Kinsey

The movie's tagline says "Let's talk about sex". And it really does - talk.

This is the other bioepic that opens this week in Singapore's shores (besides The Aviator), and it presents to you the life of Dr Kinsey, sex researcher, well, not by chance. Starting off as a zoologist with intense and devoted research on gull wasps, he discovers a necessity to research on sex, sparked by his own ineptness towards making love for the very first time with his virgin wife.

As with all research, you need a sample population size to theorize. Collecting gull wasps is must simpler than getting people to reveal their innermost secrets and fantasies, as he painfully discovers. So there lies the opening of the movie, which showcases the methods of questioning he uses to get people to open up and talk about their sex lives. This is perhaps one of the highlights of the movie.

And as with all research, you might need to dabble into the queer and the untrodden path. Here, we see him engaging in homosexual love, and in the name of science, unenthusiastically allowing his wife to sleep with his pet student (hey, he must be impartial and objective to his research), and fellow staff members to have sex with others' wives, and get it on film to be analysed!

Impartiality and objectivity in research also takes centrestage - we're humans after all, with sets of morals that differ from person to person. How much "deviant" practices can one sit through when dwelving into other's intimate secrets? In one particular interview, the interviewee boasts to having committed incest, beastality, etc!

This film charts the rise (a topic that's "new", never talked about so openly, hence gaining Dr Kinsey fame), to the fall (societal backlash from challenging normal sexual conventions, mostly from popular unacceptance and denying the truth about what's happening around society) of Kinsey's research, and through it, shows that when society's morals and conduct comes under the spotlight, not everyone can accept scientific findings with an open mind - ignorance may be bliss.

This movie is stripped of erotica, so anyone who thinks they might have a field day with sex on cellulite ought to think twice. Watch it from a scientific point of view, and you'll enjoy the show tremendously.