Mr. Fassbender.

Too much sex is bad for you. That’s the only message discernible to the naked eye in an interesting but hollow film about sex addiction called Shame, and believe me when I tell you the eye is not the only thing in it that is naked. The star is Michael Fassbender, the versatile and fearless actor of Irish-German descent who skyrocketed to attention as the imprisoned IRA hunger-strike martyr Bobby Seale in Hunger. He can also currently be seen, in and out of his underwear, as psychiatrist Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method. Mr. Fassbender is excellent and intense, but he hasn’t much use for clothes. Casting him in anything saves money on the wardrobe budget.

Shame, which reunites him with cheeky British artist-turned-director Steve McQueen (who will never be taken seriously unless he changes his name; somebody else got there first), centers on a New York businessman named Brandon who eats, breathes, and thinks of nothing else 24/7 but sex and more sex. He can’t get enough of it. He orders an early-morning prostitute before work, and when she leaves he hits the shower and works himself over again. Sex by proxy? He’s into that, too. At the office, he goes to the men’s room and knocks off another quickie. Home from work, he wastes a lot of time watching Internet porn in a state of, shall we say, stimulation? He’s intelligent, well-educated, sartorial and well-groomed, but hermetically sealed against life’s emotional pitfalls. He has no interest in food and consumes endless liters of alcohol only to dull his senses. Lonely and alienated, he doesn’t read, watch movies, attend the theater, root for a ball team, travel or explore new restaurants. Sex is his nutrition, and any attempt at normal dating ends before it begins. A mere hint of commitment leads to erectile dysfunction, sending Brandon plummeting further into the dark abyss, experimenting with all forms of sex in every combination. Mr. Fassbender’s focus is on showing every insatiable moment of this kind of orgasmic compulsion, exposing more of himself than ever. Quite a bit more, as a matter of fact. You might say he lets it all hang out—in more ways than one. The hunky star, it must be added, is in very good shape for the assignment.

Brandon keeps his fetishes a secret until the intrusive arrival of his neurotic, suicide-prone nymphomaniac sister Sissy (another heartbreaking performance by Carey Mulligan), a bottle blonde with black roots and no inhibitions. She’s like a sex toy—still an English rose, but this time with the bloom rubbed off. Two drinks and she’s anybody’s—including Brandon’s married boss. Watching her own promiscuity at work in his own apartment only magnifies Brandon’s own perverse problems. Neither of them can commit to a real relationship and their frustration brings out the worst in each other as they forge a love-hate co-dependence based on sex, sibling needs and verbal abuse. Self-destruction seems inevitable, but while we wait for something to move the action along, we have to watch a pair of emotional twin train wrecks happening simultaneously. In a movie that leaves nothing to the imagination, this much existential nonstop misery holds a certain fascination, but the movie never comes to anything valid or cautionary a normal viewer might take home.

Shame builds a repellent and depressing picture of existence on the edge of insanity, but what the movie fails to do is tell you why these people are the way they are, or indeed, why their addictions are so unhealthy. It’s actually surprising how empty and boring nonstop sex can be. When it substitutes for plot, character, movement and emotional content, sex is just something that clogs up the hard drive on your office computer. Brandon is spiritually dead, Sissy is parasitic and totally lost. When they both hit rock bottom, he goes on a real binge and hits the gay bars in a gruesome and ferocious eruption of carnal violence, and she ends up in the hospital. It’s hard, zombie sex, without joy. This, of course, is the point. But patience wears thin. It’s the study of a man whose soul has been peeled away, like coring an apple. But I wouldn’t call it sexy—or entertaining. What does Brandon learn? What do we learn? Director McQueen shares no primal truths, offers no resolutions, and the movie seems pointless. It seems almost wicked to spread on all that enticement and titillation, and then throw the sandwich away.

rreed@observer.com

SHAME

Running Time 101 minutes

Written by Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen

Directed by Steve McQueen

Starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan and James Badge Dale

2/4

Be careful where you go potty.

You may have already heard of Mister PeePee, a man on a mission to go around jerking off in every Starbucks bathroom in the city and then rating the lavatory on several key factors. (I.e. cleanliness, whether or not anyone knocked while he was trying to do his business, coffee taste). What you don't know is how Mister Peepee is actually doing you a service.

First of all, think about how time-consuming this prospect is. There are approximately 298 Starbucks in Manhattan, and unless this guy can masturbate to completion more than twice a day, every day, than it's going to take him almost half a year of non-stop jerkin' in order to complete his project.

