NEVER AGAIN
"Eric Schaeffer's contemporary sex comedy 'Never Again' poses that
age-old question: Can a desperately lonely 54-year-old exterminator
who dabbles in jazz piano find happiness with a desperately lonely
54-year-old single mother whom he meets cute in a gay bar?...'Never
Again' pretends to be sympathetic to middle-aged singles and their
sexual frustrations, but the flailing sex scenes between Christopher
and Grace make them look foolish and grotesque...Think of 'Never Again'
as bad Neil Simon with sex toys attached." --Stephen Holden, The New
York Times
"Writer-director Eric Schaeffer should take the advice of his own
movie's title the next time he thinks about coercing some poor actress
into making a fool of herself. As a newly smitten divorcee, Jill Clayburgh
is required to curse like a truck driver, giggle and screech like
a teenager, and recount her sexual exploits in cringingly explicit
detail. In what surely must be a career nadir, this elegantly attractive
actress struggles in one scene to remove a defective strap-on sex
toy before her boyfriend and his mother discover it (don't ask)."
--Megan Turner, The New York Post
"...some of the most tasteless dialogue ever spoken in a mainstream
movie...The problem is not the use of four-letter words and crude
sex talk in themselves; it is the context...Youthful audiences won't
be attracted to a love story between two 54-year-olds in the first
place, and mature audiences will be turned off by the language, not
necessarily out of prudishness, but out of its sheer crassness...That
the opportunities to depict romance in middle age on the big screen
are so few and far between makes 'Never Again's' gratuitous lapses
all the more lamentable." --Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
"... sloppy, sporadically funny adult sex comedy...Schaeffer writes
like a guy who gathered his material at a party, throwing in things
that may have been funny next to the punch bowl, but which are flat
or nonsensical in the retelling. His inspiration is the idea that
middle-agers are just as horny as teenagers, and that their sex lives
can be just as funny...Most of these jokes are either patronizing
or gratuitous, but a few are pretty funny." --Jack Mathews, The New
York Daily News
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