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NEW YORK - MORE HEINOUS TELEVISION RECAPPING

We haven't mentioned what we watched last night in a long time. How else will you know you are reading an official blog unless we do that? So here is another Shitty TV Recap by Alex Pareene…

"This film is inspired by a true story." That is basically a Lifetime Movie Network Awesomeness Guarantee. Also good signs: a colon followed by a subtitle with the word "confession" or "secret." So I highly recommend

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Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict

even though as of right now I'm only actually halfway through the title sequence.

Well.

Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict

is the story of how if your dad rapes you when you are a little girl you will grow up to marry a jerk and have two affairs and then go to rehab for sex addiction. It stars a blond 27-year-old ballerina as a 40-year-old aspiring novelist named "Sue Silverman." Trust me, her husband does not look any more like a person who in real life might have a last name of "Silverman."

Her husband Andrew is a… something or other that involves throwing fancy parties at which he does not want to be embarrassed (a classic Lifetime Movie trope, women embarrassing their husbands at important parties), and it also at one point involves traveling somewhere, for a while. Let's say he's the Vice President.

Sue is maybe unemployed, because her husband keeps mentioning the fact that he pays all these bills, and at one point she misses an important job interview because she is too "LOVE SICK" (aka she is having sex in a motel). But also she keeps showing up at this office of some kind? All she does at the office is chat with her girlfriend, though. It's unclear.

The movie opens at AN IMPORTANT COCKTAIL PARTY THAT I DON'T WANT YOU TO EMBARRASS ME AT. A guy says, "We can be a government of empire-building or democracy but not BOTH." Smart people cocktail party chatter! "Words, words, words," our protagonist thinks, or voice-overs. What a boring party this is, what with people discussing simple political concepts in as vague a fashion as possible so as not to date the film!

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Then we quickly see proof that she is LOVE SICK: Sue totally flirts with some guy! Some guy she's not married to! The dude says something about how the first sip of a martini is the best thing in the world and that after that we are just chasing the sting of that first encounter. It is a brilliant metaphor for sex and relationships (and ADDICTION) (SEX ADDICTION), except that it is NOT because no one fucking likes gin the first time they taste it and most people's first experience with alcohol involves puking. And furthermore Sue's first experience with sex was not an awesome "sting" that she is trying to recreate, either: SHE WAS RAPED BY HER DAD WHEN SHE WAS A LITTLE GIRL.

Clever Cocktail Party Banter:

Sue's novel is "about a thousand pages in search of a theme." That is something self-deprecating that an aspiring novelist might say.

DUDE SUE WANTS TO FUCK'S WIFE: "What are we toasting?"

SUE: "To stinging first encounters."

DSWTFW: "Whatever!"

Then there is a bath and soft focus sex fantasizing and then Sue puts on her secret red underwear that she keeps in a box under a sheet in a drawer and heads to a motel for sleazy LOVE SICK sex. But the seedy motel sex happens during the commercial break! Ripoff!

"Was I good?"

"Good? You almost killed me."

Sex addiction is a terrible disease that makes you say things no real person would say after sex. (The SECOND sex scene between Sue and this guy also takes place during a commercial, denying us the pleasure of figuring out if they have sex out in the parking lot, or maybe go into his Jeep, or what.)

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Sue goes back to her office to talk to her girlfriend: "They should tell you when you say 'I do' that you're really saying 'I won't.'" Then she says, "ACK! Chocolate!"

Then Sue and Andrew have to go to her parents' 35th wedding anniversary so we can get more hints about her CHILDHOOD TRAUMA.

Dad is played by a guy who played a coroner in a bunch of X-Files episodes. He is a successful and important man! "I was honored with this when I was Chief Counsel to the Secretary of the Interior," Dad says as he shows some guy something in a frame from "the President." Look, this movie, like many Lifetime movies, was filmed in Canada, which doesn't mean it necessarily takes place in Canada, but we did see a bus in an establishing shot that said "VANCOUVER TRANSIT" on it. Maybe they emigrated! Or maybe dad meant "the President of Canada."

How far are we into this movie? A half hour? It is time for the husband to go from "harmless" to "constant raging dick." He is upset that his obviously depressed wife is not cleaning the house. He gets drunk at the anniversary party and makes fun of Sue for being depressed.

So Sue goes to a TRASHY BAR and SMOKES A CIGARETTE and flirts with a GUY WHO MIGHT BE BLACK and they DANCE and then there is one of the SEX COMMERICAL BREAKS.

Back at the office there is a "French" architect or something, who kidnaps Sue to a fancy restaurant. Well we couldn't tell if he was supposed to have a French accent or if the actor was just talking kind of funny. He is maybe French Canadian? But this movie is not supposed to take place in Canada, right? Except maybe it is.