Secondly -- and we say this as a group comprised of at least some women -- we'd like to know where the cleanest, friendliest Starbucks bathrooms are. Sometimes you just need to go, you know? And yes, when you use a bathroom at Starbucks, like all public restrooms, there is already a built-in issue of wondering whether or not someone has masturbated onto the toilet seat. It's just part of life! At least by following Mister PeePee's FourSquare account you will know for sure that masturbation has occurred in the bathroom, and that - since Starbucks employees will hopefully also be clued into the situation - the room has already been sterilized with lye.

If you are more of a citizen journalist type, you could always use Mister PeePee's list to see the locations he hasn't visited yet, and then lay in wait until you hear moaning behind the door. Then it will be your time to pounce!

Bateman and Reynolds.

The charm, versatility and charisma of Jason Bateman and the camera-ready good looks of Ryan Reynolds should add up to more than a piece of crummy, amateurish junk called The Change-Up. But what else can a discerning filmgoer (I naively presume, perhaps foolishly, there are a few of those left) count on from bogus director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) and sub-mental screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (The Hangover)? Expect an overwhelming surfeit of incompetence and filth.

In this one-joke frat house masturbatory fantasy about two guys who exchange bodies for no reason except to keep a DOA movie going for almost two hours, even the title makes no sense. There is no such thing as a “change-up.” I could understand “change-over” or “trade-off,” but the invasion of one person’s persona into another person’s frame is not a “change-up.” Never mind. Nothing else jells in this farrago of idiocy, either. Mr. Bateman is Dave, a battered but responsible lawyer, husband and father of three, including a pair of twins, who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in months. Mr. Reynolds, his best friend since the third grade, is Mitch, a pot-smoking, womanizing, free-spirited bachelor-model-actor (a nice 21^st century way of saying “irresponsible, unemployed jerk”). He is a symbol of a former life Dave would like to re-live. Dave hasn’t had time to have sex with his own wife, while Mitch says things to trashy women like “I’d like to strap you to my face and say the alphabet.” One night, after a ball game and a few joints, they pee in a fountain and wish they could trade places. Miraculously, they wake up the next morning in each other’s bodies. Now it is gentle, responsible family man Dave who is talking like a drunken Marine and hangover king Mitch who is forced to attend law firm briefings and burp babies, covered with vomit and diapers filled with what looks like chocolate pudding but isn’t.

The conceit is they look like themselves but talk and act like each other. Dave arrives on a movie set looking like Mitch but to his conservative, button-down horror, it turns out to be a porno film with another man’s finger up his orifices. When the kinky Mitch’s sexy new squeeze shows up for wild, uninhibited sex with Dave, who looks like Mitch, she is nude and nine months pregnant. Meanwhile Mitch, in Dave’s body, tries to keep from sleeping with his best friend’s wife Jamie, played by Leslie Mann, wife of no-talent Judd Apatow and one of the worst actresses in B-movies. Remember her opposite pardon-the-expression Adam Sandler in the abominable Funny People? I couldn’t understand a word she said in that fiasco, and she hasn’t learned a thing since. She sounds like she’s got a mouth full of cotton swabs, stuffed in sideways.

The Change-Up drags on endlessly, held together with scatology, flatulence and masturbation. Everybody gets a chance on the toilet, with all the noise and disgust that graphic bathroom scenes entail. When Mitch tries to teach Dave how to be Mitch by shaving everything off below his Speedo line, and Dave feeds Mitch’s ego with more penis-envy jokes than a bunch of sailors in a locker room, the contrivances pile up like a tower of dominoes. Here is a minor idea with minimal possibilities for mistaken identity routines, plummeting into mind-numbing confusion.  Sooner than you can search the second hand on your watch to see how much more of this you can take, you forget if you are watching Dave in Mitch’s body, or vice versa. It’s worth a chuckle or two to see Mr. Bateman get a chance to be crazy and gregarious, but when will somebody give him a role with some stature? In this sorry waste of time, his energy gets all mixed up with Mr. Reynolds’ pecs and who cares? I finally threw in the towel when Dave, in the body of Mitch, and Sabrina, the sexy law intern in Dave’s office (played by Flavor of the Month Olivia Wilde), who thinks she’s on a date with Mitch, both get their genitals tattooed.

