In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we’re taking a look at Love & Sex, an indie rom-com that feels right in Favreau’s wheelhouse.
We’ve finally entered the 2000s, the decade where Jon Favreau really starts making moves that would put him on top of the entire business. It seems fitting, then, that we kick the decade off with Love & Sex, an indie rom-com that, at least for the moment, still feels comfortably in Favreau’s wheelhouse. It’s a movie whose title instantly casts it in the shadow of Sex and the City, which was at the height of its popularity in 2000, and which seems to inform a lot of the choices this movie makes. It’s either in direct conversation with the HBO series, or trying to zig where the show zagged.
Love & Sex comes from actress-turned-writer/director Valerie Breiman, and if that name sounds familiar, then you’re probably familiar with her first feature, Going Overboard, starring a pre-SNL Adam Sandler. The story of that film’s production is more fascinating than the film itself, but we won’t go into that here1.
This film’s story is apparently autobiographical, Breiman drawing inspiration for various episodes from her own love life. It stars Famke Janssen as Kate, a Carrie Bradshaw-esque writer for a women’s magazine whose boss (Ann Magnuson) nearly fires her for turning in an article that’s a thinly veiled instruction guide on how to perform oral sex. Her boss chastises her and says she ought to try and draw from personal experience, to which Kate sheepishly replies, “But… I did…” Kate then has twenty-four hours to come back with an article on relationships that is “happy and perky”. Cue Kate reminiscing about the various men she’s slept with since high school, a trip down memory lane that is neither happy nor perky.
Most of the film is told in flashbacks, jumping around to vignettes from Kate’s past, beginning with her first time with her high school French teacher (yeesh). In college she falls in with Eric (Noah Emmerich), a music video director who doesn’t tell her that he’s a husband and father. Later she meets Adam (Jon Favreau) at an art gallery where he’s showing off his work. The two of them immediately hit it off as Adam manages to steal her away from her date, the most boring stand-up comedian in the universe.
The relationship blossoms as the pair trade playful barbs back and forth, share their eccentricities and all that fun stuff. Eventually they move in together, ending in a scene where Kate videotapes Adam doing a striptease to “Play That Funky Music”, which is not something I ever knew I never wanted to see, but there it is. On their one-year anniversary, Adam surprises her with a box of kittens, and Kate surprises him with news that she’s pregnant. They seem like a perfectly loving couple, both weird in their own ways, but their weirdness fits together. Even as she miscarries a few weeks later, we see nothing but the utmost affection between Adam and Kate. For a brief moment, the movie paints these two 30-something toddlers as real live adults who love each other.
Naturally, things take a turn and the relationship sours. Not through any contrived complication or one cheating on the other. Adam just wakes up one night and randomly decides they need to break up. I guess this might be more true to life? People drift apart, love fizzles out. Things happen. But I can’t think of any couple I’ve ever met who just woke up one day and said “let’s break up and start trying to hurt each other’s feelings for no good reason”. Kate and Adam do, and they start following each other around with a new person hanging on their arm purely for the sake of making the other jealous. Maybe this is really a thing that happens? Or has happened? Or maybe this is just how it’s done in Los Angeles? I dunno. You see it all the time in movies where people are just complete animals to one another, and then one of them will say something stupid like “This is how adults are! Get used to it!” This is all alien territory to me, a boring suburban 30-something with a wife and two pets who is perfectly happy with how things have turned out.
The real rom-com-y stuff starts happening here and the movie honestly kinda lost me. The montage of Adam and Kate just being dicks to each other is awkward and cringy, made worse after seeing what chemistry Janssen and Favreau have together. They make a believably real couple, but backstabby exes? No way. What’s funny is the moment he and Kate split up, Adam suddenly starts acting like a Woody Allen character, completely neurotic and flustered, desperate for any kind of validation. It’s such a vibe shift from the confident, funny artist we first met at the start.
The best turn in the film comes when Kate visits a sex shop2 and randomly meets actor Joey Santino (Josh Hopkins) in the dildo aisle. Joey isn’t just any actor, though, he’s the star of Ninjeta, Adam’s favorite shitball B-movie about scantily-clad lady ninjas3. Kate starts sleeping with Joey right away, and it’s hard to tell whether she’s doing it on purpose to get back at Adam, or if it’s just a happy coincidence. Regardless, Adam is incensed at this, and the best laugh in the movie is when Favreau has to shout “MY TITTY NINJA GUY?!“
Joey, for all his B-movie actor good looks, turns out to be a complete dunce, so from there it’s no mystery who Kate winds up with in the end. There’s no real “will they/won’t they” between Kate and Adam, because from the moment the film introduces him we can’t help but think “Oh yeah, this is the guy.” The chemistry’s too strong and none of the other actors have a fraction of the material to work with. There’s simply zero tension here, not even toward whether or not Kate’s gonna finish her article on time. It doesn’t matter.
In its first half, Love & Sex is decent enough. Famke Janssen is very charming in the lead, and it makes me wish she’d gotten more chances to do movies like this before she got stuck in the X-Men movies for the next ten years. The movie’s real downfall is in its back half, where the smartly-observed ideas about dating give way to ridiculous rom-com bullshit that make Kate and Adam seem like two broken idiots who deserve each other. It skates by on the chemistry and charm of its leads, but I get now why this never really took off.
Love & Sex made just over half a million dollars playing in roughly seventy theaters nationwide. After that it found its way onto premium cable, and I’m sure after X-Men came out, HBO (which was where I first encountered this film) was more than happy to run it late at night right after reruns of Sex and the City. There are worse indie rom-coms from the late 90s, to be sure4. There are also plenty better ones.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
As the male lead, Jon Favreau actually acquits himself pretty well. In the early going, Adam is charming and witty, Favreau clearly enjoying the opportunity to be the sensitive nice guy that his Swingers character Mike always wished he could be. But then that second-act switch happens and suddenly Adam is a desperate, lovesick weirdo. It’s like he’s suddenly auditioning to play a wacky side character in an even more expensive rom-com. He’ll get that chance sooner than you think.
FINAL RATING
2.5 stars (out of 5). S’okay.
NEXT TIME: A movie whose entire plot is “Scabs are good, actually!”
- Going Overboard‘s IMDb trivia page explains it all. Give it a read.
↩︎ - The sex shop manager is played by Rance Howard, father of Ron, and words fail to convey what a bizarre casting choice this is.
↩︎ - By comparison, Kate’s favorite movie is Nosferatu. She says it makes her depressed, which she enjoys because it makes her feel deep and introspective. Adam, on the other hand, just likes titty ninjas. I respect both picks, honestly.
↩︎ - We covered one of them on Christmas Creeps once. Let It Snow. Check it out. ↩︎
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