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"Americans, you have your… psychotherapy," he says. So he's definitely supposed to be French. Or Canadian! "I'm too much like you," he says to Sue, "and that scares you, doesn't it?" If this guy was played by Heath Ledger in Juggalo makeup internet nerds would be demanding it win 100 Oscars for achievement in ruling.

Frenchy gets date-rapey but Sue likes it once he promises to marry her. Sue feels kinda guilty and calls her husband (this is when he is out of town on important Vice President business, btw) and promises "things are gonna be better when you get back," but the house is still totally a mess. So they have a fight, and once again Andrew is comically insensitive to her obvious LOVE SICKNESS, and so she moves into the attic and goes to a bar to meet Frenchy, who, it turns out, is married to a young Annie Lennox, and doesn't remember her name.

Andrew runs away at this point, maybe, or at least we don't see him anymore for a while. Sue "thanks" her girlfriend's husband for being nice to her by unbuttoning her shirt and getting grabby but he does not care for it. He is not LOVE SICK! So Sue retires to her attic and explores her box of sex addiction props, various things she's been given by men, such as a tiara, a teddy bear, a lighter, and THE SCARF OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA. Then she finally goes to a psychiatrist, who has a comically thick Canadian accent. He tells her, "I will always be here for you," which is what Frenchy wrote, in French, on a bar coaster that Sue keeps in her trunk of addiction to love.

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Then we finally get the flashback to the CHILDHOOD TRAUMA, which is lit in a creepy Lynchian flashlight kinda thing. She tells the story of how her dad gave her a scarf, the famed SCARF OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA, and called her princess and his "real wife," and all sorts of creepy stuff like that. "He made me say, 'I love you poppa'," she says, and the psychiatrist is all, "Your father. Had sex with you." Yes, doctor, we figured it out back at the anniversary party.

So! It is time for her to go to rehab for Love Sickness, and Andrew shows up for one more scene of being a total jerk. "I have to go away for a while," she tells him. Guess what he says back to her. No, just guess. Come on.

"You went away a long time ago, Sue."

Finally, before going to sex rehab, Sue makes sure to pack her SCARF OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA.

Once in sex rehab, we meet Gabriel, the sexy black orderly. Also we meet all the sexy ladies of sex rehab. Her roommate is a sort of half-assed Angelina Jolie in

Girl, Interrupted

kind of woman, who says scandalous stuff about Gabriel, the sexy black orderly, but she is introduced and disposed of fairly quickly.

Sue does not do well at Sex Rehab, at first, but there are only 15 minutes of the movie left so there isn't really too much suspense when she acts out during "crayon self-portrait hour." She is unable to draw herself! A helpful fellow patient tries to describe Sue's face! Sue will have none of it! "LIAR! I DON'T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING! YOU'RE A LIAR!"

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Crayon self-portrait hour always ends the same way: the "weeping in a fetal position in the shower" scene. Which is the first step to a rushed resolution!

But she has to overcome one more obstacle, because there are about eight minutes left! Oh, look, it's Gabriel, the Sexy Black Orderly, propositioning her for utility closet sex, using amusingly self-aware sex addict talk ("I want to show you how special you are"). And she meets him in the closet! For sex! But she cannot have sex with him because she keeps having flashbacks to her creepy dad, lit like that one creepy Fiona Apple video, grinding away on top of her, which means she is CURED OF LOVE SICKNESS. And she runs away from the utility closet and runs home to write the book

Love Sick

. We know she is totally cured now too because she keeps calling the male therapist she is dependent on when she feels tempted to go back to one of the other dudes she is dependent on.

Then at the end she is reading

Love Sick

to a group of ladies, in a bookstore, and even Andrew is there, even though he is a jerk!

And then of course I looked up the real-life lady who wrote this book (she looks a bit more like someone named "Sue Silverman") and it turns out the fucking SCARF OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA is, in real life,

just some scarf some random dude gave her in college.

For shame, Lifetime Movie producers. For shame.

Bonus

This is an IMDB review of "Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict" written by a man who wishes he had Cinemax:

"Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict" is about a bored wife feeling guilty about having affairs. Having been around highly sexed people with heightened sensuality, I was more than disappointment with what is depicted here. Oversexed people effortlessly relate every mundane thing into personal sensuality. That smell of fresh cut grass… "is orgasmic." That food… "is almost as good as sex." They seek out pleasures and seek out endless toe-curls in every moment. Over sexed people are super sensual before sex and after sex. 24 hours a day--ttheir antenna is always up. Feeling. Touching. Warm seeking warm.

"Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict" all too briefly hints at the heightened sensuality (smelling a saved leaf from a first kiss), but a truly overly sensual person would have to go further using the leaf already so close to the face to tickle the lips, tickle the cheeks, the cleavage -- squeezing out every sensation. "Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict" does not really explore the world of the over-sexed over sensual. Too bad. The director uses many extreme close-ups. The actors are mostly OK. The ingredients are there, but this TV movie remains boringly inside the conventional.

ALEX PAREENE