Your move.

rreed@observer.com

THE CHANGE-UP

Running time 112 minutes

Written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore

Directed by David Dobkin

Starring Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann

1/4

I’ve since tried erotic G-chatting and sexy Skyperbation, and I once put the kink back in Kinko’s by photocopying and faxing a smooshed boob to a young man I fancied in college. I even lost one of my virginities (never mind which one) to a Second Life avatar named LycheeNut, who looked like one of Santa’s elves but with bat wings.

Come to think of it, I still get sort of turned on by green boots.

Sadly, ’Nut and I lost touch when I left my laptop in a taxi. (But, baby, if you’re out there, holler!)

Naturally, I hopped on the sexting bandwagon before it had a name, much less made the front page of The New York Times. As my duly elected representative from the state of New York amply demonstrated last month, the practice is more about photos than text, and as a result, I’ve probably spent more time toying with the tilt of a full-length mirror—believe me, it’s all in the angles—than I should admit.

Of course, said representative also amply demonstrated that the sending of such messages poses certain dangers, even with judicious cropping, reminding me that basically every sext I’ve ever sent is probably sitting somewhere out there on a guy’s phone (maybe all of his friends’ phones, too) waiting for an opportune moment to destroy me.

So when I discovered BlackBerry Voice Notes (Apple has a similar app called Voice Memos), which lets you record and send brief audio messages via text or email, I immediately recognized the copious erotic possibilities, as well as the professional risks. But I didn’t actually explore them in earnest until late last year, when I found myself entangled with young man (let’s call him Dre) who early on in our dalliance acknowledged a fondness for vocal cues.

In spite of my experience with sexting, talking dirty out loud was new territory for me, and I found it somewhat absurd initially. But after a little practice, I began to enjoy it. Before long I grew to think of myself as the Len Berman of our late-night sporting events, whispering a play-by-play into Dre’s ear that couldn’t have been any more exciting if I’d whipped out a vuvuzela.

Once I saw the sexual potential of calling an audible, I became determined to apply the latest technology to the task, especially since Dre and I saw each other only once a week or so.

With dick pics in the news, Voice Notes seemed like a safer way to flirt from afar. You see, since speech recognition is still a tricky science (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to phone my friend Gino via voice-activated speed dial and called my “gyno” instead), I figured it must be tougher to get caught by voice than by likeness.

Sending a Voice Note is a bit like leaving a voicemail, but not exactly. For one thing, you don’t need to wait for a mood-killing robot to tell you when to speak or to press 1 for further options and what to do after some beep. And because they appear as texts with attachments, they don’t require users to dial a number to retrieve them.

I hit record.

“You’ve been a baaaaaad boy, haven’t you, Mister?” I said.

I played it back.

Delete.

The possibility of hearing myself meant that I could craft the perfect self-presentation, get the intonation just right and choose my words carefully. It also meant I sort of had to.

I tried again. “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi? Ce soir?”

Delete!

“I’m soooo hot and wet,” I tried again, dissolving into a series of moans and little whimpers. I sounded like a dying giraffe.

I then tried a straightforward approach. “I have a confession to make. When you called me before, you inadvertently interrupted my afternoon self-pleasuring session … ”

Ew. Self-pleasuring? Session??

Too clinical. This was tougher than I’d expected. It was like moaning into an abyss. It would be so much simpler to improvise with the other party physically present, when everything was reciprocal and I could absorb my partner’s cues.

I grabbed a notepad.

Eventually, I succeeded in recounting an intimate anecdote in an octave that sounded appropriately sultry, if a little contrived, and sent my message. I knew it might be a while before Dre was able to open it since he was at work, but my phone rang almost immediately.

It was my dad.

“Sweetie,” he said. “I received the audio file you sent me.”

A moment passed.

“Sweetheart, are you there?” he asked.

“Dad. I … I really messed up.”

“I can’t seem to get the damned thing open! Do I click somewhere? Can you just tell me your news over the phone?”

“Oh, nothing major. Just wanted to say hi!”

I hung up and went to resend the message, but not without quadruple-checking the “to” field.

Forty-five minutes later, I received a reply from Dre. It showed up as a little microphone icon.

I hit play.

“I want to take my tongue and slowly work it down your chest and midsection … ” Dre said. Hmm. “Midsection”? But okay. I knew what he meant.

He went on to describe in graphic detail various things he would like to do with, for and to me. It was hot.

Before I could reply, Dre texted: “This is fun!”

And it was. Until the next day, that is, when the little jerk went all Beavis on me, sending me a voice note that sounded remarkably like … was it? Yes, yes it was. A fart.

I was speechless.

Naturally, I’m saving the file … just in case he runs for office.

editorial@observer.com