Bedtime Stories

Rated PG

Five shorts about sexual longing and human connection, told in sharply contrasting styles. By far the strongest entry is Mary Feuer's Rock Bottom, which sympathetically observes the shifting relationship between a lonely, taciturn writer and the hip, attractive, sexually open street hustler he brings home. The lower depths of Los Angeles provide a cool and haunting landscape, establishing the jagged emotional rhythm between the two wary strangers. John Daschbach's Bedtime Stories (2000) cuts among three different couples in the same apartment building, straining toward a facile and unimaginative conclusion. Joshua Sanchez's INSIDE/out studies the entropy of a young man whose experiments with rough sex go dangerously awry. And Stewart Wade's video Coffee Date, about a vain straight guy who's tricked into a blind date with a man, belabors the sexual and emotional ignorance of heterosexuals, yielding little in the way of surprise or excitement. Also showing: Paul VanDeCarr's Sexual Orientation. By Patrick Z. McGavin

Official Site: Disney.com/BedtimeStories.
Director: Adam Shankman
Writer: Matt Lopez
Producer: Andrew Gunn, Adam Sandler and Jack Giarraputo
Cast: Adam Sandler, Keri Russell, Guy Pearce, Russell Brand, Richard Griffiths, Jonathan Pryce, Courteney Cox, Lucy Lawless, Teresa Palmer and Aisha Tyler