. The plot is pretty predictable, well except for one event that takes place in the last act, something I didn't really care for, kinda disturbing in my opinion. The dialogue is thankfully free of any anti gay or sexist language. I was kind of surprised by this since typically movies like this which features a lot of male sexual talk usually has slang of a discriminatory nature. But thankfully josh hartnett's character is a good enough man to rise above crap like that. The movie doesn't really cover any new ground or surprise at all, but I was mostly entertained while watching it. I'd say if you like sex comedies but want one that's not as horribly crude as Van Wilder and doesn't have offensive language then this one may be for you. 7/10.

Hollywood writers are largely egotistical, juvenile, spoiled, shallow, hedonistic, amoral, arrogant, and totally disconnected from the day-to-day world most of us "nobodys" live in. Once in a great while, something seeps into the scripts they write that's so extreme in it's reprehensibility it reveals their delusional view of the world. That's what happened with this movie, but since it wasn't a wildly popular blockbuster that was in the theatres for several months, it was mostly ignored. At the end of this movie a man is raped by a woman in a context that makes it clear that the writers think it's a good thing. Knowing the stupid plot of the movie doesn't make it any better. Matt (Josh Harnett) just had a bad break-up with a girl and decides he would get a better perspective on women and relationships if he went without sex during the 40 days of Lent, including kissing and masturbation. He meets a woman, but continues his experiment in sexual abstinence without explaining his experiment to her, just saying he wants a platonic relationship. I'll admit I didn't follow every detail of the plot and sub-plots (he's some kind of executive and has a lot of obnoxious roommates and co-workers) but I figure nothing could justify the rape at the end. There is a sequence where he's so aroused and frustrated he dreams he's flying through a landscape of CGIed breasts, which I guess is relatively imaginative. Near the end of the movie he goes to bed, as always handcuffed to the bedposts so he can't masturbate. His ex-girlfriend gets on top of him and RAPES HIM! If the sexes were reversed there'd be a public outcry about this movie that would be pretty considerable even though the movie wasn't extremely well- known. I think what the so-called writers think is that men having sex whenever they can get it and perpetually pursuing sex like mindless animals the rest of the time is the natural order of Nature and any man who goes against that is denying nature and is not a real man and deserves to be FORCED back into sexual activity, in other words deserves to be RAPED. In their minds, the abstinence is the twisted thing and the rape is the healthy thing. Of course movies are primarily entertainment and some people, mostly women I guess, would get a kick out of seeing a healthy, good-looking young guy constantly horny and teased and frustrated, but the movie doesn't even work on that dark level because Hartnett doesn't react the way most men would. Most of the other characters in the film are shallow, obnoxious twenty- somethings who act like 12-year-olds and I can't help thinking that this must be pretty close to what the writers act like. There are a lot of jokes about embarrassment over having erections at work. This isn't the worst movie ever made - that honor I think belongs to "Forrest Gump" - only because "40 Days and 40 Nights" is useful in the way it reveals the society-induced mental disorders of the "writers".

The only good thing really I can say about 40 Days and 40 Nights is the soundtrack, especially the use of Recondita Armonia(from Tosca) performed the wonderful Jussi Bjorling. The rest though is a mess. The scenery is decent, but the editing could have been much tighter and the photography more fluid. Josh Hartnett and Shannon Sossaman are charming to look at, but they are rather awkward and never are believable together. It's not their fault though, they struggled with a flat predictable story, a bad smutty script, uneven pacing and especially shallow characters. What spoilt this movie the most was the ending, which is the most terrible and most insulting ending I've seen in a long time. In conclusion, an awful movie. 1/10 Bethany Cox

40 days and 40 nights is not a masterpiece. That has to be stated first. It's very shallow, filled with smut and a bad script. But I enjoyed it anyway. This is mainly because Josh Hartnett and Shannyn Sossamon had very good chemistry and it was fun to watch them together. The way they interact at the laundromat and on their first is just so natural and sweet that it nearly melted my heart. Next to that there were some mildly funny jokes. Not 'rolling-over-the-floor-laughing' but entertaining enough to put a smile on your lips. It's a movie to watch when you have a gigantic bucket of ice cream and you're in the mood for mindless entertainment. If you're the type of person who's afraid his/her I.Q points will drop drastically when watching this, avoid avoid avoid. For the rest of you, watch and be entertained.