Sex, Politics & Cocktails

The politics get pretty short shrift, but cigarettes and liquor are everywhere.

Structurally, Sex, Politics and Cocktails is wildly, almost frantically inventive, with techniques ranging from stop-motion to split-screen to silent film-style intertitles. But no amount of directorial trickery can mask the essential vacuousness of the story and its characters.

This peculiar little comedy, shot on digital video, gets points for editorial pizzazz, but earns a big zero for content.

The result is TV flavored, less a narrative than a haphazard succession of vignettes populated by crude stereotypes instead of credible characters.

Overwhelmingly poor camerawork helps obscure the deficiencies in the dialogue but can't conceal a sparse plot stretched to feature length by an endless parade of lame sketches.

Julien Hernandez's Sex, Politics & Cocktails gives all three a bad name.

A relentlessly dull film that's shot on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.